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Applications for a $4 million federal government grants program to instil creative, tech and entrepreneurial skills in young students around Australia have opened.

The four-year Maker Projects grants scheme opened applications on Thursday to help schools and community groups establish dedicated maker spaces for students to gain practical skills in design, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Grants of between $2000 to $5000 are being offered for tools, equipment, software and consumables to create these maker spaces.

Community groups can also apply for grants of $5000 to 20,000 to further develop STEM activities and networks for young people to connect with local entrepreneurs and inventors.

While $2000 to $5000 may not be enough to create a full-blown maker space from scratch, Girl Geek Academy co-founder Sarah Moran says it’s a great way to provide distributed support to schools keen to equip their students with important skills for the future.

“That’s really good if you’ve got champions in your school who need to buy equipment,” Moran tells StartupSmart. 

“It’s a really good injection if you have amazing teachers who want to extend what they do, [but] it’s not going to create a bucket tonne of maker spaces around Australia.”

Grant funding will be offered on a “first in” basis to eligible applicants.

Federal innovation minister Arthur Sinodinos said the government’s $4 million commitment to the program is motivated by a need to equip Australian schools with resources to help young people engage with technology as creators, instead of just consumers.

“Around 75 percent of the jobs of the future will require qualifications is science, technology, engineering or mathematics,” Sinodinos said in a statement.

He explained the initiative is part of the government’s $29.8 million Inspiring Australia science engagement program, which forms part of the $1.1 billion National Innovation and Science Agenda that was unveiled in December 2015.

“It builds on existing successful school and community-based ‘maker’ activities, like local Maker Faires, Coderdojo coding clubs, and the Questacon Smart Skills Initiative,” Sinodinos said.

“These activities allow young people to design and build in the real and digital world, make movies and stop-motion animation and learn the art of creating.

“These activities will expand Australian students’ horizons beyond the school curriculum towards the everyday experiences of engineers, scientists and innovators, giving them the skills they need for critical 21st century jobs.”

The value of maker spaces

Seed Digital co-founder and tech entrepreneur Mike Ebinum says maker spaces are a powerful educational tool that can expose children and young students to collaboration, critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving, all “while having fun”.

“Maker spaces are a great way for providing kids or anyone interested in technology a safe learning space to play, tinker and experiment with electronics, 3D printing, and software,” Ebinum tells StartupSmart 

“Providing kids with spaces like these are a great way to help ignite their creativity, imagination, and curiosity. Skills which will be paramount for next generation to come up with solutions that will change the way the works.”

Moran adds that while there are many maker spaces around the country, it’s a great project for schools to undertake.

“You don’t need the flashiest maker space going to create maker culture at your school,” she says.

“The grants are beneficial in that they’re a stepping stone to what schools can create.”

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As shares in US tech company GoPro continue to fall in value, the company’s chief executive has shared insights into why the brand’s time on the stock market has not been smooth sailing.

In an interview with CNBC, GoPro chief executive Nick Woodman says the company failed to keep up with market trends.

“Where we fell out a little a bit in our post-IPO years was that we failed to make GoPro contemporary and failed to align GoPro with the smartphone movement,” he said.

GoPro established its Australia-New Zealand headquarters in Victoria in 2015, 12 months after the company went public with an initial public offering share price of $US24.

When it launched operations in Australia, shares in the company had dropped to $US21.16.

Now, its share price is just over $US8.50 ($10).

But Woodman says GoPro can turn a profit this year.

“We’ve targeted cost reductions that get our spending down $[US]200 million from below 2016 levels. Now forecasting spending of [less than] $[US]495 million and that’s going to make a significant impact on our ability to achieve profitability in 2017,” Woodman said.

In the year ahead, Woodman said GoPro’s focus will be on producing new software solutions to appeal to the “dramatically” increasing number of consumers “sharing themselves online”.

