Exploring the technology teacher shortage in New Zealand: the implications for quality teaching and learning

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - The recruitment and retention of technology teachers in New Zealand is facing a potential crisis point. Worryingly, there are continuing...     

Opportunities to reduce road traffic injury: new insights from the study of urban areas

Abstract

Over the past four decades considerable efforts have been taken to mitigate the growing burden of road injury. With increasing urbanisation along with global mobility that demands not only safe but equitable, efficient and clean (reduced carbon footprint) transport, the responses to dealing with the burgeoning road traffic injury in low- and middle-income countries has become increasingly complex. In this paper, we apply unique methods to identify important strategies that could be implemented to reduce road traffic injury in the Asia-Pacific region; a region comprising large middle-income countries (China and India) that are currently in the throes of rapid motorisation. Using a convolutional neural network approach, we clustered countries containing a total of 1632 cities from around the world into groups based on urban characteristics related to road and public transport infrastructure. We then analysed 20 countries (containing 689 cities) from the Asia-Pacific region and assessed the global burden of disease attributed to road traffic injury and these various urban characteristics. This study demonstrates the utility of employing image recognition methods to discover new insights that afford urban and transport planning opportunities to mitigate road traffic injury at a regional and global scale.     

Coveted or Overlooked? The Psychology of Bidding for Comparable Listings in Digital Auctions

This article elaborates on, and provides evidence of the herd behavior bias -- the tendency to gravitate toward, and bid for, auction listings with one or more existing bids, ignoring comparable or even more attractive unbid-for listings available at the same time -- exhibited by buyers in digital auctions. Some listings attract many bidders and become coveted, the center of bidding attention, while other equivalent or even superior listings are overlooked, receiving no bids at all. Empirical analysis using data from digital auctions across different product categories shows that this herd behavior bias is attenuated with increasing bid price, but increases with the difficulty of evaluating quality. The practical implications of these findings, and promising research opportunities in this area are also discussed.     

The financing of rural producer co‐operatives: A case study

The article attempts to address the lack of empirical data in literature on South African producer co‐operatives. A detailed analysis of the financial results of a rural producer cooperative over a twelve‐year period is used to evaluate the project's start‐up phase and long‐term viability. The results generally expose weaknesses well documented in the international literature. Due to the poverty of the membership, the co‐operative was dependent on loans for its foundation. In the long run, the co‐operative survived, increasing not only the number of members, but also their wages. It has been weakened, however, by a lack of reinvested earnings, which was due to repeated withdrawals of revenues as wages and slow‐growing sales due to a lack of marketing effort.     

ENGLE AND YOO THREE STEP ESTIMATION OF CONSUMERS' EXPENDITURE AND HOUSING EQUITY WITHDRAWAL

This paper reports a substantive application of Engle and Yoo's three-step estimator for cointegrated systems. Their estimator was proposed as a computationally convenient alternative to a number of FIML systems estimators. In part this estimator was developed to overcome some drawbacks of the OLS estimator of the first stage Engle-Granger cointegrating regression which, despite its widespread use, is not asymptotically efficient and does not provide (even) asympototically correct ' t ' statistics. Our application, which is of interest in its own right, is to an explanation of expenditure on nondurables and services in the UK. In formulating an empirical explanation for this variable we find it necessary to extend our framework to consider a system of dynamic error correction equations with feedbacks — or error correction mechanisms — from consumption and housing equity withdrawal.     

The Roles of Innovators and Labor in a Schumpeterian Factor Endowments Based Model of Intra‐industry Trade

This paper builds a model of Schumpeterian innovation and trade that emphasizes endowments of innovators and labor as a key factor in determining the pattern of trade. The model suggests a strong complementarity between intra‐industry and inter‐industry trade. The pattern of inter‐industry vs intra‐industry trade is analyzed using the Grubel–Lloyd index. The theoretical model predicts that the prominence of intra‐industry trade is a nonlinear function of the ratio of the proportion of world knowledge domestically generated to the domestic share of the world labor supply. Strong empirical evidence for this key result is presented and implications are discussed.