62880 research outputs found
Sort by
The role and significance of planning consultants as intermediary-actors: between and amongst government, civic society and the market
Get PDFThe paper discusses the role of private planning consultants as intermediary-actors and their implications in relation to planning theory and practice. To do so, the paper focuses on niche consultants involved in servicing neighbourhood scale plan-making in England, clarifying that they hold crucial agency in local planning processes and adding to the understanding of consultancy roles and co-production dynamics in planning. The paper draws together the literature on private sector consultancy and on intermediaries, along with theoretical work highlighting the diversification of planning, the rise of the collaborative turn and the effect of regulation on creating niche markets in planning expertise. The conclusions drawn help clarify the ‘action on others’ that planning consultants, as intermediary-actors, have in collaborative governance and planning in and beyond neighbourhood planning
The end of administrative supremacy in Canada
Get PDFFor forty years, from the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision in CUPE to the 2019 one in Vavilov, Canadian administrative law has been characterized by a strong belief in the value of administrative power and a distrust of its supervision by the judiciary. This article charts the development of this approach to administrative law, which it refers to as “administrative supremacy”, and explains its fundamental commitments. It then argues that administrative supremacy is fundamentally misguided, and that its rejection by the Vavilov majority is a significant improvement for Canadian law.
Administrative supremacy rests on distinctive and, as the article argues, misconceived views about three key issues in constitutional theory. First, it rejects the separation of powers in favour of an embrace of allegedly expert administrative institutions. Second, it either rejects the Rule of Law or, more recently, redefines it to negate its central commitments to legal certainty. Third, it also redefines democracy as participation in administrative rule-making.
On each of these issues, the article contends that the more orthodox understanding of the relevant principles is preferable to that put forward by administrative supremacy. Administrative expertise does not live up to its promise and is not worth the abandonment of the safeguards against abuse of power. And while administrative reasons and participation may enhance the quality of administrative decision-making, it is no substitute for independent judicial review of administrative action.
To a large degree, Vavilov repudiates key aspects of administrative supremacy. While the repudiation is incomplete, it is to be warmly welcomed
Contradictions of identification of safety and security requirements for industrial cyber-physical systems
Get PDFIndustrial cyber-physical systems (iCPSs) are the backbone of the fourth industrial revolution, facing more safety
and security (S&S) challenges compared to traditional industrial systems. One of the most critical challenges is the collaborative analysis of S&S. Considerable efforts have been made towards integrating S&S and resolving their contradictions. However, a significant research gap remains regarding the accurate definition of contradictions in S&S requirements, along with an identification methodology. This study presents a systematical methodology to address this challenge. We propose two sufficient conditions that result in contradictions and provide algorithms to help their
identification. Additionally, three measures have been proposed to reduce the difficulty of contradictions identification, including a conceptual model for iCPSs with S&S objectives to constrain objects and interactions within the model, a method for unifying the elicitation of S&S requirements, and a requirements template for coordinating the representation of S&S requirements. To provide
insight into the operations of the methodology, we demonstrate its application in a smart factory. The results show that this approach can effectively identify the hidden contradictions in S&S requirement
The making of #CovidTwitter: who were the loudest Covid influencers and what did they say about the Covid-19 pandemic?
Get PDFThis study explores Covid-19 communications disseminated by the top 100 most followed Twitter profiles – what we call the Twitter influencing elite. Focusing on a critical period from January to July 2020, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 6,602 tweets about Covid-19 produced by these Covid Influencers. The findings reveal that approximately two-thirds of the Covid-19 tweets in our sample originated from established global media organizations. While these sources were prominent, they were not the ‘loudest’ in terms of engagement and virality. That belonged to powerful politicians like Trump and Obama, popular singers such as Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, and business personalities like Elon Musk. What is more, our qualitative analysis highlights how the affordances of the digital space and the context of the pandemic were leveraged by these influential Twitter users to advance their own agendas. For instance, some blended health information and caring narratives with promotional appeals, while others, such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump, engaged in political agitation and/or anti-care discourses creating a staccato of conflicting messaging and mis/dis-information. These findings demonstrate that the Twitter space is as political and politicized as it is commercial and commercialized. We conclude that digital influencers and celebrities cannot just simply be used to produce communications during times of crisis as many across the study of health and medical communication have argued. The involvement by digital influencers and celebrities—much like the Covid Influencers we examined here –in spreading information must be critically scrutinized, considering the potential for mixed motives, agendas and informational and real world outcomes
Commodity trailing contemporary performance: Sh!t Theatre’s DollyWould and Selina Thompson’s salt
No full textThis article puts into dialogue the field of theatre and the European and
North American geographic tradition of ‘commodity trailing’, including
its Marxist underpinning. In recent years, a number of performances
have emerged that engage with the process and provenance of commodities.