“The smartphone has set a new bar for convenience and a new bar for how much work a consumer’s willing to put into sharing themselves,” Woodman said.

“You’re going to see over the course of 2017, it become less of a question of, ‘Should I use a GoPro or my smartphone?’, and more about using a GoPro with a smartphone.”

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A Sydney startup that is developing wearable payment technology has found itself at the centre of global attention after Visa asked it to collaborate in the development of pay-wave sunglasses.

Inamo, a founding startup at Stone & Chalk, had just raised $1 million to launch a pay-and-go watch when Visa knocked on its door in December 2016.

“Before we even had anything out in the market, we actually [worked with Visa] and that’s pretty daunting and humbling as well,” Inamo founder Peter Colbert tells StartupSmart.

Together with Visa and New South Wales-based sunglasses manufacturer Local Supply, Inamo helped create WaveShades — sunglasses that act like a digital wallet.

Colbert says Inamo helped develop the near field communication chip that’s attached to the glasses to make them work like a “miniature” debit or credit card.

“They gave us three weeks to pull it together,” he says.

“They just basically did an arrangement to purchase 150 sunglasses. We worked on the payments part, which is our platform, to integrate Visa.

“There is a chip on the right-hand-side arm of the sunglasses. It’s a prototype and because we only had three weeks, we couldn’t embed our chip into the arm of the sunglasses, we actually had to glue it on.

“The chip is actually the same chip that goes into Inamo’s curl … which goes onto any sports watch, fitness band or key ring.”

After WaveShades attracted attention during Visa-sponsored promotions at St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival across Australia in February, more giveaways with major brands were organised, says Colbert.

Colbert has also seized the spotlight to promote Inamo’s Curl and sold 100 of these watches, worth nearly $2000, within four hours during one of the Laneway festivals, he says.

WaveShades have also made their way to South by South West is the US.

“Visa was really excited by the feedback and they went down to [South by South West in] Austin and started showing people and there was just such an enormous interest about the technology and who was behind it,” says Colbert.

Colbert is now in the Gold Coast for a Quicksilver campaign for WaveShades that Visa has sponsored.

“What’s unique about [WaveShades] is the people who win these sunglasses can go and use them straight away,” says Colbert.

“Its’ very secure [because] it’s a chip, it has the same security as any debit or credit card from a bank.

“It has the same fraud protection that Visa gives its customers. If you lose your credit or debit card, Visa will repay you the balance of what’s been spent.

“[And] we have a mobile app where if for example, you lose your sunglasses or your Curl, you can go onto the app and disable it.”

Despite all the media attention and interest from big brands to produce more of these sunglasses, Colbert says he won’t be pivoting Inamo’s focus to only focus on the sunglasses in a hurry.

“We have been approached by some of the larger sunglass companies globally,” he says.

“First and foremast, we’re a payments platform — we’re not manufacturers at all — so what we need to think about is, is it really viable to have our chip embedded into the sunglasses?

“I’m not yet convinced that fashion items are a good way to go for contactless payments because they’re so personal [and easy to lose].

“What we think we’ll be doing is having a miniature collar that slips onto the right-side arm of the sunglasses.”

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By Shane Koelmeyer

We know people can say or do things they don’t mean when they’re under pressure, feeling stress or are angry.

In rare incidences (often in the context of disciplinary meetings), an employee may indicate that they wish to resign, only to later try to withdraw their resignation or claim that they did not really resign.

So can a resignation given “in the heat of the moment” be accepted or later be retracted by the employee?

In a recent case, the Fair Work Commission considered an unfair dismissal application where the termination of employment arose from an argument with management.

On Friday, November 11, 2016, the employee met with a director after taking issue with her repeated questioning of why he was in the warehouse.

It was accepted by both parties that the meeting became heated with the employee becoming agitated and angry. The employee yelled and raised his voice at the director and pointed his finger at her.

