4,910 research outputs found
Finland-India Business Prospects 2007-2017
No full textFinland-India Economic Relations were researched for the first time in a study that analysed mutual trade and investment potential through the lens of revealed comparative advantage and identified profitably tradable goods at 4-digit and 8-digit disaggregated levels in the standard international trade classification (Mathur, 1998). This study was made freely available on the world wide web for five years through http:// www.uta.fi/kati as part of longitudinal action research to study how small and large players would take advantage of this freebie. This paper provides initial results of a sequel study initiated in 2005 to understand what happened thereafter, whether trade grew, and to analyse how trade could diversify from identification of new opportunities for product-services linkages after the expiry of the transitional period that brought GATS into effect in 2005. Finlands share in Indian imports and exports has grown rapidly and exponentially and the prospects are vast but the potential realised by 2007 remains considerably untapped and far below comparable figures for other EU countries. This study emphasises the need for policy research on institutional barriers to design new gateways beyond an increased frequency of contact between people from the two countries. The conclusion that robust bridges could be built through tripartite fora comprising business, government and academia points to the need for new institutionalities and deepening research studies, some of which initiated as part of the Finland-India Economic Relations project, are at various stages of progress and expected to be completed during 2007-2010.
Book Ends & Odd Books : Publications Refuting Conventional Form from the Banff Centre Library Collection
No full textMathur explains how he "unselected" nearly 200 works for this exhibition of unconventional publications by international artists and authors, recognizing the influence of Ulises Carrion's article "The New Art of Making Books." The author reflects upon the roles of language and poetics, the distinction between book and text, and how politics and power affect the making and reception of these works. 2 bibl. ref
Forced convection heat transfer from solder balls on a printed circuit board using the characteristic based split (CBS) scheme
No full textFINANCING COMMUNITY FACILITIES: A CASE STUDY OF THE PARKS AND RECREATIONAL GENERAL OBLIGATION BOND MEASURE OF SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA
No full textThis study of the City of San Jose’s Parks and Recreation General Obligation (GO) Bond Measure seeks to identify the politics-, management-, and planning-related lessons learned by the City as it developed its community facilities using the GO bonds proceeds. The study finds that these lessons include: be conservative in what you promise the residents; be prepared for changes in economic environment by identifying supplementary funding sources should the primary source not yield adequate funds; make sure that the jurisdiction is organizationally capable of handling the increased workload; and prepare detailed project plans prior to the bond issuance.Community Infrastructure and Services; Municipal Bonds; Public Finance
Politics of Consumption, Politics of Justice : the Political Investment of the Consumer
No full textFor a long time consumption was thought of as a private act, untouched by power: aligned with the market, commerce, the family and pushed into the private sphere, consumption was opposed to the public and political spheres of the State, of citizenship and rights. However, it has become increasingly evident that the ways in which consumption is both represented and articulated are deeply intertwined with power relationships. Recent literature in sociology and anthropology has shown that contemporary consumer practices are characterized by ambivalence in terms of power effects. Consumption neither frees subjects nor is it the expression of absolute freedom outside of social norms. Likewise, it is not totally determined by advertising and the culture industry, by commodities, shopping centres, theme parks, fast-food chains, and such like. All in all, it is because of its ambivalence – as the various practices of using goods may be occasions for self-realisation and emancipation as well as for frustration and subjugation - that consumption is essentially a site of politics. Of course, there are various dimensions to the politics of consumption. Firstly, as a vast literature documents, choices of consumption are the site of what may be defined as a politics of difference: they are means of social inclusion as well as exclusion. We can add to such, often implicit, politics of difference, other more structural and overt relations of power, which have to do mostly with the ‘normality’, ‘legitimacy’, ‘fairness’ or otherwise of certain goods and practices and with the identity thereof ascribed to consumers. There is thus a politics of normality. That which we today consider as' normal’ in consumer practices is in fact a social construct which has consolidated historically. In contemporary Western societies such normality is fixed by opposition to negatives such as addiction or drugs. The politics of normality points to the normative view of the consumer which is conventionally sustained by the market economy as we know it: it portrays consumers as looking for personal satisfaction but doesn’t allow them to fall into excess or dependency being asked to behave as self-possessed hedonists. This individualistic outlook clashes with another dimension of the politics of consumption, that which has to do with the systemic and often unintended effects produced by consumer practices on other spheres of action. We may call this dimension politics of effects. Even though consumption may be conceived of as a process of de-commoditisation, consumers' power is however neither reducible nor symmetrical to that of agents in the supply or retail sectors. This indeed opens the space for power effects and strategies of different sorts, including global division of labour (with consumerist Nations consuming a disproportional share of global produce) and environmental effects. After discussing the politics of consumption as a complex set of intertwined issues, in this chapter I concentrate on the latter dimension, the politics of effects. In particular, I focus on critical and alternative lifestyles. The chapter examines the growing wealth of literature on the spread of social movements which question the commodity frontier and the relationship between production and consumption. Critical or alternative consumption addresses globalization as de-territorialization, the disarticulation of production and consumption, and the separation of politics and the market. This begs the question whether social mobilization and the awareness of systemic, unintended effects may translate (alternative) consumption into a genuine politics of justice
