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11:32:37 PM    

Low-paid workers, changing patterns of work and life, and participation in VET. This item includes an audio recording of an interview with researcher Barbara Pocock; the accompanying interview transcript; and the occasional paper itself. In this interview, Steve Davis talks with researcher Barbara Pocock about her paper, 'Low-paid workers, changing patterns of work and life, and participation in vocational education and training'. This paper outlines the issues emerging from the first year of research undertaken by University of South Australia's Centre for Work + Life on what influences people's decisions to participate in vocational education and training, particularly for low-skilled and low-paid workers (that is, those earning less than $15 per hour). [edna]
11:22:39 PM    

On a potentially amazing resource. I don't usually simply plug other sites, but one cannot but admire the chutzpah of this site;

"Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world[base ']s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

We invite those who share our passion to explore our website, participate in our online community, and help us continue to find new ways to make learning easier for everyone."

By noreply@blogger.com (James A). [Recent Reflection]
2:16:47 PM    

They took our jobs.

The Australian Government intends to head into the G20 meeting in April with strong warnings against the dangers of growing economic nationalism around the globe, so we should not expect the Government to exhibit any such traits in the lead up to the London meeting.¬[sgl dagger]

On Sunday morning Wayne Swan was offered the chance to pillory ANZ for out-sourcing 500 back office jobs to India.¬[sgl dagger] He was asked on the ABC Insiders program¬[sgl dagger]whether the Government was getting enough in return for the financial guarantees provided to the banks, given that jobs are being sent off-shore.¬[sgl dagger] Swan’s reply was reassuring in its economic liberalism.¬[sgl dagger]¬[sgl dagger]Swan said that the guarantees and off-shoring of jobs were unrelated issues, and he only urged banks to look after their employees.¬[sgl dagger]

So far so good.¬[sgl dagger] But then on Monday we hear that the Government is to slash Australia’s skilled migrant intake.¬[sgl dagger]

¬[sgl dagger]This is a bad¬[sgl dagger]decision on every level.¬[sgl dagger] It trashes the Government’s credibility in arguing against economic nationalism; it restricts the flow of valuable human capital into Australia; and it pulls up the ladder people who are in the pipeline and could reasonably have expected to come to Australia this year.¬[sgl dagger]¬[sgl dagger] Josh Gans explains below that there is little or no evidence that immigration increases either unemployment or rents in a¬[sgl dagger]recession.¬[sgl dagger] ¬[sgl dagger]

We are a nation of immigrants.¬[sgl dagger] Apart from our¬[sgl dagger]indigenous¬[sgl dagger]population, everybody who lives in Australia is descended from immigrants (and/or convicts).¬[sgl dagger] Our immigration policy has served the nation fantastically well and should¬[sgl dagger]not be¬[sgl dagger]used as a semi-annual labour market policy instrument (the skilled immigration quota increased substantially only 9 months ago).

The Government might just as easily have announced that in the global war for talent the GFC¬[sgl dagger]presents a unique opportunity for Australia to bring in a wave of talented and energetic immigrants that will carry us forward for decades.¬[sgl dagger] It might have announced that in the interests of up-skilling the economy and solving the demographic problems of a greying population, skilled migration will be increased by 100% for the next three years.¬[sgl dagger] Skilled immigration is like adrenaline to any society and an opportunity to attract this much talent is unlikely to present itself again, so lets go for it.¬[sgl dagger]

But, alas no.¬[sgl dagger] Instead we have a sop to ACTU lobbying that does a lot of harm and and very little good.

[Core Economics]
2:13:16 PM    

Developing Australia's digital skills. To fully participate in the digital economy, Australians need effective digital, media literacy and e-business skills. We are talking about skills at all levels[~]individual, business and higher education and vocational training. Read on for more detail about these issues and to let us know the best ways we can develop Australia's digital skills... [Digital Economy Future Directions Latest Topics]
1:57:33 PM    

What does the digital economy encompass? What does it mean for Australians?. A useful starting point for any discussion about how we can maximise the participation of Australian households and businesses in the digital economy is to understand what we are referring to when we use the term 'digital economy.' Read on to see recent data about internet and broadband take-up and to give your feedback on what the digital economy means to you... [Digital Economy Future Directions Latest Topics]
1:56:59 PM    

When Good Leaders Hit Bad Times.

In early-1993, Australian unemployment peaked at nearly 12%. In 1992-1995, six of Australia’s eight states and territories ousted their government. By contrast, unemployment averaged 5% in 2003-2006. In these years, no state or territory government was ousted from power.

In Australian politics, conventional wisdom has it that the state government oustings of the early-1990s were due to bad leadership, while the victories of the early-2000s were due to skill. But could it be that Carr wasn’t more skillful than Cain & Kirner, just luckier? In a paper that we released last year, Mark McLeish and I showed that Australian state governments were more likely to lose office when the national economy turned sour.*

To check that our results weren’t being driven merely by the modest contribution that state leaders make to economic performance, we were able to show that our results held up even if we only used a purely unrelated source of growth - the US economy. Here’s a chart that shows our central result: the bars indicate the share of state governments losing office in each 5-year period, while the line is the US unemployment rate.