The evidence from the employer was that the employee stated, “I don’t care”, “You can have your f*cking job”, “I resign” and “I don’t f*cking care”, before leaving the meeting, despite an attempt to calm him down.

However, the employee claimed that he was told to leave the meeting and that the employer would ring him the following day.

On the following Monday, November 14, to the employer’s surprise, the employee attended for work. The employer attempted to speak to the employee to tell him that he had resigned and that he should leave the premises.

The employee later lodged an unfair dismissal application. He alleged that the employer terminated his employment on November 14 and denied that at any stage he resigned.

The employee agreed that at the meeting he swore and stated, “You can keep your f**king job”, but maintained that this was not meant to be a resignation.

The employer submitted that based on the employee’s conduct and words at the meeting, it was understood that he resigned. Therefore, the unfair dismissal application should be dismissed.

Significantly, another employee who was outside the meeting room provided evidence that it was her impression that the employee had quit given the tone of the meeting, and because the employee had subsequently collected his belongings and left the office.

The employer also argued that even if the employee provided his resignation “in the heat of the moment”, the employee had considerable time to withdraw his resignation but at no point did he do so.

The Commission noted the case law principles that:

It may not be reasonable to immediately accept a resignation where there are special circumstances;

Special circumstances may include words said in anger, under undue pressure or the intellectual capacity of employee;

Where there are special circumstances, employers should allow a reasonable period of time to pass. The employer may need to enquire whether the employee actually intended to resign;

Given the special circumstances, whether an employee intended to resign will be judged objectively by the courts; and

Where a resignation is given and the intention is unambiguous, the employer is not required to make further enquiries.

The Commission was satisfied that the employee’s comments in the meeting did mean that he had resigned at the time.

However, it was also accepted that they were said in an argument that amounted to a special circumstance and that the employer was to allow reasonable time to see if the employee did not intend to resign.

The Commission noted that the employee resigned at midday on the Friday and had the opportunity for the remainder of the day and over the weekend to withdraw his resignation if he wished to, but did not.

Given the employee’s conduct during and after the meeting, the employer was entitled to accept the employee’s resignation.

As the Commission held that the termination of the employee’s employment was by way of resignation and not by the employer, the unfair dismissal application was dismissed.

Once a resignation is clearly communicated and accepted by the employer, it cannot later be withdrawn by the employee unless the employer consents.

Care should be taken in giving effect to resignations that are made in special circumstances.

A court or tribunal may consider whether the employee was entitled to retract the resignation or if further enquiries should have been made by the employer to confirm the resignation before accepting it.

Shane Koelmeyer is a director of specialist law firm Workplace Law.

This article was originally published on SmartCompany. 

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SME owners are being reminded about their obligations to keep complete and accurate records of the hours their staff work, after the Fair Work Ombudsman today released an app for employees to do their own record-keeping.

The “Record My Hours” app allows employees to automatically track and record the amount of time they spend at work with the help of geo-location services, which register exactly when employees arrive and leave their place of employment.

The app asks workers to confirm the number of hours worked at the end of every shift and also includes a notification system to alert employees when they have to head to work.

Employees will be able to export the tracking data to their employer, or even to the Fair Work Ombudsman if the employee believes they are being underpaid.

The app is available in 12 languages to encourage workers from migrant backgrounds to use it and can be downloaded for both Android and iPhone systems.

Fair Work Ombudsman Natalie James said in a statement the app is designed to address underpayments of young and migrant workers, and to act as a “back-up” if employers are suspected of not meeting their obligations,

“Workplace laws require employers to keep accurate records of the hours their employees have worked. Minor discrepancies in record-keeping are usually resolved without the need for formal enforcement action,” James said.

While James said most business owners “do the right thing” when it comes to record keeping, the Fair Work Ombudsman sees “too many” examples of deliberately altered or very poorly kept records.

“We take matters very seriously when we come across examples of record-keeping that is so sub-standard it compromises our ability to determine a worker’s entitlements,” said James.

