Creating an Online Lifeline: A Web Portal for Emergency Preparedness & Disaster Recovery

Offers a step-by-step guide to developing and implementing a portal in order to provide a single access point for critical information for displaced residents, government, community organizations, and businesses during the recovery and rebuilding process

Mathematical Methods and Operation Research in Logistics, Project Planning, and Scheduling

In the last decade, the Industrial Revolution 4.0 brought flexible supply chains and flexible design projects to the forefront. Nevertheless, the recent pandemic, the accompanying economic problems, and the resulting supply problems have further increased the role of logistics and supply chains. Therefore, planning and scheduling procedures that can respond flexibly to changed circumstances have become more valuable both in logistics and projects. There are already several competing criteria of project and logistic process planning and scheduling that need to be reconciled. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that even more emphasis needs to be placed on taking potential risks into account. Flexibility and resilience are emphasized in all decision-making processes, including the scheduling of logistic processes, activities, and projects

The Montclarion, February 10, 1977

Student Newspaper of Montclair State Collegehttps://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/montclarion/2433/thumbnail.jp

Outsourcing government: the use of outcome-based payments in UK social policy

The aim of this thesis is to examine the interaction between policy and implementation choices, by tracing the adoption of outcome-based payments in UK welfare-to-work policy. New Labour’s flagship welfare-to-work programme, the New Deal for Young People, was delivered by civil servants and private and voluntary sector providers working under highly-specified, fee-for-service contracts. The programme was then reformed to introduce elements of outcome-based payment, rewarding job placements. The Coalition government’s Work Programme extended this approach further. The use of financial incentives was presented by government, and largely accepted by the policy community, as a measure to improve efficiency and effectiveness in achieving policy outcomes. However, the literature based on transaction cost analysis and principal-agent theory has shown that the use of high-powered incentives in contracts to provide complex public services involves sacrificing some policy goals, even while it rewards others. The thesis uses process-tracing methodology to examine the factors which led successive governments to switch towards outcome-based payments. It finds evidence that the shift was only possible because of significant changes in policy, and that the outcome-based approach addressed political concerns beyond the aims of achieving efficiency and effectiveness in welfare-to-work policy

Automated vehicles and the rethinking of mobility and cities

The project CityMobil2 has carried out a forward-looking exercise to investigate a lternative cybermobility scenarios, including both niche and large-market innovations, and their impacts on European cities and their transport systems. The paper describes the current status of and main trends in automated vehicles, a preliminary vision of the future city with mobility supported mainly by automated vehicles, and freight distribution. The expected positive impacts derive from the development of car sharing, the reduction of space required for parking vehicles, the possibilities for older people or those with disabilities to use cars, the enhancement of safety, and the improvement of efficiency of the transport system

The Montclarion, February 10, 1977

Student Newspaper of Montclair State Collegehttps://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/montclarion/2433/thumbnail.jp

How Are Historical Villages Changed? A Systematic Literature Review on European and Chinese Cultural Heritage Preservation Practices in Rural Areas

Background: In the past century, the importance of historical villages has been highly recognized, as they serve aesthetic, functional, and environmental values and can foster local socioeconomic development through the heritagization process. The purpose of this paper is to outline the core features of the preservation and management of historical villages in the European and Chinese contexts. Methods: Using a qualitative systematic literature review, the research was based on international academic papers covering 73 case studies from the two contexts, addressing the fact that little work has been carried out comparing European and Chinese realities. Results: Similarities and differences in rural cultural heritage preservation and management between Europe and China were compared and discussed, paying particular attention to historical villages in both contexts. Using this method, rural heritage preservation in China can be better framed and analyzed for scholars engaged in both the Chinese and international contexts. Conclusions: Inspired by the European case studies, the research suggests that capacity building of different types of stakeholders, contextualized financial mechanism and multiple values the civic society perceived and recognized during the Chinese rural heritage preservation and management process should be further studied and implemented case by case based on a historical-sensitive approach. In addition, the issue of the lack of social capital and policy arrangements in rural areas should be further addressed to stimulate community resilience

Making Markets in Employment Support: Promises and Pitfalls in the Work Programme’s Private Power Market

Welfare-to-work services have been a key area of experimentation in quasi-marketised public service delivery. The British flagship Work Programme is seen as an international pioneer in its reliance on outsourcing, payment by results and provider flexibility allied to promises of innovation and performance improvement. Within schemes dominated by such marketised accountabilities there are well-known risks and tensions around creaming, parking and churning. International literature equally makes clear that the design specificities of programme governance and accountabilities can play a key role in either facilitating or buttressing against these negative provider practices. In this context, the overarching question which animates this thesis is whether this crafted Work Programme design structure is sufficient and appropriate to steer its quasi-marketised providers to the achievement of the full suite of government policy objectives. Unprecedented academic access to the commissioning Department’s administrative datasets alongside sophisticated and conceptually tailored multivariate quantitative analyses underpin the thesis’ empirical contributions. The analysis is framed by an original multi-dimensional analytical framework articulating multiple potential alternative types of quasi-markets. This conceptually broad and empirically focused study provides a rare opportunity to trace outcomes directly from the plans and promises of a particularly bold quasi-market experiment and to consider the ways in which key design elements cascade through to, and are detectable in, the patterning of employment and earning outcomes of programme participants on the ground. The empirical analyses highlight myriad ways in which Work Programme promises end up in performance pitfalls despite, if not because of, its particular variety of quasi- marketised governance