Bayesian Ranking and Selection of Fishing Boat Efficiencies

The steadily accumulating literature on technical efficiency in fisheries attests to the importance of efficiency as an indicator of fleet condition and as an object of management concern. In this paper, we extend previous work by presenting a Bayesian hierarchical approach that yields both efficiency estimates and, as a byproduct of the estimation algorithm, probabilistic rankings of the relative technical efficiencies of fishing boats. The estimation algorithm is based on recent advances in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods—Gibbs sampling, in particular—which have not been widely used in fisheries economics. We apply the method to a sample of 10,865 boat trips in the US Pacific hake (or whiting) fishery during 1987–2003. We uncover systematic differences between efficiency rankings based on sample mean efficiency estimates and those that exploit the full posterior distributions of boat efficiencies to estimate the probability that a given boat has the highest true mean efficiency.Ranking and selection, hierarchical composed-error model, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Pacific hake fishery, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q2, L5, C1,

Work Integrated Learning and Business Education: A Legitimate Reverse Mapping Approach?

This paper investigates whether work integrated learning (WIL) can be effectively implemented by using students existing workplace experiences (full-time or part-time). Students had to be in a work placement as a precondition for unit enrolment. The learning outcomes focussed on the ‘authenticity’ and relevance of University based learning when mapped against students ‘real world’ work experiences. Students were asked to reassess, question and integrate their individual (and collective) work-based experiences and acquired ‘real life’ knowledge against their business-based university learning. Students concluded that the learning topics had provided critical and personally useful insights into their own and the wider work environment. The learning experience(s) also led to a deeper and more engaged, as well as critical questioning of, university learning

Making meat collectivities : entanglements of geneticisation, integration and contestation in livestock breeding

To explore some of the contours of this meat ‘supply chain integration’ - ‘the phrase of the moment’ according to Farmers Weekly - this chapter draws on research conducted as part of a project exploring the effects of the emergence of particular types of genetic knowledge-practice in beef cattle and sheep breeding in the UK and their entanglement with ‘traditional’ ways of knowing and valuing livestock. The research is interested in the production and circulation of genetic knowledge-practices in agriculture, in examining how such knowledge-practices become established and gain legitimacy, how they become tangled up with visual and other traditional knowledge-practices, and in the effects of genetic knowledge-practices on how cattle and sheep are bred and managed and on human-nonhuman animal relationships in livestock farming. The research has increasingly led us to explore the process of ‘geneticisation’ beyond the farm gate, to look at how the establishment of particular genetic truths or ways of rendering ‘life itself’ (Franklin, 2000) are entangled with processes of restructuring and differentiation within UK food systems

A Role for Management Accountants in Best Practice Benchmarking

Best practice benchmarking (benchmarking for short) generally refers to the pursuit by organisations of enhanced performance by learning from the successful practices of others. Comparisons of processes which contribute to strategic success are made with other parts of the same organisation; competitors; or organisations operating comparable processes in a context which is in some way relevant. Benchmarking continues to grow in popularity in both private and public sector organisations – but does it always produce the desired outcomes? Although spectacular gains from benchmarking are claimed particularly in practitioner literature, there is also growing evidence of disappointment with the effectiveness of benchmarking. It can be very time consuming to undertake and manage, and ensuring that sharing information with competitors is to the mutual advantage of partner organisations is difficult. With this in mind, it is important to recognise that management accountants play pivotal roles at organisational interfaces and therefore could play a (more) significant part in successful benchmarking activities. This paper will report on an ongoing research project at the Open University Business School, funded by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, aimed at understanding, in depth, the processes which are undertaken by Management Accountants, in the name of benchmarking. The project team are using postal questionnaires and case studies to identify the features of successful benchmarking practice, and the characteristics of benchmarking organisations or benchmarking processes which are considered to be problematic. This research centres on an extensive survey of Management Accountants. This research has begun to identify the contribution which Management Accountants can make to successful benchmarking and the factors which have led organisations to abandon benchmarking activities. This study is also facilitating better understanding of the relationship between organisational size and level of benchmarking activity, the impact of benchmarking clubs, and the perceived costs and benefits of benchmarking to stakeholders. The final phase 3 of this research will focus on providing innovative ways to make the findings available to management accounting practitioners