“In the six months to December, two-thirds (64 percent) of the cases we filed in court included alleged record-keeping or pay slip contraventions.”

New app does not change employers’ obligations

Principal lawyer at McDonald Murholme lawyers Andrew Jewell told SmartCompany that but just because some employees may choose to use the app, it shouldn’t change business’ obligations to accurately keep time records.

“Employers have always had an obligation to record time and pay employees accordingly,” Jewell says.

“The app is a tool for employees but this does not alter the employer’s obligations.”

He also believes the app will aid employees in holding businesses accountable, but says workers have always had the means to do so.

“Practically, it may mean more employees are equipped to keep records, however, employees have always been able to keep their own records enabling them to hold their employer accountable,” he says.

While the app is aimed at employees, James said in a statement it could also help small businesses that don’t have resources to install automated time-keeping systems.

“The app will also be of particular benefit to small business owners who do not have the resources to install expensive automated time-recording systems, especially those in the retail and hospitality industries where staff are more likely to work irregular hours that do not always reflect rosters,” James said.

“In these instances the data from an employee’s Record My Hours app can be checked against the businesses’ records to identify any discrepancies and resolve any issues before they arise.”

Jewell believes there’s “no harm” in employers using another method to record employee’s hours, believing it is within a business’ “best interests”.

Jewell is optimistic the app will be used by employees in order to iron out any underpayment disputes.

“The app will make it easier to record hours so I think that they will [use it],” he said.

“Often the issue with an underpayment claims is an accurate reflection of hours worked so this problem could be solved.”

This article was originally published on SmartCompany. 

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Form a plan, identify and manage the risks it involves, but don’t lie awake at night thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong.

That’s the advice of Randall Brugeaud, who has a rather complex and high-pressure job as chief information officer of one of the Commonwealth’s most technology-reliant organisations, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

“If something comes out of left field, then you just have to deal with it,” he told the Trans-Tasman Business Circle’s founder Johnny Weiss after giving a speech at one of the group’s business lunches in Canberra last week.

“I think, there’s 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week and sometimes I use all of them, but there’s no point in laying awake at night wondering about what might happen.

“We’re in an emotionally charged, highly volatile, business-led operational environment… it is 24-7, global, you really can’t sit there and just wonder about what might go wrong and stress about it.”

Brugeaud was there to give a helicopter-view update on “digital transformation” projects he has been leading in the big organisation — while, he noted, it continues bedding down the complex integration process that created it, and keeps on top of business as usual.

Of the three, he says keeping the lights on is the top priority: “If production for whatever reason stops working or looks like it will stop working, everybody stops what they’re doing and they work on our production environment.”

Brugeaud also listed a set of “enabling factors” he considers necessary for the success of the department’s transformative digital projects:

Support from the top:

“Yes, the business transformation is absolutely critical but technology is actually being discussed at our executive table. We’ve had more discussions than I can remember about technology with our secretary, with our commissioner and with our deputy secretaries than I can ever recall. It is absolutely front of mind and being driven from the top.”

Risk management:

“A very easy way to engage with risk is by not changing anything and just battening down the hatches and hoping nothing goes wrong. In order for us to transform, we do need to engage with risk in an informed way. It’s a matter of managing it, not being reckless in implementation.”

Collaboration and co-creation:

“We have far more interaction, I think, between our consumers of services and suppliers of services, be they technology or otherwise. And that is really proving to be a powerful union.

The right people with the right skills:

“I think this is one of our biggest challenges, particularly in Canberra, in government. There’s a lot of transformation happening right now and in order for us to be able to resource this with people who have the right skills, and are of the right character, it is a real challenge, I think.”

The capacity to exploit data and information:

“When we distil down what we do as an organisation, we bring together information, draw insights, and then feed and support decision-making … either by people or systems. That’s really what we do. Yes, we have a whole lot that sits around that but fundamentally, our job is to ensure that the department makes good decisions.”

