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Tracking farmland purchases is central to interpreting transnational finance's growing power in agrarian restructuring. Australia's public Register of foreign land ownership reveals little about agrarian change, however. In presenting the first comprehensive mapping of farmland purchases made between 2008 and 2020, this paper examines the ways that financial investments are altering farm ownership patterns in Australia. First, we show that most foreign owned land has been purchased by only 10 pastoral companies, which are implicated in speculative development activities. Second, foreign investment in cropping and horticulture is more significant than it appears in the Register, with investments in agricultural infrastructure increasingly driving land use change. Third, we illustrate the deepening entrenchment of institutional finance. By engaging with the findings from our dataset as well as with the politics of data that have shaped the availability of information, the paper progresses understandings of the financialization of farmland in both its material and ideational aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What if data used to inform knowledge is incomplete or false, leading to misunderstandings about the social world? In Australia, what is known about ethnic diversity is based on an outdated definition and inadequate measure of multiculturalism. This article explores how gaps in data can lead to and further entrench disempowerment. Using a sociodemographic approach, this paper examines the ways in which data can create and maintain poor representation; via collection, analysis and infrastructure. This paper demonstrates that what is counted matters for equality, and lays out what is necessary to help promote ethnic diversity through data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings to light the notable contributions of Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) who enlisted her peers and students to help reduce the gender imbalance by participating in mass collaborative initiatives like edit-a-thons to increase the stock of knowledge about and of interest to women. Such projects, and the edit-a-thons that continue to be convened in Wadewitz's honour, help to reconcile the imbalance and simultaneously present pedagogical opportunities. Drawing upon scholarly literature, this paper also illustrates how Wikipedia editing supports and reinforces the principles of both academic and public writing and represents an open and sustainable platform for formative and summative assessment. Moreover, the paper emphasises the superiority of digital informative texts created by mass-collaboration and participation over those compiled by individuals or through small group collaboration, both of which delimit the homogeneity of networked knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conditional autoregressive approach is popular to analyse data with geocoded boundary. However, spatial prediction is often challenging when observed data are sparse. It becomes more challenging in predicting areal units with different areal boundaries. Hence, this paper develops a spatial generalised linear model for spatial predictions using data from spatially misaligned sparse locations. A spatial basis function associated with the conditional autoregressive models and the kriging method is considered. The proposed model demonstrates its better predictive performance through a simulation study and then is applied to understand the spatial pattern of undecided voting preferences in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This is the seventh in a series of papers reporting Sustainability in Health care by Allocating Resources Effectively (SHARE) in a local healthcare setting. The SHARE Program was a systematic, integrated, evidence-based program for resource allocation within a large Australian health service. It aimed to facilitate proactive use of evidence from research and local data; evidence-based decision-making for resource allocation including disinvestment; and development, implementation and evaluation of disinvestment projects. From the literature and responses of local stakeholders it was clear that provision of expertise and education, training and support of health service staff would be required to achieve these aims. Four support services were proposed. This paper is a detailed case report of the development, implementation and evaluation of a Data Service, Capacity Building Service and Project Support Service. An Evidence Service is reported separately.Methods: Literature reviews, surveys, interviews, consultation and workshops were used to capture and process the relevant information. Existing theoretical frameworks were adapted for evaluation and explication of processes and outcomes.Results: Surveys and interviews identified current practice in use of evidence in decision-making, implementation and evaluation; staff needs for evidence-based practice; nature, type and availability of local health service data; and preferred formats for education and training. The Capacity Building and Project Support Services were successful in achieving short term objectives; but long term outcomes were not evaluated due to reduced funding. The Data Service was not implemented at all. Factors influencing the processes and outcomes are discussed.Conclusion: Health service staff need access to education, training, expertise and support to enable evidence-based decision-making and to implement and evaluate the changes arising from those decisions. Three support services were proposed based on research evidence and local findings. Local factors, some unanticipated and some unavoidable, were the main barriers to successful implementation. All three proposed support services hold promise as facilitators of EBP in the local healthcare setting. The findings from this study will inform further exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of data infrastructure in Australian schooling with a specific focus on interoperability standards that help to make new markets for education data. The conceptual framework combines insights from studies of infrastructure, economic markets and digital data. The case of the Australian National Schools Interoperability Program is analysed, drawing on a corpus of web-based technical and promotional documents and supporting interviews. The paper shows that Australia has well-developed data infrastructure in schooling that is creating new relations between schools, school systems and commercial vendors within network markets for data-driven educational technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper