The consequentialism of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: towards the fulfilment of ‘do no harm’

In this paper I demonstrate that the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) leans heavily on consequentialism to inform the corporate responsibility to respect to human rights. Through the conception of ‘human rights impacts’, the UNGPs adopt a standard of human rights-based negative act consequentialism, capturing any business act that has the outcome of ‘removing or reducing’ an individual’s enjoyment of human rights. Such a lens is necessary because deontological human rights rules inadequately capture the full scope of global business harm to human rights. Consequentialist responsibility offers a much wider scope, of particular use around systemic, macro-level, harm, for example, agri-business decisions that harm the right to food. The great pity is that this consequentialist element goes largely ignored in the literature. Through elucidation and demonstration of the consequentialist ethic therein, this paper hopes to contribute to more ambitious readings of the UNGPs

Management of Health and Safety Risks at Large Events

This chapter details and guides managers and researchers to consider organisational culture, risk management systems, procedures, principles, and processes to manage larger events successively and effectively without any potential tragedies, harms, and risks. It begins with the conceptual understanding of events and how the event organising involves managing health and safety risks. Health and safety management in such situations consists of organised efforts and procedures for identifying workplace hazards and reducing accidents and exposure to harmful situations and substances. The events are organised with different purposesm and each event has a unique blending of durations, seating, management, and people. This is further followed by risk management planning, which assists event organisers in devising and conducting events in the safest possible manner while mitigating losses. HSE England commissioned a study in 2012 and found a range of potential risks and remedies at major events. The main risk identified were design and construction, public health and safety risks, airborne and communicable diseases, non-infectious risk, respiratory diseases, road traffic accident, crowd control, strain on healthcare, workplace violence, fires, etc. Managing a safe event involves planning, assessing risks, precautions measure and corrective and perverting actions, contingency, emergency planning and procedures, effective communications, managing crowd and resources, review, and reflection. The primary legislation covering occupational health and safety in Britain is the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which makes employers responsible for the management of health and safety. It sets out the general duties which employers have towards employees and members of the public, and employees have to themselves and to each other. The last section discusses main principles of a H&S risk management policy followed by some case studie

Development of a ‘real-world’ logic model through testing the feasibility of a complex healthcare intervention: the challenge of reconciling scalability and context-sensitivity

Logic models feature prominently in intervention research yet there is increasing debate about their ability to express how interventions work in the real-world. ‘Real-world’ logic models are a new proposition which express complex interventions in context. They are designed to help researchers strike a balance between context-sensitivity and scalability. This article explores the utility of real-world logic models in a trial involving a complex intervention called ‘Your Care Needs You’, designed to improve hospital-home transitions for UK older patients. The approach is found to usefully capture, refine and express important learning about intervention-implementation-context dynamics. The findings imply the need for intervention researchers to think creatively about how to implement interventions in diverse and sometimes challenging environments and to develop understanding of how complex interventions adapt on implementation to produce outcomes. The possibility of assessing the wider social and policy context within intervention research is also posed

A comparative study of alkali activated slag cement concretes with carbonates and silicate activators.

Alkali-activated cements are increasingly gaining interest as viable alternatives to Portland cement, because they are considerably reducing CO2 emissions compared to traditional Portland cements while maintaining or exceeding performance requirements commonly specified for construction applications. Experience of this type of cement shows that the results are very sensitive to mixing procedures and curing conditions. This article thus studies concretes with Na2CO3 activated ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS) cement mixes and mixes of on Na2CO3 plus Na2SiO3 activated GGBS under different mixing and curing regimes. After studying different mixing procedures of the ingredients and their effects on the compressive strength, the most suitable mixing procedures were adopted for a series of mechanical and durability related tests using different curing conditions. The results showed that providing the carbonate in solution rather than powder form, resulted in higher strengths. Curing conditions at ambient temperature and high humidity regimes were most successful in maintaining strength development in time. All mixes had adequate strengths for structural concrete but those with Na2SiO3 developed the highest strengths at all ages and curing conditions

Real-Time Simulation of small-scale power grids with software in-the-loop and hardware in-the-loop experiments

As the term “Smart Grid” defines, the electricity supply network uses smart devices to monitor the state quantities, and digital communication technologies to support fast decisions and control. This work is focused on developing a flexible IoT architecture to support real-time tests and to validate some algorithms for monitoring and maintenance of micro-systems as intelligent smart functions on the virtual model of a small-scale power grid, through Real-Time Simulation Software in-the-loop (SIL) and Hardware in-the-loop (HIL). We aim to explain the implementation aspects of a microgrid in MATLAB/Simulink, based on real grid data and “smart customers” as end-users (capable of exchanging data with the outside of the simulation environment), then compiled in Real-Time environment (RT-LAB software). The overall communication infrastructure relies on different protocols for the data exchange between grid and application components (TCP and MQTT protocol). Furthermore, the presence of an MQTT broker makes the architecture flexible, since it allows the integration of different services

Worldviews Education and Worldview Literacy for social change.

Notions of religious literacy have tended to focus on the acquisition of knowledge and skills vis-à-vis religious diversity thought necessary to engage in plural democracies. An alternative conception is that of worldview literacy as a process of reflexive engagement in plurality. This chapter presents worldview literacy as a theoretical framework that supports an emerging ‘worldviews approach’ within English Religious Education. This approach both expands the subject’s traditional subject matter and suggests a more critical, transformative educational experience. Discussion of a worldviews approach in the English context highlights its potential, within a ‘knowledge rich’, performance driven system, to act as a vehicle for the renewal of broader educational aims of active citizenship and the promotion of social justice