Secure and resilient systems:

“As you enter the digital space you do open yourself up more to greater interest from the external community, or those who wish to exploit or penetrate our controls, [becoming] resilient being very important as we move to a more digitised and automated environment. We no longer have the fallback of manual processing.”

There’s still a lot more ground to be covered in cybersecurity for DIBP, according to the auditor-general’s latest cybersecurity report, which follows up on a 2014 audit of seven Commonwealth agencies including DIBP that found none were up to scratch.

This time, the audit office concluded DIBP was still not “cyber resilient” against external attackers, and it is still yet to fully comply with the Australian Signals Directorate’s top four mitigation strategies (along with the Australian Taxation Office).

Brugeaud said DIBP had made “a big investment in cybersecurity” and had begun a significant new program at the start of this financial year.

This article was originally published on The Mandarin. 

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There are few greater satisfactions in the world of tech than building an app.

I know this because I did this last month when I joined a one day Decoded course on learning to code.

The resulting app is proudly displayed on my iPhone. It still requires some work and I am, so far, the only person who has used it. But it’s real and I built it. I even got to pitch my idea to my fellow classmates over a glass of wine — although that’s where my bubble burst. My app idea was the absolute worst of the lot.

I joined the Decoded Code_in a Day course with a small group of men and women who shared varying reasons for showing up on the day. While no one appeared to have direct experience coding, most had some kind of link to tech — such as project management, startups, or in online media.

Our instructors Nicola Steele and Chris Monk made it clear that they wouldn’t be training developers during the course, but they would demystify what goes on with coding, and prove that technology’s not built with magic. They also warned us the day could get exhausting, but that no person would be left behind.

The day’s first session involved a history lesson, and a very good one at that. To start building tech it helps to put what you’re doing in context, and to better understand just how we ended up with iPhones, PCs and the world wide web. It’s here also that it’s comforting to know women have an excellent legacy in tech, despite the fact we’re now significantly underrepresented in STEM-related fields.

Prior to morning tea, we were given the brief that we’d start working on immediately after the break. Each of us needed to come up with an idea for an app where people check into a single location.

I panicked at this and cursed myself for not better reading the pre-course pack and realising I should have thought this through. Was this a wasted opportunity to start work on my yet-to-be determined billion dollar idea? Could I come up with something in the time it took me to go to the bathroom?

When class resumed, and I had a terrible idea to work with, we immediately got to work. We had individual Macs and followed along with Chris and Nicola, but were also given opportunities to break things, to get creative and get just confused enough that we could take in an added lesson while being steered back on course.

We started with the front-end side, looking at the role of HTML, CSS and Javascript, before moving onto the basics of server-side programming languages and databases.

Our instructors were quick to demystify the process and dispel the myth the world of coding is some kind of secret club. We were shown how to access the endless number of free and open tools available for coding, including libraries of pre-existing code, and how simple and easy it is to find what you need by simply Googling it.

Just before 5 in the afternoon, we re-grouped back where we started that morning, took a quick look at the 10 or so different apps we’d created and debriefed on what we’d learned and how it might change how we work and think.

I didn’t leave the room as a developer, nor did I go home and turn the lights out, my computer screen vertical, and start writing out lines of code into the early hours of the morning.

But I did leave with a lot more knowledge about just what’s behind the technology I use and embrace every day. I’m now more confident in my conversations with developers, and much more interested in how the things we take for granted are actually created.

This article was originally published by Women’s Agenda. 

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You may not know this, but a great deal of our data about the human mind is based on a relatively small but intensively studied population: first-year undergraduate university students.

There has long been concern about the over-reliance on students as a source of data, particularly around lack of demographic diversity and limited sample sizes. Both concerns have been implicated in the current crisis in psychological research, in which many key effects have not been replicated by subsequent studies.