Such performances often present their makers on the trail of
commodity origins, consumer experiences, and historic routes of trade.
This article introduces a framework in which performances that dramaturgically
engage with commodities and their trails can be identified and
analysed. It commences with an overview of the geographic principles of
commodity trailing, and how this approach might be deployed in
theatre scholarship. It applies the framework of commodity trailing to
two case studies: Sh!t Theatre’s DollyWould (2017) and Selina
Thompson Production’s salt. (2017). In analysing these performances
against the principles of commodity trailing, this article supports an
enhanced understanding of how dramaturgies attend to commodities
and, in so doing, contribute to emergent discourses on performance and
political economy.
Keywords: trail; commodity chain analysis; performance journeysdefetishization;
decolonizatio
CEO overcaution and capital structure choices
Get PDFThis paper develops and empirically tests a new version of the trade-off theory of corporate capital structure choices that accounts for CEOs’ biased beliefs, with a focus on over- caution. We characterize the bias as a distortion of expected rates of return on equity and debt that, for Overcautious CEOs, are overestimated compared to a rational CEO. The theory shows that if CEOs have higher bias in equity, than in debt-value estimation, overcautious CEOs will choose lower levels of debt compared to rational CEOs, and, if the degree of overcaution is sufficiently high, they will adopt a zero-leverage policy
Novel acryloylated and methacryloylated nanocellulose derivatives with improved mucoadhesive properties
Get PDFIn this work, three nanocellulose derivatives are synthesized with the aim of preparing new mucoadhesive materials. Nanocellulose is reacted with glycidyl methacrylate in dimethylsulphoxide, and with acryloyl and methacryloyl chloride in dimethylacetamide in the presence of 4-(N,N-dimethylamino)pyridine as a catalyst. These reactions are carried out under heterogeneous conditions, and the reaction products are characterized using various spectroscopic techniques, X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis. The Fourier-transform infrared spectra showed all the characteristic absorption bands typical for cellulose and also new peaks at 1720 cm−1 for the carbonyl group (C═O) and 1639, 812 cm−1 for the double bond (C═C). It is established that the crystal structure of the nanocellulose is slightly changed with derivatisation and the thermal stability of these derivatives increased. Mucoadhesive properties of nanocellulose and its derivatives is evaluated using the tensile test, rotating basket method, and fluorescence flow-through method. The retention of these polymers is evaluated on sheep oral mucosal tissue ex vivo using artificial saliva. Test results demonstrated that the new derivatives of nanocellulose have improved mucoadhesive properties compared to the parent nanocellulose
Wildflower strips in polytunnel cherry orchard alleyways support pest regulation services but do not counteract edge effects on pollination services
Get PDFSweet cherry (Prunus avium) production relies on modern growing practices like polytunnel coverings to improve yields but this may interrupt arthropod-mediated ecosystem services. The distribution of beneficial arthropods (natural enemies and flower visitors) and the ecosystem services they provide may be affected under polytunnel systems, especially at orchard edges. Across 10 commercial cherry orchards grown in polytunnels, we explored how wildflower strips mitigated edge effects on beneficial arthropods and pest regulation and pollination services. In each orchard, we established a standard wildflower strip (SWS; single cut at the end of the season) and an actively managed wildflower strip (AMWS; regularly cut at 20 cm height) between tree rows and compared this to a conventional control strip (CS). We recorded natural enemies in alleyways and cherry trees post-cherry anthesis (flowering) and flower visitors during and post-cherry anthesis at different distances from the orchard edge (2017–2019). In 2019, we deployed insect prey bait cards in trees to measure pest regulation services and recorded fruit quality (2017–2019) and fruit set (2018–2019) to measure pollination services. Distance from the orchard edge did not affect natural enemy density or diversity in any year or under any alleyway treatment, but pest regulation services decreased towards orchard centres with CS (by 33.0% reduction). Flower visitor density (−34% individuals) and diversity declined with distance from the edge during cherry anthesis. For post-cherry anthesis, marginal negative edge effects were observed for flower visitor density and diversity and behaviour. Overall, fruit set decreased towards the orchard centre while fruit quality increased. Our results suggest that wildflower strips are an effective tool to mitigate edge effects on pest regulation services but have limited effects on flower visitors and pollination