Look at Me: Japanese Women Writers at the Millennial Turn

Look at Me: Japanese Women Writers at the Millennial Turn This dissertation explores body aesthetics and anxieties through analyses of contemporary fiction by women. Framed in terms of the male gaze, it analyzes the ways in which women writing today negotiate and reappropriate the subject/object binary upon which the gaze itself rests. The four authors on whom I focus-- Hasegawa Junko, Kanehara Hitomi, Matsumoto Yûko, and Sakurai Ami--deliberately disturb readers with stories of incest, sadomasochism, and eating disorders. Representative texts from their respective oeuvres are categorized and analyzed in terms of the obscene, the abject, and the traumatic in order to elucidate--and ultimately understand--the ways in which their works suggest an aggression toward the gendered nature of visual culture in Japan today. These writers offer jarring narratives of female protagonists whose bodies are exposed to intense psychological, physical, and sexual harm. Drawing from psychoanalytic as well as cultural theories, I posit that important counter narratives reside in the abjected, obscene, and traumatized bodies of these protagonists. I further contend that these counter narratives are intended to bring awareness to the ways in which women\u27s experiences of their bodies have been dictated by patriarchal and outdated standards that rely too heavily on static constructions of female subjectivity and bodily experience. The analyzed texts were written between 1990 and 2007, and the protagonists range from teenagers to women in their mid-30s. The late 1980s/early 1990s (the lost decade ) was an important historical juncture that shapes this fiction. Not only were all of the texts published after 1990, but also the protagonists are representative of a lost generation that grew up in the aftermath of the economic collapse and pervasive social anxiety that was endemic to the time. In Chapter One, Apocalypse and Anxiety, I argue that the effects of recession, natural disasters, and widespread violence fostered social breakdown, evident in the texts analyzed later, in which the protagonists seem aimlessly adrift. Furthermore, these protagonists lead thin lives, a potent metaphor for the importance of the thin body today as a cornerstone of feminine desirability and one which feeds the current epidemic of eating disorders in Japan and elsewhere. In this chapter, in addition to elucidating key historical events that shape the primary texts, I comment on the sociocultural and -historical importance of the thin body, offering possible explanations for its primacy in contemporary Japan. Chapter Two, Repurposing Panic, emerges from a particular discourse of moral panic that emerged during the 1990s that scholars used to opaquely capture the troubling aura of the times. Enjo kôsai, or compensated dating, a phenomenon in which young women from good homes offered their time to older men in exchange for money or luxury goods, was widely believed to be a sign of moral turpitude. Indeed, the notion that these women willingly sold their bodies flew in the face of essentialist ideologies that presumed passive and sacrosanct female sexuality. The texts examined in this chapter--Sakurai\u27s Innocent World and Kanehara\u27s Snakes and Earrings--are united through protagonists who embrace their sexuality and who use their bodies to manipulate men. Sakurai\u27s protagonist engages in incestuous sex with her brother and father, while Kanehara\u27s seeks out a sadomasochistic relationship with her lover\u27s friend. This chapter holds that both texts push for a politics of ecstasy and obscenity in which sexual gratification unfolds according to female desire vis-à-vis obscene sexuality. It also argues that these texts tap into a lineage of Japanese women\u27s texts in which female sexual desire is construed as aberrant and even dangerous. Finally, borrowing from feminist theories of sexuality, this chapter demonstrates that both Sakurai and Kanehara repurpose the panic surrounding women\u27s usages of their own bodies to challenge conventions of sex and sexuality. Chapter Three, Writing Size Zero, is similarly framed in terms of moral panic, though of a different nature. At about the same time Japan was experiencing its sex-driven moral panic, the United States was ensnared in its own version. The problem was not young women selling themselves. Rather, important fashion houses were pushing a new look on their impressionable consumers through the medium of high-powered runway models. Heroin chic, as the look was