But now there’s a new tool in the psychologist’s arsenal, one that has shown it can produce valid data, which can help broaden the population of test subjects: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Mechanical Turk is the most popular online data collection platform. People register with the platform, then choose from thousands of advertisements searching for participants.

Compared to the slow slog of testing first-year students in a laboratory, Mechanical Turk offers the opportunity to collect hundreds of responses at a modest cost in a matter of hours.

Psychologists have embraced Mechanical Turk with gusto, and many recent studies have drawn their data from Mechanical Turk subjects. However, the new system is not without its drawbacks.

Too good to be true?

Recently, researchers working with Mechanical Turk have raised concerns about whether it comes with hidden costs. The original goal of many researchers using this platform was to conduct scientifically valid studies in large and diverse samples.

But does online data really provide the solution? Here are some pros and cons.

Sample Size

Mechanical Turk offers an unparalleled opportunity to collect large samples, particularly in comparison to traditional undergraduate participant pools, many of which cap annual testing at 200 participants.

In contrast, there are more than 500,000 workers registered on Mechanical Turk. However, researchers must be careful to prevent Mechanical Turk workers from participating in the same study more than once and thus invalidating the results.

Diversity

Psychologists are concerned with whether findings generalise beyond student samples, or beyond so-called “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) samples.

This is important not only for their own theoretical closure, but also to increase confidence in the general public about the overall validity and importance of the findings. The demographic diversity of Mechanical Turk workers is certainly more varied than that of undergraduate students.

Reliability

One barrier to obtaining reliable data is participant engagement, which is easier to ensure and monitor with students in the lab than it is with Mechanical Turk workers in their own home.

To combat this issue, researchers typically integrate checks into questionnaires to identify participants who are not paying attention, such as asking: “This is a test item, please answer ‘not at all’ for this question”. However, there are now reports that Mechanical Turk workers are adept at spotting such questions.

Fortunately, larger sample sizes do allow researchers to “wash out” the noise of less-than-perfect data. This means that relationships can be detected in noisy data given a large enough sample, but that averages across different samples are likely to differ.

Naivety

Another concern is the naivety of research participants. Study results are unlikely to be valid if participants know the procedure and expected hypotheses in advance.

Lack of naivety in this form has the potential to significantly alter results, and thus impact on replicability. Here, undergraduate samples present an advantage: students typically complete only a handful of studies in their first year, and most before being exposed to detailed information about psychology.

In contrast, some MTurk workers treat study completion as a full-time job, completing hundreds of studies per week. More concerning still is the availability of online communities in which workers trade information about study hypotheses and procedures and offer tips on completing studies quickly, which inevitably comes at the cost of psychological engagement.

The future of online data collection

Researchers turned to online data collection platforms like Mechanical Turk because they offered quick, cheap and apparently scientifically valid solutions to problems implicated in the replication crisis.

Although Mechanical Turk allows for collection of large and diverse samples, it comes with other costs that may compromise scientific rigour, including questionable quality and validity of results.

This means Mechanical Turk is useful, but only to the extent that researchers are aware of, and compensate for, its pitfalls. This includes:

1) embedding novel attention checks to keep ahead of savvy workers

2) ensuring workers do not complete studies more than once

3) avoiding common procedures that workers have seen hundreds of times; and

4) diversifying onto other online platforms (or creating an Australian platform that is better suited to the requirements of local researchers)

Overall, online samples should be used as a complement to, not a replacement for, traditional student samples. Both methods have their own strengths and weaknesses, but together produce better science.

While Mechanical Turk isn’t the silver bullet that psychology researchers had hoped, harnessing its benefits and offsetting its costs will ensure the future of online data collection is still bright.

Michael Humphreys is an emeritus professor of Cognitive Psychology at The University of Queensland, Katharine H. Greenaway is a research fellow in Social Psychology at The University of Queensland, and Sarah Bentley is researcher in Social Psychology at The University of Queensland. 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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