Valuing skills: why vocational training matters

In light of sweeping changes to vocational education and training (VET) provision in Victoria, and dramatic proposed cuts in Queensland, this new CPD paper studies the sector’s social and economic significance and asks what lessons can be gleaned for NSW. The paper presents definitive evidence that: Substantial benefits from VET accrue to individuals, the economy and society; Individual benefits include are financial benefits (such as over 324k increase in lifetime earnings), and personal development (94% of those in VET for this reason reported positive benefits); By providing skills to the economy VET has been estimated to provide a strong return on investment. An important social benefit of VET is that it builds the capacity of some of our society’s most disadvantaged people, with over 7% of VET students identifying as disabled or having a long-term health condition. All socioeconomic backgrounds are well represented in VET students, with a slight bias towards less advantaged backgrounds, and a disproportionate number of students from remote regions. VET’s largest provider, TAFE tends to provide a greater share of the benefits: TAFE serves a disproportionate share of students with disabilities; TAFE is the main training provider outside metropolitan areas; TAFE provides more training towards skills in shortage; TAFE provides costly training such as mining and construction skills, while private providers can ‘skim off’ cheaper and more profitable courses, at the expense of the taxpayer. NSW should learn from the Victorian experience how not to undertake reform: The mismatch between deregulation and need to target training towards skill shortages was exemplified by an upsurge in fitness instructor enrolments in Victoria, despite a surfeit of the qualification The assumption that increasing the role of private providers will deliver better outcomes is not justified, given that TAFE appears to be responding more effectively to industry needs by directing a greater proportion of its training towards areas of skill shortage than private registered training organisations. Had the 500 million spent mostly on growing private provider enrolments, been invested in growing TAFE at a similar rate, would it have reaped greater long-term benefits for Victoria? An overall reduction in government funding of the VET sector in the past decade has coincided with rising concern over skills shortages.  These seemingly disparate concerns underlie the national conversation we should be having over the level of funding required to ensure that the significant social and economic benefits delivered by the VET sector continue

Farming smarter, not harder: securing our agricultural economy

In the context of rising global demand, resource scarcity, and environmental pressures, this report considers the future of Australian agriculture. Global populations are growing and food prices are skyrocketing. This creates new market opportunities for Australian agriculture. But Australia has fragile and vulnerable soils, which are being degraded at an unsustainable rate. If we continue with ‘business as usual’, we will keep losing soils faster than they can be replaced. Acting now to improve soil condition could increase agricultural production by up to 2.1 billion per year. It could also help farmers cut costs on fertiliser and water use. “Winners of the food boom will be countries with less fossil fuel intensive agriculture, more reliable production, and access to healthy land and soils” said the report’s lead author Laura Eadie. “How we manage our land and soils will be key to whether Australia sees more of the upsides or downsides of rising global food demand.” Farming Smarter, Not Harder finds that Australian agriculture can build a lasting competitive advantage through innovation that raises agricultural productivity, reduces fuel and fertiliser dependence, and preserves the environment and resources it draws on. To achieve this, Australia needs to: Invest in knowledge: increase government investment in research and development by up to 7% a year; increase funding for extension programs; implement the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to set up Rural Research Australia; fund the national soil health strategy with an endowment sufficient to support ongoing research and monitoring for at least 20 years. Stop chopping and changing support for regional natural resource management: Federal and State governments should commit to a 10-year agreement to provide stable longterm funding for regional Natural Resource Management (NRM) bodies, including specific funding to monitor long-term trends in natural resource condition. Enable accountable community governance of land and soil management: To enable farming communities to protect themselves from free-riding, they should be supported to develop stewardship standards based on a shared understanding of what it takes to maintain productive agricultural landscapes over the long term. Align financial incentives with the long-term needs of sustainable farming communities: In addition to the drought policy reforms announced on October 26, drought assistance policies should support farming communities to take a lead in preparations for more frequent and severe droughts, and should be linked to community stewardship standards. “Recent projections indicate the potential doubling of exports by 2050, according to the National Food Plan and ANZ-commissioned Greener Pastures report. Our work looks at how to support farmers dealing with the practical challenges of seizing this opportunity, in the context of soil degradation and rising input costs”, said Laura Eadie. The case to increase research funding and foster innovative farming is made even stronger by the likely impacts of climate change. Without action to adapt to more variable and extreme weather, by 2050 Australia could lose 6.5 billion per year in wheat, beef, mutton, lamb and dairy production. The report profiles leading farmers who are already seeing the benefits of innovations in sustainable farming. It proposes simple measures to support them and the agricultural communities that depend on healthy farming landscapes. Download Farming Smarter, Not Harder report in full [Australia\u27s newly appointed Advocate for Soil Health, Michael Jeffery, also chairs the non-profit organisation Soils for Life which is already actively encouraging wider adoption of smarter farming. The Soils for Life report Innovations for Regenerative Landscape Management showcases a range of case studies of these farming innovations in practise, and the positive economic, environmental and social outcomes they are achieving. Read the case studies, learn more about the challenges landscape degradation will bring and what we can do about it at www.soilsforlife.org.au.

