Net Zero Precincts:Stage 3: Activating

In this report we share details of the Living Lab that was developed to accelerate net zero precinct transitions across domains including energy, mobility, buildings, governance and data and build capability for a new style of collaborative and place-based transition governance. This report presents an overview of the Living Lab’s structure, cycles of engagement, theory of change and the monitoring and evaluation approach that was used to support reflexive learning. The Living Lab grew to 10 teams through a portfolio of experiments that ran over the course of 2024 and 2025. The Transformative Outcomes approach was used to enable experiment leads to re-calibrate their experiments and harness appropriate leverage points to promote learning, networking, navigate expectations, institutional change and actor empowerment. This report shows researchers, policymakers and practitioners how diverse actors can be brought together through a Living Lab using a portfolio-based approach to trial experiments that generate transformative outcomes to drive systems change in precinct settings

Tailored text-messaging versus standard Quitline telephone counselling for smoking cessation among people who smoke from a low-socio-economic status background in Australia:a study protocol for a non-inferiority randomized controlled trial (The Quit By Phone Study)

Background and aims: Signficant inequalities in tobacco smoking exist, with higher smoking rates among people from low-socio-economic status (low-SES) populations. Tailored technology-based programs for low-SES smoking populations have the potential for high reach, but require effectiveness data from large-scale trials. This trial among Australians who smoke from a low-SES background will determine the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of tailored text-message (TTM) support compared with standard Quitline (SQL) telephone support service. Design, setting and participants: This is a two-arm, parallel group, randomized, non-inferiority trial with allocation concealment and blinded outcome assessment in an Australian population within the greater Sydney region in New South Wales. Participants are adults who smoke daily (n = 1246), are interested in quitting and currently receiving a government pension or allowance, and will be recruited via advertisements. Intervention and comparator: Participants will be randomized (1:1 ratio) to receive either 12 months of TTM quit support or enrolment in SQL telephone support. Measurements: Assessments will be completed at baseline (telephone interview), within 1 month (check-in call), at 3 months (on-line questionnaire) and 12 months (telephone interview) post-randomization. The primary outcome will be 6-month continuous abstinence verified by carbon monoxide breath test at 12-month follow-up. The study will test whether TTM is non-inferior to SQL by a non-inferiority margin of 2%, i.e. the quit rate in the TTM group will be no worse than 2% less than the quit rate in the SQL group. Secondary outcomes will include self-reported continuous and point prevalence abstinence and acceptability and cost-effectiveness of TTM versus SQL. Conclusion: Should the tailored text-message support prove non-inferior and more cost-effective than Quitline for this population, this will provide an opportunity for the upscaling of an effective, inexpensive and tailored quit support service. The trial findings will inform cessation treatment policy for priority populations in Australia and globally.</p

Counter-narrative as method:researching immigrant teachers differently

This article addresses the ethical question concerning how educational research helps immigrant teachers gain authority and ownership over their self-understanding and self-becoming. By critically examining prior research and analysing the dominant discourse surrounding this specific group, we highlight the limitations and ethical implications of existing findings. We problematise current methodological approaches ito advocate for the necessity of counter-narratives. By empowering immigrant teachers to ‘author(w)rite’ their own accounts, this form of authorship broadens scholarly discourse, allowing them to pursue self-understanding and assert agency over their narratives. To illustrate our contention, we present our counter-narratives in the form of satirical poetry within boxed texts, highlighting the need to expand and complicate conventional research practices. Through subversive discourse, we emphasise more empowering methodologies in the ethical interpretation and representation of immigrant teacher participants. We suggest that counter-narratives offer an alternative lens through which to examine the lived realities and emotions of immigrant teachers, ultimately enriching scholarly discussions and fostering a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of their humanity.</p

Investor reactions to climate change disclosures:joint effects of disclosure focus and controllability

When evaluating the potential financial effects of climate change, investors demand disclosures of the climate-related risks and opportunities that companies need to manage. We examine how and why management control over climate change performance affects investors' evaluations of such disclosures. In a series of experiments, we find that investors believe that managerial optimism is beneficial and, thus, are more willing to invest when climate-related disclosures focus on opportunities rather than risks. This effect, however, occurs only when management has high control over the company's future climate change performance. When that control is low, investors believe that managerial realism is beneficial and, thus, are more willing to invest when these disclosures focus on risks rather than opportunities. Our study has implications for companies and standard setters considering the consequences of focusing on either risks or opportunities in climate change reporting and the conditions under which one focus or the other may be beneficial.</p

Conceptualizing heritaging in the representation of the revival of the record store and vinyl