was to test the capabilities of the Sentinel-1 radar data in downscaling Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) radiometer data for high-resolution soil moisture estimation. Three different active–passive downscaling algorithms, including the brightness temperature-based downscaling algorithm (BTBDA), the soil moisture-based downscaling algorithm (SMBDA), and a change detection method (CDM), were analyzed using pairs of Sentinel-1 active and SMAP passive observations collected over a semiarid landscape in southeastern Australia from May 2015 to May 2016. While these algorithms have been tested previously, this is the first study to evaluate the three algorithms using real Sentinel-1 radar and SMAP radiometer data. The SMAP passive observations were disaggregated to 9-, 3-, and 1-km scales and then compared with ground soil moisture measurements. The results suggest that the root-mean-square error (RMSE) in downscaled soil moisture at 9-km resolution was 0.057, 0.056, and 0.067 cm3/cm3 for the BTBDA, SMBDA, and CDM, respectively. The accuracy of downscaling methods was generally decreased when applied at the finer spatial resolution. The SMBDA had overall better performance in terms of correctly detecting the soil moisture pattern and relatively lower RMSE values, and is, therefore, recommended for the combined Sentinel-1 radar and SMAP radiometer setup for soil moisture monitoring. The influence of incidence angle normalization of Sentinel-1 SAR data on downscaled soil moisture was also investigated and found to be minimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The generation, processing and circulation of data in digital form is now an integral aspect of contemporary schooling. Based upon empirical study of two secondary school settings in Australia, this paper considers the different forms of digitally-based 'data work' engaged in by school leaders, managers, administrators and teachers. In particular, three distinct aspects of school data work are explored: (i) the distinction between official 'mandated' data requirements from external government agencies, and the unofficial efforts to generate and work with 'useful' data; (ii) the highly mediated nature of digital data work within schools; (iii) the ways in which digital data lead to compromised knowledge and 'work arounds'. These findings, it is argued, illustrate the embedding of digital data within secondary schools as a technology of (self)control in ways that tend to reinforce dominant cultures of school administration and management. As such, the paper considers how the restrictive forms of data governance currently at large within school systems might be problematized and acted against. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2008, all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 have been assessed in literacy and numeracy through an annual National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test. In 2015, a team of mathematics education researchers across Australia conducted a nationwide research project to identify school practices and policies that were consistent between schools that showed growth and/or improvement in their NAPLAN numeracy results. This paper reports findings from three case study schools, using a school improvement framework to interpret evidence gathered from the schools’ principals and school leaders. The study has particular implications for policy makers and school leaders who may be seeking ways to improve mathematical practices in their own jurisdictions and schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The energy industry is undergoing significant disruption. This research outlines that, whilst challenging, this disruption is also an emerging opportunity for electricity utilities. One such opportunity is leveraging the developments in data analytics and machine learning. As the uptake of renewable energy technologies and complimentary control systems increases, electricity grids will likely transform towards dense microgrids with high penetration of renewable generation sources, rich in network and customer data, and linked through intelligent, wireless communications. Data digitisation and analytics has already impacted numerous industries, and its influence on the energy sector is growing, as computational capabilities increase to manage big data, and as machines develop algorithms to solve the energy challenges of the future. The objective of this paper is to address how far the uptake of renewable technologies can go given the constraints of existing grid infrastructure, and provides a qualitative assessment of how higher levels of renewable energy penetration can be facilitated by incorporating even broader technological advances in the fields of data analytics and machine learning. Western Australia is used as a contextualised case-study, given its abundance and diverse renewable resources (solar, wind, biomass, and wave) and isolated networks, making a high penetration of renewables a feasible target for policy makers over coming decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an emerging global recognition of the inadequacies of conventional socio-economic and demographic data in being able to reflect the relative wellbeing of Indigenous peoples. This paper emerges out of a recent desktop study commissioned by an Australian Indigenous organization who identified a need to enhance local literacies in data collection and interpretation in order to monitor the wellbeing of the Indigenous people within their region, manage governments in respect of their civic responsibilities to this population, and proactively and imaginatively plan for the future of the Indigenous people in their region. In canvassing available data and the growing Indigenous wellbeing literature, it became apparent that conventional statistical collections used to report on the status of populations are governed by a series of assumptions regarding three related concepts: wellbeing; demography; and economic productivity and prosperity. These assumptions have direct implications for how Indigenous peoples are represented to governments and broader society. The paper draws together the existing threads of literature regarding Indigenous wellbeing research to posit a possible broader framework for organising various kinds of Indigenous wellbeing analyses. In doing so, it identifies important shortcomings and deficits in the kinds of data that are available to Indigenous peoples in presenting themselves and their aspirations to governments with. It also opens up a critical analysis of the opportunities and obstacles for Indigenous communities in undertaking such research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an account and a critique of the rise of the contemporary policy as numbers phenomenon and considers its effects on policy and for educational research. Policy as numbers is located within the literatures on numbers in politics and the statistics/state relationship and, while recognising the longevity of the latter relationship, it is argued that the governance turn and neo-liberalism have strengthened the role of numbers in contemporary education policy. This phenomenon is situated in the contemporary 'structure of feeling', which sees politics reduced to managing the everyday and the evisceration of a progressive imaginary. The paper then documents the impact within education, focusing both on the emergent global education policy field and on the national agenda in Australian schooling and the related rise of 'gap talk', both globally and nationally. