This Sporting Mammon: A Normative Critique of the Commodification of Sport

The advent of communications technology has enabled large and world-wide audiences to have visual access to sports whose spatially limited field of action prevents such numbers of interested spectators attending the event in person to witness them. Simultaneously a number of new issues for sport have arisen. Recognising that spectators’ location and distance from sporting events at times permit audiences viewing at home to enjoy a better view of the action, organisers sometimes erect huge screens relaying the action at sporting arenas to redress this disadvantage. But the facility to focus in close-up, slow-motion, repeat display and from several angles provides not only a detailed inspection of sporting episodes, but also a mechanism for quality control of refereeing decisions. This article examines one recent attempt to make recommendations concerning the relative role of technology and humans in officiating, given an analysis of the problems technology can cause officials.     

The World Bank's policy paper on vocational and technical education and training

In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, some of his major works include The Neglected Source of Human Wealth: A Study of Formal Education and Training during the Adult Years(1982) and The Lingering Crisis of Youth Unemployment (1978).     

Some Functions are More Equal than Others: The Development of a Macroappraisal Strategy for the National Archives of Australia

In 1999–2000 the National Archives of Australia (NAA) adopted a functions-based approach to appraisal. Since that time functional appraisal projects have for the most part been conducted in cooperation with individual agencies. What has been missing is a broad whole-of-government or macroappraisal framework which might assist with the strategic prioritisation of projects, the allocation of resources and the identification of high-value functions, activities and record classes. This article describes a project commenced by the NAA during 2003–2004 to research and develop a functions-based macroappraisal framework for current and prospective appraisal and for retrospective application to records of the past 30 years of the Australian Government. The article compares the Australian approach with macroappraisal strategies pursued in Canada, the Netherlands and South Africa.     

Interactions between defining,explaining and classifying: the case of increasing and decreasing sequences

This paper describes a study in which we investigated relationships between defining mathematical concepts — increasing and decreasing infinite sequences — explaining their meanings and classifying consistently with formal definitions. We explored the effect of defining, explaining or studying a definition on subsequent classification, and the effect of classifying on subsequent explaining and defining. We report that (1) student-generated definitions and explanations were highly variable in content and quality; (2) explicitly considering the meaning of the concept facilitated subsequent classification, and giving a personal definition or explanation had a greater effect than studying a given definition; (3) classifying before defining or explaining resulted in significantly poorer definitions and explanations. We discuss the implications of these results for the teaching of abstract pure mathematics, relating our discussion to existing work on the concept image/concept definition distinction and on working with examples.     

Meeting innumeracy at primary school

Innumeracy, as understood here, is the inability to handle numbers and numerical data decently and to evaluate statements regarding sums and situations which invite mental processing and estimating. Innumeracy is quite frequent at primary school, as experience shows, and particularly, where open problems ask for numerical data to be supplied and substituted by the pupils themselves.Innumeracy may be caused by a structuralist design of the instruction: from the beginning onwards, emphasis is on teaching the algorithms of column arithmetic, and no room is yielded to context problems.The alternative, as here presented, to the structuralist approach is the realistic one. Here arithmetic starts as an informal context-bound activity of the children, who, via model situations, gradually develop more formal methods; these, in turn, remain tied to mental arithmetic and arithmetic by estimate, both in bare sums and in context situations.