called, demanded a cultivated emaciation. I begin here because heroin chic solidified the importance of thinness in contemporary constructions of femininity in the United States that bled into Japanese constructions of the same. The protagonists of Matsumoto\u27s The Excessive Overeater: A Day Without Dawn and Hasegawa\u27s Prisoner of Solitude are committed to remaining thin: both women, one twenty and the other thirty-five, have eating disorders, and the texts do not shy from explicit descriptions of bingeing and purging. These texts are important in shedding light on the dangers of the adoration of the thin body today. Both women want to be beautiful and both see thinness as the means. But the texts expose the underside of constant calorie counting, offering protagonists who are miserable and even suicidal. They also demonstrate that femininity today is defined by abjection and reduction, a literal wasting or throwing away. Matsumoto and Hasegawa offer sobering portraits of women caught in vicious cycles of bingeing and purging to tell a story that is often lost amidst the glamour of the thin and beautiful body. A cornerstone of beauty today is youth. Chapter Four, The Dark Trauma delves into two works of fiction that engage the cult of youth. Returning to Hasegawa and Kanehara, the former\u27s short story The Unfertilized Egg and the latter\u27s Hydra, this chapter elucidates the ways in which the inevitability of aging is a traumatic experience for many Japanese women who see their worth in terms of their age. The texts analyzed here are both foregrounded by a sense of displacement that occurs as the protagonists get older and find themselves forced from the visual economy, which relies heavily on youthfulness as visual spectacle. This chapter demonstrates that Japanese society does not have a place for women who are in the process of getting older. They exist between the cult(ure) of shôjo, the ubiquitous model of inexperience and deferment, and the finality of old age. The protagonists in these two works are not able to make the transition from one place to the other and in the process get lost somewhere in the unarticulated void of uncertain futurity. In the Conclusion, Discourse of Disappointment, I rearticulate the way obscenity, abjection, and trauma have been used as important diegetic tools to help us understand the ways in which femininity is both constructed publicly and dismantled privately. I also demonstrate that for all of their boundary pushing, these texts are not entirely optimistic in their subversion, as they collapse into derivations of the conventional heterosexual romance, often at the expense of potentially therapeutic female-female relationships; they are disappointing in this respect--for us and for the authors. Ultimately, then, these texts are about surviving: they offer case studies of young women managing lives within contradiction and fantasy who may challenge convention but who nevertheless must self-preserve within it

Geo-based technologies, tourists and bushfires in northern Australia

This paper analyses how the use of geo-based technologies can play a role in the safety of tourism operations and tourist travel — especially in the case of bushfires. The study uses data from 42 qualitative interviews with tourists, tourism operators and other stakeholders in the remote Kununurra area of Western Australia carried out in 2012 and 2013. We contend that the spatiotemporal nature of tourism has stimulated considerable development in a range of geo - based technologies. The paper argues that geo-based technologies are an integral part of fire suppression and mitigation practices, and that tourists’ familiarity with geo-based technologies makes these technologies an effective mode of fi re safety information for independent tourists, especially those travelling in remote an d regional areas of Australia. A key finding, from a thematic analysis of the data, is the importance and relevance of real - time fire warning information for tourist operators and independent tourists, along with an observation that tourists and tourism operators are particularly interested in using the new user - friendly MyFireWatch website. This finding draws a parallel with the high use of geospatial technologies in the tourism industry by both tourism operators and tourists themselves. Further, this paper also calls attention to outback tourism and the importance of a ‘loci of responsibility’ between emergency services, tourism operators and the independent tourist in times of bushfire and other emergencies in remote Australia