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications for educational research, suggesting that we as educational researchers are also being positioned by policy as numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon the sociology of numbers, particularly work by Theodore Porter, to reveal the multifarious ways in which numbers actively constitute practices in schools. Drawing upon a case study of one low-performing school in a low-performing region in the state of Queensland, Australia, and theorising into the sociology of numbers, the research explores the complex ways in which numbers came to constitute and dominate the practices in this school site under a broader national, state and regional policy context demanding rapid improvements in various forms of standardised tests and associated practices. Specifically, the research reveals a strong and simultaneous focus by teachers upon a variety of numeric data collected at national, regional and local levels, and intricate relations between these data; multiple visualisation, triangulation and comparison approaches towards such data in virtual and physical formats; and the enumerative nominalisation of both students and their reading attainment in relation to specific, concretised levels of achievement and various types of scale scores. The research cautions against the sheer volume of such enumerative practices, which, while productive of teachers’ understandings of student capacity against standardised measures of achievement, may also lead to a more reductive view of education, dominated by concerns about achievement in standardised tests (and associated practices) alone. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Locata Corporation's positioning technology 'Locata' is a terrestrial-based RF-ranging technology that provides high accuracy position solutions using a network (LocataNet) of time synchronised pseudolite-like transceivers (LocataLites). This technology provides centimetre level accurate position solutions for static positioning using carrier phase measurement data which provides an advantage over other technology for monitoring structural movement in many applications. The Locata network can be deployed in such a configuration around a structure that optimal network geometry could be ensured despite site constraints. This paper describes the first deformation trial using Locata technology carried out at Tumut Pond Dam, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. This trial was run for 22 hours and yielded millimetre-level precision for horizontal positions, and centimetre-level vertical precision for all observed epochs. The accuracy of the coordinate solutions was at the few millimetre level with standard deviations of 2.5 mm, 2.1 mm and 18 mm for the east, north and height components respectively. The position solutions were generated by an iterative least squares estimation process of Locata carrier phase observations per epoch. Then mean of sixty seconds coordinate solutions was used as input for a Kalman filter. Standard deformation detection methods were applied. No significant displacement was observed during this trial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concept of health implied in the SF-36 within a group of Iranians in Australia. Qualitative data were collected from a sample of 21 people,10 females and 11 males. For the first time, the NUD*IST program was used to organize and manage the data in Persian (also known as Farsi), the language spoken by Iranians. Health was defined in terms of holistic, spiritual, social, physical/emotional aspects, and absence-of-disorder dimensions. Among these, physical, absence of disorder, holistic, and spiritual aspects of health were mentioned more frequently than other themes. The findings of the study raise concerns about the extent to which the SF-36 captures the diversity of the concept of health as expressed by the sample of Iranian migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction and Aims: Indicators suggest an escalation in opioid use globally, with recent HIV outbreaks linked to non-medical pharmaceutical opioid (NMPO) use. Little is known about how young Australians engage in NMPO use.Design and Methods: During 2015, we conducted qualitative interviews with young people (16-29 years) who reported oral NMPO use at least twice in the past 90 days. The study included a sample of injecting (n = 14) and oral (n = 22) users. This paper focuses on the oral user group.Results: Most participants grew up in affluent areas of Sydney, reported few health problems, rarely accessed health or welfare services and had limited contact with police. NMPO use was part of a repertoire of drug use involving: (i) use to come down from stimulants; (ii) use in conjunction with cannabis and alcohol; and (iii) use by itself. Participants reported limiting their use in order to avoid stigma and dependence.Discussion and Conclusions: Results suggest culture of self-limiting NMPO use characterised by stable housing, disposable income and intimate friendship networks. Despite the adverse health outcomes observed in other settings, our data suggest that the patterns and meanings of NMPO use observed in this small sample may help explain the limited nature of problematic use among young Australians to date. Findings indicate a need for epidemiological data, including longitudinal data, to assess possible demographic shifts in NMPO use in Australia, and to address risk factors for dependence and transitions to injecting and heroin use in this population. [Dertadian GC, Dixon TC, Iversen J, Maher L. Self-limiting non-medical pharmaceutical opioid use among young people in Sydney, Australia: An exploratory study. Drug Alcohol Rev 2017;00:000-000]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]