Beyond supply and demand: addressing the complexities of workforce exclusion in Australia

Workforce exclusion is a complex and enduring problem in Australia, with some groups of job seekers more likely to be disadvantaged in the labour market than others. We identify a dominant unemployment narrative of ‘work first’ that surrounds unemployment interventions, and ignores the nature of disadvantage and its relationship to workforce exclusion, and reduces unemployment to a simple matter of labour market supply and demand. This approach privileges immediate economic productivity and exit from welfare payments over sustainable attachment to quality jobs. We examine fourteen programs for disadvantaged job seekers under one national provider network. Data was gathered from eleven semi-structured telephone interviews and eight evaluation reports and analysed using thematic analysis supported by NVivo. Our findings challenge the dominant narrative and argue that both ends of the supply and demand equation need to be examined, stressing the importance of a partnership-orientated and capacity building focus on the unemployed person, and the significance of quality employment with long term support. We identify the importance of acknowledging job seekers’ strengths, aspirations and preferences, and of job seekers having agency to determine their own pathways with support from service providers

If I ran Away to New Mexico

Claire Hutchinson is a graduating senior from Kansas City double-majoring in English (creative writing focus) and classical studies. She is currently working on her Honors thesis manuscript. Past publications include Hill Magazine, the Honors college’s A+ Magazine, and The Diamond Line. She has also self-published a series of zines under the hashtag #2019zineproject on Instagram. In her free time, she enjoys playing murder-mystery games and daydreaming about interstellar space travel

The big squeeze: work, home and care in 2012

The Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) survey measures how work intersects with other life activities, as seen by a randomly selected representative group of 2,887 working Australians.In recent years a number of major events have influenced Australians’ work, personal, family and community lives. The global financial crisis commenced in 2007/8 and international financial markets have experienced continuing instability. The Fair Work Act 2009 introduced a number of changes to the regulation of work. These included a new net of National Employment Standards that incorporated a formal right for some workers to request flexibility or extended unpaid parental leave from 1 January 2010. A national system of paid parental leave came into effect in January 2011. At the same time, the Australian labour force has continued to evolve, with increasing participation of women, declining rates of participation amongst men, an aging workforce and a continuing shift in the composition of employment away from manufacturing and agriculture towards the services sector

Vision-related symptoms as a clinical feature of chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis? Evidence from the DePaul Symptom Questionnaire

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) is a debilitating disorder, affecting at least 250,000 people in the UK. Marked by debilitating fatigue, its aetiology is poorly understood and diagnosis controversial. A number of symptoms overlap with other illnesses with the result that CFS/ME is commonly misdiagnosed. It is important therefore that significant clinical features are investigated. People diagnosed with CFS/ME consistently report that they experience vision-related symptoms associated with their illness1-3 with some of these reports being verified experimentally. Although vision-related symptoms may represent a significant clinical feature of CFS/ME that could be useful in its diagnosis, they have yet to be included in clinical guidelines

Spatial frequency selective masking of first-order and second-order motion in the absence of off-frequency `looking'

AbstractConverging evidence suggests that, at least initially, first-order (luminance defined) and second-order (e.g. contrast defined) motion are processed independently in human vision. However, adaptation studies suggest that second-order motion, like first-order motion, may be encoded by spatial frequency selective mechanisms each operating over a limited range of scales. Nonetheless, the precise properties of these mechanisms are indeterminate since the spatial frequency selectivity of adaptation aftereffects may not necessarily represent the frequency tuning of the underlying units [Vision Research 37 (1997) 2685]. To address this issue we used visual masking to investigate the spatial-frequency tuning of the mechanisms that encode motion. A dual-masking paradigm was employed to derive estimates of the spatial tuning of motion sensors, in the absence of off-frequency `looking'. Modulation-depth thresholds for identifying the direction of a sinusoidal test pattern were measured over a 4-octave range (0.125–2 c/deg) in both the absence and presence of two counterphasing masks, simultaneously positioned above and below the test frequency. For second-order motion, the resulting masking functions were spatially bandpass in character and remained relatively invariant with changes in test spatial frequency, masking pattern modulation depth and the temporal properties of the noise carrier. As expected, bandpass spatial frequency tuning was also found for first-order motion. This provides compelling evidence that the mechanisms responsible for encoding each variety of motion exhibit spatial frequency selectivity. Thus, although first-order and second-order motion may be encoded independently, they must utilise similar computational principles

