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Currently Australia and New Zealand are experiencing a major restructuring of their social, political, and economic bases. A conceptual framework for analysing these changes is presented here with special emphasis being placed on the impact of resource developments at a regional level. New Zealand's current 'major projects' are reviewed in the context of this framework. It is suggested that academic social scientists should coordinate their work with that of applied social scientists who are responding to change at a regional level.

Highlights • About two-thirds of farmers in Narok South District of Kenya were willing to pay while one-third needed compensation to accept the preferred vaccine and vaccination. • The WTP for preferred vaccine and vaccination was high but since there was high level of uncertainty, further WTP studies are needed. • Willingness to pay for preferred vaccine and vaccination attributes and for the entire profiles was influenced by various farmer demographics and household characteristics. • Vaccination against CBPP was economically worthwhile using all programmes investigated., Contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP) is an economically important trans-boundary cattle disease which affects food security and livelihoods. A conjoint analysis–contingent valuation was carried out on 190 households in Narok South District of Kenya to measure willingness to pay (WTP) and demand for CBPP vaccine and vaccination as well as factors affecting WTP. The mean WTP was calculated at Kenya Shillings (KSh) 212.48 (USD 3.03) for vaccination using a vaccine with the characteristics that were preferred by the farmers (preferred vaccine and vaccination) and KSh −71.45 (USD −1.02) for the currently used vaccine and vaccination. The proportion of farmers willing to pay an amount greater than zero was 66.7% and 34.4% for the preferred and current vaccine and vaccination respectively. About one third (33.3%) of farmers would need to be compensated an average amount of KSh 1162.62 (USD 13.68) per animal to allow their cattle to be vaccinated against CBPP using the preferred vaccine and vaccination. About two-thirds (65.6%) of farmers would need to be compensated an average amount of KSh 853.72 (USD 12.20) per animal to allow their cattle to be vaccinated against CBPP using the current vaccine and vaccination. The total amount of compensation would be KSh 61.39 million (USD 0.88 million) for the preferred vaccine and vaccination and KSh 90.15 million (USD 1.29 million) for the current vaccine and vaccination. Demand curves drawn from individual WTP demonstrated that only 59% and 27% of cattle owners with a WTP greater than zero were willing to pay a benchmark cost of KSh 34.60 for the preferred and current vaccine respectively. WTP was negatively influenced by the attitude about household economic situation (p = 0.0078), presence of cross breeds in the herd (p

Demographic projections for New Zealand indicate there will be major labour shortages in the future which will not be met through either natural increase in population or immigration. It is therefore necessary that for New Zealand to retain and or improve its current economic position, the labour force we di have is employed in ways that optimize outcomes for individuals, families/whanau and communities on the one hand, and businesses, enterprises and institutions on the other. At present, there is inadequate information about the labour market and employment due, in part, to the way many employment-related measures are defined. Additionally the importance given to two specific measures – official unemployment and labour force participation – as indicators of a buoyant labour market, provide an incomplete picture of the complex and increasingly diverse patterns of employment in New Zealand. While most measures used in New Zealand mirror those used internationally and thus allow for large-scale international comparisons, much more could be done to understand shortfalls in employment. This paper provide a preliminary conceptualization of sub-optimal employment, which emphasis the complexity of the issue under examination by suggesting the extent to which some of employment statuses could be considered sub-optimal.

This paper reports on research being conducted under a FRST -funded research programme. The programme has two linked research objectives - (i) creating a quantitative profile of the incidence of multiple job holding in New Zealand; and (ii) investigating the dynamics of becoming a multiple job holder in New Zealand and the social consequences of multiple job holding. Organised around these two objectives, this programme of social research is investigating the role of multiple job holding as a positive change strategy for individuals, families and communities. It focuses particularly on factors that influence the adoption of multiple job holding by individuals, and the effects that a multiple job holding work style has on individuals, families and communities. The paper reports the findings of an initial statistical profile of the incidence of multiple job holding in New Zealand based on the 2001 census.

Multiple job holding is a significant feature of the contemporary New Zealand labour market, with at least one in ten people actively involved in the workforce holding more than one job at a time. Research into the effects of multiple job holding on the lives of workers in three sectors shows there can be considerable impact on their work-life balance. The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with male and female health professional, farmers, and cafe or restaurant workers. The research shows that multiple job holding is comparatively well established in the agriculture and health sectors, with multiple job holders expecting to remain as such for the longer term. While multiple job holding may be equally established in the cafe and restaurant sector, the multiple jobs holders do not generally expect to remain so for long so the multiple job holding appears more transitional. Multiple job holders, who typically work long hours, are motivated by a range of factors, with economic reasons dominating. However, personal factors and pulling together a portfolio of work are also important. Overall, workers interviewed in the three sectors tend to hold their jobs because they want to rather than because they have to. Nevertheless, multiple job holding affects lives outside work, particularly family activities, participation in leisure and exercise, and community involvement. These effects on work-life balance vary by sector.

In this paper we describe a technology probe aiming to aid understanding of how digital displays can help support communities. Using a simple photo gallery application, deployed in a central social point in a small village and displaying user-generated photos and videos, we have been able to gain an understanding of this setting, field test our device and inspire new ideas directly from members of the community. We explore the process of deploying this display, the response from residents and how the display has taken a place within the community.

Public displays and mobile phones are ubiquitous technologies that are already weaving themselves into the everyday life of urban citizens. The combination of the two enables new and novel possibilities, such as interaction with displays that are not physically accessible, extending screen real estate for mobile phones or transferring user content to and from public displays. However, current usability evaluations of prototype systems have explored only a small part of this design space, as usage of such systems is deeply embedded in and dependent on social and everyday context. In order to investigate issues surrounding appropriation and real use in social context field studies are necessary. In this paper we present our experiences with field deployments in a continuum between exploratory prototypes and technology probes. We present benefits and drawbacks of different evaluation methods, and provide a number of validated lessons from our deployments.

Humans manipulate fluids intuitively using intuitive approximations of the underlying physical model. In this paper, we explore a general methodology that robots may use to develop and improve strategies for overcoming manipulation tasks associated with appropriately defined loss functions. We focus on the specific task of pouring a liquid from a container (pourer) to another container (receiver) while minimizing the mass of liquid that spills outside the receiver. We present a solution, based on guidance from approximate simulation, that is fast, flexible and adaptable to novel containers as long as their shapes can be sensed. Our key idea is to decouple the optimization of the parameter space of the simulator from the optimization over action space for determining robot control actions. We perform the former in a training (calibration) stage and the latter during run-time (deployment). For the purpose of this paper we use pouring in both stages, even though separate actions could be chosen. We compare four different strategies for calibration and three different strategies for deployment. Our results demonstrate that fast fluid simulations are effective, even if they are only approximate, in guiding automatic strategies for pouring liquids.

This paper provides an extensive Monte-Carlo comparison of severalcontemporary cointegration tests. Apart from the familiar Gaussian basedtests of Johansen, we also consider tests based on non-Gaussianquasi-likelihoods. Moreover, we compare the performance of these parametrictests with tests that estimate the score function from the data using eitherkernel estimation or semi-nonparametric density approximations. Thecomparison is completed with a fully nonparametric cointegration test. Insmall samples, the overall performance of the semi-nonparametric approachappears best in terms of size and power. The main cost of thesemi-nonparametric approach is the increased computation time. In largesamples and for heavily skewed or multimodal distributions, the kernel basedadaptive method dominates. For near-Gaussian distributions, however, thesemi-nonparametric approach is preferable again.