Space Tourism Law: Lessons From Aviation, Antarctica, And The International Space Station

Space tourism has economic, social, and educational benefits, however, unresolved legal issues remain that need to be addressed on state and international levels in order for space tourism to succeed and for these benefits to be realized. Space treaties do not address and federal laws have impeded space tourism efforts. Aviation industry regulations, Antarctic treaties, and International Space Station agreements serve as models to guide the space tourism. In the future, however, the space tourism industry will create its own legal regime based on the technical expertise of its practitioners and the social mores of its participants

Capturing Individual Harms

The aggregated lifestyles and behaviors of individuals impose significant environmental harms yet remain largely unregulated. A growing literature recognizes the environmental significance of individual behaviors, critiques the failure of environmental law and policy to capture harms traceable to individual behaviors, and suggests and evaluates strategies for capturing individual harms going forward. This Article contributes to the existing literature by approaching the problem of environmentally significant individual harms through the lens of environmental federalism. Using climate change and individual greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions as an exemplar, the Article illustrates how local information, local governments, and local implementation can enhance policies designed to capture individual environmental harms. Local information and community-level implementation may enhance norm management efforts designed to influence GHG-emitting behaviors by (1) allowing for the identification of concrete behaviors that are feasible to target through norm management in a given community; (2) informing the design and content of norm campaigns, including the selection of the abstract norm that will form the basis of the appeal for specific behavioral change; and (3) facilitating effective implementation strategies. This framework supports a preference for local action expressed, but to date largely unexamined, in the broader norm management literature. Additionally, the Article argues that obstacles to using mandates to influence GHG-emitting behaviors may be less formidable when mandates are developed and enforced locally. Local development and enforcement of mandates can reduce intrusion objections because (1) individuals are accustomed to local control over day-to-day behaviors; (2) familiarity with local attitudes and practices enables the design of mandates that avoid intrusion objections; and (3) local governments are in a better position to structure time, place, and manner restrictions that channel behavior while preserving some individual choice. Local design and enforcement of mandates may also minimize the key enforcement challenges of expense, numerosity, and (in)visibility

Digitalisation For Sustainable Infrastructure: The Road Ahead

In today’s tumultuous and fast-changing times, digitalisation and technology are game changers in a wide range of sectors and have a tremendous impact on infrastructure. Roads, railways, electricity grids, aviation, and maritime transport are deeply affected by the digital and technological transition, with gains in terms of competitiveness, cost-reduction, and safety. Digitalisation is also a key tool for fostering global commitment towards sustainability, but the race for digital infrastructure is also a geopolitical one. As the world’s largest economies are starting to adopt competitive strategies, a level playing field appears far from being agreed upon. Why are digitalisation and technology the core domains of global geopolitical competition? How are they changing the way infrastructure is built, operated, and maintained? To what extent will road, rail, air, and maritime transport change by virtue of digitalisation, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things? How to enhance cyber protection for critical infrastructure? What are the EU’s, US’ and China’s digital strategies?Publishe

Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Agent Coordination

In everyday life, people often depend on their theory of mind, i.e., their ability to reason about unobservable mental content of others to understand, explain, and predict their behaviour. Many agent-based models have been designed to develop computational theory of mind and analyze its effectiveness in various tasks and settings. However, most existing models are not generic (e.g., only applied in a given setting), not feasible (e.g., require too much information to be processed), or not human-inspired (e.g., do not capture the behavioral heuristics of humans). This hinders their applicability in many settings. Accordingly, we propose a new computational theory of mind, which captures the human decision heuristics of reasoning by abstracting individual beliefs about others. We specifically study computational affinity and show how it can be used in tandem with theory of mind reasoning when designing agent models for human-agent negotiation. We perform two-agent simulations to analyze the role of affinity in getting to agreements when there is a bound on the time to be spent for negotiating. Our results suggest that modeling affinity can ease the negotiation process by decreasing the number of rounds needed for an agreement as well as yield a higher benefit for agents with theory of mind reasoning.</p