Why do Australian voters turf out their state governments when the US economy tanks? The answer seems to lie in something psychologists call ‘the fundamental attribution error’, which is the fact that humans aren’t very good at separating situational factors from ability when making assessments. So for example managers tend to be bad at taking task difficulty into account when assessing their workers, sports fans don’t appropriately adjust for field conditions when judging ability, and shareholders tend to overpay CEOs when the market booms. Consequently, it isn’t all that surprising that voters aren’t very good at separating out the component of economic growth that lies within the control of state politicians from factors outside their control.

Our results suggest that a 1 percentage point rise in the unemployment rate lowers a Premier’s chances of re-election by 3-5 percentage points. So the 1 1/2 percentage point increase in the Queensland unemployment rate over the past year has lowered Premier Bligh’s chances of re-election on the weekend by 5-8 percentage points (the average Premier in our sample had a 66% chance of re-election).

But the fundamental attribution error doesn’t just affect Australian state elections. In earlier work, Justin Wolfers showed that luck affected US state elections in a similar way (though Australian voters seem a little more gullible than their US counterparts). And in work on national elections, I’ve recently shown that when the world economy slumps, national leaders tend to get voted out of power.

Here’s a chart plotting world growth against re-election rates over recent decades (I exclude the US and Japan, since they make up a large share of world GDP).

We don’t know the optimal turnover rate of governments, so it could be that voters in national elections get rid of too many governments when the world economy slumps. Or perhaps they axe too few when the world economy booms. But either way, some more national leaders are likely to join the ranks of the unlucky unemployed.

One last prediction. I’m guessing that the prognostications of the pundits will over-emphasise competence and under-emphasise luck. After all, it’s not just voters who commit the fundamental attribution error.

* As part of the Australian state elections paper, we also produced estimates of Australian state unemployment rates from 1913-2006, which are available here.

[Andrew Leigh]
1:25:56 PM    

External Link: Apple Updates AirPort Design Guide. Apple has revised its guide for planning and building Wi-Fi networks, formerly called Designing AirPort Networks. The new guide, Apple AirPort Networks, is a fairly in-depth effort at explaining with step-by-step instructions how to configure Apple base stations for various kinds of networks and tasks.

 

Copyright © 2009 Glenn Fleishman. TidBITS is copyright © 2009 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you're reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

By glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman). [TidBITS: Mac News for the Rest of Us]
12:32:00 PM    

Sony Reader Gets 500,000 Free Public Domain Titles from Google.

Google made a practical move with some of the 7 million books it's scanned from academic collections by making 500,000 titles with no remaining copyright protection available to Sony for its electronic book device, the Reader. Reports indicate only books from 1922 or earlier were included, as 1922 is the latest date for which public domain status is entirely clear. (Many works published after 1922 are also in the public domain, but each work has to be researched individually to determine its status.)

Earlier this year, Google added an option to view but not download 2 million public domain books on the iPhone; see "More Ebooks Available for the iPhone/iPod touch," 2009-02-09. Think of it like iTunes song purchases versus a Pandora stream.

Google's program to scan books ran afoul of publishers and authors' concerns about the right to scan and archive titles, and the legality of snippets being displayed from these scanned works. A preliminary settlement between Google and various interested parties should make millions of books available for viewing, printing, download, and purchase in the coming months; these titles could also wind up being previewable and for sale on the Reader. (See "Authors and Publishers Settle with Google Book Search," 2008-10-29.)

It's clear that Google has chosen a side (for now) between the two giants of electronic book readers, Sony and Amazon. The Wall Street Journal notes Sony said its Reader sales are at 400,000 and reported that Citigroup estimated Amazon Kindle sales at 500,000.

The Kindle 2, introduced in February, improves on the design of the original device and has a faster screen refresh. Amazon released Kindle for iPhone shortly after the Kindle 2 hardware. Amazon offers 245,000 books for sale along with subscriptions to dozens of magazines and newspapers, and hundreds of blogs. The iPhone software can download only books, not subscriptions. That may change with Apple's iPhone 3.0 software, which now enables in-application subscriptions and purchases.

Lest we forget, Project Gutenberg's volunteers have been assiduously typing, scanning, and correcting out-of-copyright works for many years. Its catalog, now at 27,000 books, includes downloads in text and other formats, including a DRM-free ePub format that both the Reader and Kindle 2 can handle. Affiliated and partner projects bring a grand total to 100,000 titles.

While Project Gutenberg has a fraction of what Google has made available, the quality should be higher, as works have been prepared for accuracy instead of volume, and represent works of a great likelihood to be interesting to a modern audience instead of historians and researchers.

 

Copyright © 2009 Glenn Fleishman. TidBITS is copyright © 2009 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you're reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

By glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman). [TidBITS: Mac News for the Rest of Us]
12:29:13 PM    

Odds Of Tipping: Better Than Even Chance Of Major Changes In Global Climate System, Experts Predict. According to the estimates of climate scientists in a newly published expert survey, there is more than a 50% chance of major changes in the global climate system if global warming proceeds at the current rate. Should average global temperature increase by more than 4 degrees Celsius, one or several parts of the climate system could tip to a new state. [ScienceDaily: Latest Science News]
12:25:04 PM