Politics of Consumption, Politics of Justice : the Political Investment of the Consumer
No full textFor a long time consumption was thought of as a private act, untouched by power: aligned with the market, commerce, the family and pushed into the private sphere, consumption was opposed to the public and political spheres of the State, of citizenship and rights. However, it has become increasingly evident that the ways in which consumption is both represented and articulated are deeply intertwined with power relationships. Recent literature in sociology and anthropology has shown that contemporary consumer practices are characterized by ambivalence in terms of power effects. Consumption neither frees subjects nor is it the expression of absolute freedom outside of social norms. Likewise, it is not totally determined by advertising and the culture industry, by commodities, shopping centres, theme parks, fast-food chains, and such like. All in all, it is because of its ambivalence – as the various practices of using goods may be occasions for self-realisation and emancipation as well as for frustration and subjugation - that consumption is essentially a site of politics. Of course, there are various dimensions to the politics of consumption. Firstly, as a vast literature documents, choices of consumption are the site of what may be defined as a politics of difference: they are means of social inclusion as well as exclusion. We can add to such, often implicit, politics of difference, other more structural and overt relations of power, which have to do mostly with the ‘normality’, ‘legitimacy’, ‘fairness’ or otherwise of certain goods and practices and with the identity thereof ascribed to consumers. There is thus a politics of normality. That which we today consider as' normal’ in consumer practices is in fact a social construct which has consolidated historically. In contemporary Western societies such normality is fixed by opposition to negatives such as addiction or drugs. The politics of normality points to the normative view of the consumer which is conventionally sustained by the market economy as we know it: it portrays consumers as looking for personal satisfaction but doesn’t allow them to fall into excess or dependency being asked to behave as self-possessed hedonists. This individualistic outlook clashes with another dimension of the politics of consumption, that which has to do with the systemic and often unintended effects produced by consumer practices on other spheres of action. We may call this dimension politics of effects. Even though consumption may be conceived of as a process of de-commoditisation, consumers' power is however neither reducible nor symmetrical to that of agents in the supply or retail sectors. This indeed opens the space for power effects and strategies of different sorts, including global division of labour (with consumerist Nations consuming a disproportional share of global produce) and environmental effects. After discussing the politics of consumption as a complex set of intertwined issues, in this chapter I concentrate on the latter dimension, the politics of effects. In particular, I focus on critical and alternative lifestyles. The chapter examines the growing wealth of literature on the spread of social movements which question the commodity frontier and the relationship between production and consumption. Critical or alternative consumption addresses globalization as de-territorialization, the disarticulation of production and consumption, and the separation of politics and the market. This begs the question whether social mobilization and the awareness of systemic, unintended effects may translate (alternative) consumption into a genuine politics of justice
Oxidative dealkylation of a hindered phenol catalyzed by copper (II) bis benzimidazole diamide complex
No full textThe oxidative dealkylation of 2,4,6-tri-tert-butylphenol (TTBP) has been investigated using molecular oxygen and Cu(NO3(GBHA)(NO3) as catalyst, where GBHA is N,N′-bis((benzimidazol-2-yl)methyl)hexanediamide (a) M. Gupta, P. Mathur, R.J. Butcher, Inorg. Chem. 40 (2001) 878; (b) M. Gupta, S.K. Das, P. Mathur, A.W. Cordes, Inorg. Chim. Acta 353 (2003) 197; (c) S. Tehlan, M.S. Hundal, P. Mathur, Inorg. Chem. 43 (2004) 6589; (d) F. Afreen, P. Mathur, A. Rheingold, Inorg. Chim. Acta 358 (2005) 1125.. X-ray structural characterization of complex Cu(NO3)(GBHA)(NO3)·CH3OH confirms that the Cu (II) ion is in a distorted square pyramidal geometry (τ=0.168). The TTBP oxidation reaction proceeds via tri-tert-butylphenoxyl radical producing two products 2,6-di-tert-butyl-1,4-benzoquinone (A) and 4,6-di-tert-butyl-1,2-benzoquinone (B). Both A and B have been well characterized by 1H NMR, 13C NMR, UV–Vis and mass data
Book review: paper tiger: law, bureaucracy and the developmental state in Himalayan India by Nayanika Mathur
No full textFollowing eighteen months of intensive fieldwork, in Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India author Nayanika Mathur details the everyday absurdities of bureaucracy in the Himalayan borderlands, showing the frequent gulf between ‘real life’ and the abstract workings of the law. Elisabetta Iob highly recommends this accessible, witty and vividly written book as an outstanding and essential example of ethnographic research
- …