This paper examines representation of the conjoined ‘revival’ of record stores and vinyl through the lens of cultural heritage. It employs David Crouch’s concept of ‘heritaging’, which describes an active process in which heritage is constituted. Analysis derives from a case study of Vinyl Nation, a documentary depiction of the record store as a site of discovery and rediscovery of vinyl and its cultures of consumption and community. Depictions include evidence of the knowledge, commitment and interactions nurtured in the store, of the cultivation of dispositions that celebrate vinyl’s materiality and distinctiveness. The record store is depicted as a site of intimacies and the nurturing of a culture of care and freedoms not generally available under ‘anonymous capitalism’ and the relations that condition many other contemporary interactions. Conclusions draw attention to the paradoxes of this representation of the record store, of the contingent nature of the historical sensibilities ‘emerging’ in this site of ‘heritaging’.</p

Predation by stock price manipulation

We develop a model in which feedback effects from equity markets allow uninformed traders to profit by short selling a firm's stock while going long on its product market competitor. As this strategy distorts the investment of the firm targeted by short selling to the benefit of its rival, we label it predation by stock price manipulation. A short selling ban does not prevent manipulation since the speculator can still induce a firm to underinvest by establishing a long position in its rival. Our analysis unveils how competitive interactions among firms expand the scope of manipulation, providing new insights into equity markets and short sales regulation.</p

Trade-off independent image watermarking using enhanced structured matrix decomposition

Image watermarking plays a vital role in providing protection from copyright violation. However, conventional watermarking techniques typically exhibit trade-offs in terms of image quality, robustness and capacity constrains. More often than not, these techniques optimize on one constrain while settling with the two other constraints. Therefore, in this paper, an enhanced saliency detection based watermarking method is proposed to simultaneously improve quality, capacity, and robustness. First, the enhanced structured matrix decomposition (E-SMD) is proposed to extract salient regions in the host image for producing a saliency mask. This mask is then applied to partition the foreground and background of the host and watermark images. Subsequently, the watermark (with the same dimension of host image) is shuffled using multiple Arnold and Logistic chaotic maps, and the resulting shuffled-watermark is embedded into the wavelet domain of the host image. Furthermore, a filtering operation is put forward to estimate the original host image so that the proposed watermarking method can also operate in blind mode. In the best case scenario, we could embed a 24-bit image as the watermark into another 24-bit image while maintaining an average SSIM of 0.9999 and achieving high robustness against commonly applied watermark attacks. Furthermore, as per our best knowledge, with high payload embedding, the significant improvement in these features (in terms of saliency, PSNR, SSIM, and NC) has not been achieved by the state-of-the-art methods. Thus, the outcomes of this research realizes a trade-off independent image watermarking method, which is a first of its kind in this domain.</p

Trend-cycle decomposition in the presence of large shocks

We introduce some refinements of the Beveridge-Nelson filter to help address possible distortions from large shocks. We then compare how the Beveridge-Nelson filter and other popular univariate trend-cycle decomposition methods perform given the extreme outliers associated with the Covid recession. Real-time estimates of the output gap based on the Hodrick-Prescott filter are highly unreliable in the years just prior to the pandemic, although the revised estimates during the pandemic are similar to those of the more reliable Beveridge-Nelson filter. The Hamilton filter suffers from base effects that produce a mechanical spike in the estimated output gap exactly two years after the onset of the pandemic, in line with the filter horizon. Given projected data with a simulated Covid-like shock, both the Hodrick-Prescott and Hamilton filters overstate the true reduction in the output gap and fail to capture the implied movements in trend output. The Hodrick-Prescott filter generates a spurious transitory boom just prior to the simulated shock, while the Hamilton filter produces another mechanical spike exactly two years after the simulated shock, as well as an ongoing divergence in forecasted values of the output gap away from zero. Only the Beveridge-Nelson filter correctly forecasts trend and cycle movements when faced with a Covid-like shock

More Than 'ticking-a-box':The Affordances of Short-form Video for Community Reporting to Government

Communication between government agencies and not-for-profits (NFPs) within the local funding sector typically require the writing and submitting of long-form text-based reports. These processes are time and resource intensive and require skill in written communication, placing a significant administrative burden on the small, already under-resourced organisations who interact with programs. NFP's now have the technical literacy to create rich video content, but little is understood about how video could be used instead of, or alongside traditional written reports. We present findings from a novel funding acquittal (final report) process that we designed for a government grant programme to explore the affordances of video from the perspective of the grantee. We discuss the affordances of structured short-form video to overcome the barriers faced by organisations during these reporting processes. We present design considerations for digitally mediated processes that could support the media augmentation of these established workflows.</p

Accelerating progress on the SDGs:policy guidance from the global modeling literature

There is an urgent need to accelerate progress if the world is to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Global research has identified six transformation entry points as imperative for SDG achievement: well-being, the economy, and food, energy, urban, and environmental systems. Policymakers require evidence on transformative policies to accelerate progress across these entry points. Here, we present evidence on SDG policies from a scoping review of the global modeling literature. We find that policies have been modeled for all six entry points. Most studies model single entry points and have less coverage of urban systems and five of the SDGs. Initial quantitative estimates of policy ambition and costs and policy interactions are available but remain limited and challenging to compare. Future SDG modeling research to inform policy could emphasize modeling multiple entry points and policy interactions as well as policy standardization.</p