Ethics in Higher Education

The international conference of the University of Nigeria, held in 2016, made it clear that education must assist and lead students to learn to be free, responsible, innovative and creative. The teacher has the duty to guide students to know how to acquire knowledge that is not mere information but knowledge that is reflected, offering essential insights needed for effective living—such knowledge bears the ingredients of ethics. This first of two book volumes serves as a guide providing insights gained through experience from 29 authors, including teachers, administrators and policy makers and researchers, all brought together to focus on how Ethics in Higher Education can be integrated into concrete contexts

Advances in the sociology of trust and cooperation: theory, experiments, and field studies

The problem of cooperation and social order is one of the core issues in the social sciences. The key question is how humans, groups, institutions, and countries can avoid or overcome the collective good dilemmas that could lead to a Hobbesian war of all against all. Using the general set of social dilemmas as a paradigmatic example, rigorous formal analysis can stimulate scientific progress in several ways. The book, consisting of original articles, provides state of the art examples of research along these lines: theoretical, experimental, and field studies on trust and cooperation. The theoretical work covers articles on trust and control, reputation formation, and paradigmatic articles on the benefits and caveats of abstracting reality into models. The experimental articles treat lab based tests of models of trust and reputation, and the effects of the social and institutional embeddedness on behavior in cooperative interactions and possibly emerging inequalities. The field studies test these models in applied settings such as cooperation between organizations, informal care, and different kinds of collaboration networks. The book will be exemplary for rigorous sociology and social sciences more in general in a variety of ways: There is a focus on effects of social conditions, in particular different forms of social and institutional embeddedness, on social outcomes. Theorizing about and testing of effects of social contexts on individual and group outcomes is one of the main aims of sociological research. Modelling efforts include formal explications of micro-macro links that are typically easily overlooked when argumentation is intuitive and impressionistic Extensive attention is paid to unintended effects of intentional behavior, another feature that is a direct consequence of formal theoretical modelling and in-depth data-analyses of the social processe

When interests collide: the story of an industry-community relationship

Abstract This thesis makes a new contribution to the field of public relations in the area of organization-public relationships (OPRs). The thesis focuses on a petroleum industry-community relationship in Sundre, Alberta, Canada, which was explored in-depth. A qualitative phenomenological orientation was adopted as it suited the focus of the research which was to explore and describe the lived experiences of the actual participants involved in the Organization-Public Relationship phenomenon as well as how they described the relational elements and related them to their experience of the OPR. In-depth interviews, as the primary method, were conducted with both industry and community members. Secondary methods played an important but minor role and were used primarily for the purpose of the researcher as a tool to double check the interview findings and included participant observation, discourse analysis, and a small co-orientation survey. The empirical research undertaken uncovered the importance of the background context of the OPR when engaging in relationship building and maintenance activities, opinions regarding the relational elements, relationship building processes, including the importance of having communication and trust building workshops. An interesting finding for this particular industry-community relationship emerged concerning the influence of ‘management guru’ Stephen Covey’s work which shaped the way the industry and community members engaged with each other. Trust emerged as the fundamental relational element, whilst transparency was critical for rebuilding trust after a crisis. This thesis has added to the body of theoretical knowledge in the field of public relations. Specifically it extended the understanding of an area of practice, community relations, and it has explored options for the management of activism and community engagement. The thesis also contributes to public relations practice. Public relations practitioners working within the oil and gas industry as well as other non-renewable resource extraction industries are responsible for developing and maintaining relationships with key publics, including the communities they operate within. Practitioners need to be able to work with the relational parties and collaborate in the development of processes that meet the needs of the participants. As practitioners shift their focus to developing relationships with key publics they will need to develop new skills in areas such as conflict resolution, community engagement, and interpersonal relationship building. This piece of research is functional as it reflects on the OPR and highlights findings that are useful for gaining insight into the relational dynamics for academics and practitioners as well as questioning the power distribution and dynamics within this particular OPR. By adopting the phenomenological approach it has provided a representation of an OPR, which whilst it cannot be generalized it does provide a richer understanding of how relationship building processes can operate as well as the importance of trust and transparency building when there has been a relational history of hostility, distrust and deep unhappiness. Further qualitative research should explore the development and maintenance of the other OPRs in order to understand more about the various contexts, processes, content and ability to set agendas within relationships. It would also be interesting to further explore the influence of management gurus and management fashions adopted or promoted by senior management involved in OPRs and illuminate how these approaches are implemented and impact an organization’s external relationships