Splitting Line Patterns in Free Groups

We construct a boundary of a finite rank free group relative to a finite list of conjugacy classes of maximal cyclic subgroups. From the cut points and uncrossed cut pairs of this boundary we construct a simplicial tree on which the group acts cocompactly. We show that the quotient graph of groups is the JSJ decomposition of the group relative to the given collection of conjugacy classes. This provides a characterization of virtually geometric multiwords: they are the multiwords that are built from geometric pieces. In particular, a multiword is virtually geometric if and only if the relative boundary is planar.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures; v2 fixed a few typos; v3 38 pages, 21 figures; v4 30 pages, 11 figures 'Preliminaries' section expanded to make paper self-contained and split into two sections. Some arguments refactored and simplified. Paper streamlined; v5 56 pages, 21 figures Added examples and improved exposition according to referee comments. To appear in Algebraic & Geometric Topolog

Sign language interpreter aptitude: The trials and tribulations of a longitudinal study

This paper discusses the process of undertaking an exploratory longitudinal study of language learning and interpreter aptitude. It discusses the context of aptitude testing, the test selection for a test battery, the recruitment of subjects within the small-scale study (n=22) and the administration of that battery within the context of whether longitudinal studies are feasible with small cohorts of sign language interpreters. Sign languages continue to be languages of limited diffusion in Europe. Even with gradually increasing numbers of ‘hearing’ sign language users, typically those wishing to become sign language interpreters do not have high levels of sign language fluency prior to enrolling in sign language interpreter training. As such, these students need to gain fluency in sign language, whilst also beginning to engage in interpreter education and interpreting-skills development. To date there is little understanding of how best to screen sign language interpreter program applicants to ensure the effective use of resources, i.e. to educate those who will both learn sign language to C1 fluency (Pro-signs, 2016) during the BA and also be able to learn how to interpret. Longitudinal studies enable us to take a longer view of learning and the professionalisation of skills and knowledge. They do, however, require significant time and this in itself can prove to be an obstacle when university researchers are required to produce tangible research outputs for career goals such as promotion or tenure.ESR

A New Era for Justice Sector Reform in Haiti

In the months before the January earthquake, Haiti and its criminal justice institutions were the subject of an unprecedented effort by two UN agencies to measure the state of the Rule of Law. Drawing on the results of that pre-quake assessment as well as on post-quake assessments of the justice sector, this paper raises four questions that should guide recovery and further development of the police, courts, and prisons in Haiti—questions that focus attention on the meaning of justice sector reform for the people of Haiti, especially the poor. (1) What is the goal of justice sector reform in Haiti and how would we know if we are achieving it? (2) From whose perspective will specific reforms to the police, courts, and prisons be prioritized? (3) How is the police enforcement mission changing in Haiti in the post-quake period, and what are the implications for the courts and prisons? (4) Where are the immediate opportunities for signal reforms that could be achieved quickly and demonstrate to a wide audience the direction in which longer term reforms are heading? The paper frames alternative answers to each of these questions and, in the process, suggests how the Rule of Law Indicators piloted just before the earthquake could be used to assess Haiti’s criminal justice system in the years ahead

Problems of Power in the Design of Indicators of Safety and Justice in the Global South

This paper explores the possibility that governance indicators can be harmonized across three levels (within an individual ministry or government department, across government as a whole, and at the level of global governance) and that doing so will produce effective governance. Specifically, I argue that those operating on the global level -- particularly in the domain of safety, justice, and the rule of law -- might design their indicators from the bottom up, supporting local ambitions and building on the legitimate sources of authority close to the operations they seek to influence, rather than starting with ambitions and power at a global level

Naive Bayes vs. Decision Trees vs. Neural Networks in the Classification of Training Web Pages

Web classification has been attempted through many different technologies. In this study we concentrate on the comparison of Neural Networks (NN), Naïve Bayes (NB) and Decision Tree (DT) classifiers for the automatic analysis and classification of attribute data from training course web pages. We introduce an enhanced NB classifier and run the same data sample through the DT and NN classifiers to determine the success rate of our classifier in the training courses domain. This research shows that our enhanced NB classifier not only outperforms the traditional NB classifier, but also performs similarly as good, if not better, than some more popular, rival techniques. This paper also shows that, overall, our NB classifier is the best choice for the training courses domain, achieving an impressive F-Measure value of over 97%, despite it being trained with fewer samples than any of the classification systems we have encountered