Psychophysical correlates of global motion processing in the aging visual system: a critical review

The consequences of visual decline in aging have a fundamental and wide-reaching impact on age-related quality of life. It is of concern therefore that evidence suggests that normal aging is accompanied by impairments in the ability to effectively encode global motion. Global motion perception is a fundamentally important process. It enables us to determine the overall velocity of spatially extensive objects in the world and provides us with information about our own body movements. Here, we review what is currently known about the effects of age on performance for encoding the global motion information available in random dot kinematograms (RDKs), a class of stimuli widely used to probe the mechanisms underlying motion perception. We conclude that age-related deficits in global motion perception are not all encompassing. Rather, they appear to be specific to certain stimulus conditions. We also examine evidence for an interaction between age and gender and consider the efficacy of techniques such as visual perceptual learning that may attenuate some of the visual deficits in the older adult population

The role of contrast sensitivity in global motion processing deficits in the elderly

This study compared the effects of age on the perception of translational, radial, and rotational global motion patterns. Motion coherence thresholds were measured for judging the direction of each motion type as a function of contrast (visibility) and temporal sampling rate in young and elderly participants. Coherence thresholds decreased as dot contrast increased asymptoting at high dot contrasts but were higher in elderly compared to young participants. This equated to global motion impairment in the elderly of a factor of around 2, characterized by a shift of the threshold vs. contrast function along the horizontal axes (dot contrast). The effect of contrast interacted with the temporal sampling rate. Old participants were deleteriously affected by reduced temporal sampling particularly at low contrasts. The findings suggest that age- related changes in global motion perception may be driven principally by deficits in contrast encoding, rather than by deficits in motion integration and suggest a role for increased internal noise in the older visual system

Action video game training reduces the Simon Effect

Abstract A number of studies have shown that training on action video games improves various aspects of visual cognition including selective attention and inhibitory control. Here, we demonstrate that action video game play can also reduce the Simon Effect, and, hence, may have the potential to improve response selection during the planning and execution of goal-directed action. Non-game-players were randomly assigned to one of four groups; two trained on a first-person shooter game (Call of Duty) on either Microsoft Xbox or Nintendo DS, one trained on a visual training game for Nintendo DS, and a control group who received no training. Response times were used to contrast performance before and after training on a behavioral assay designed to manipulate stimulus-response compatibility (the Simon Task). The results revealed significantly faster response times and a reduced cost of stimulusresponse incompatibility in the groups trained on the first-person-shooter game. No benefit of training was observed in the control group or the group trained on the visual training game. These findings are consistent with previous evidence that action game play elicits plastic changes in the neural circuits that serve attentional control, and suggest training may facilitate goal-directed action by improving players' ability to resolve conflict during response selection and execution

Photographic identification of individuals of a free-ranging, small terrestrial vertebrate

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Recognition of individuals within an animal population is central to a range of estimates about population structure and dynamics. However, traditional methods of distinguishing individuals, by some form of physical marking, often rely on capture and handling which may affect aspects of normal behavior. Photographic identification has been used as a less-invasive alternative, but limitations in both manual and computer-automated recognition of individuals are particularly problematic for smaller taxa (<500 g). In this study, we explored the use of photographic identification for individuals of a free-ranging, small terrestrial reptile using (a) independent observers, and (b) automated matching with the Interactive Individual Identification System (I3S Pattern) computer algorithm. We tested the technique on individuals of an Australian skink in the Egernia group, Slater’s skink Liopholis slateri, whose natural history and varied scale markings make it a potentially suitable candidate for photo-identification. From ‘photographic captures’ of skink head profiles, we designed a multichoice key based on alternate character states and tested the abilities of observers — with or without experience in wildlife survey — to identify individuals using categorized test photos. We also used the I3S Pattern algorithm to match the same set of test photos against a database of 30 individuals. Experienced observers identified a significantly higher proportion of photos correctly (74%) than those with no experience (63%) while the I3S software correctly matched 67% as the first ranked match and 83% of images in the top five ranks. This study is one of the first to investigate photo identification with a free-ranging small vertebrate. The method demonstrated here has the potential to be applied to the developing field of camera-traps for wildlife survey and thus a wide range of survey and monitoring applications