Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

Three Risky Decades: A Time for Econophysics?

Our Special Issue we publish at a turning point, which we have not dealt with since World War II. The interconnected long-term global shocks such as the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and catastrophic climate change have imposed significant humanitary, socio-economic, political, and environmental restrictions on the globalization process and all aspects of economic and social life including the existence of individual people. The planet is trapped—the current situation seems to be the prelude to an apocalypse whose long-term effects we will have for decades. Therefore, it urgently requires a concept of the planet's survival to be built—only on this basis can the conditions for its development be created. The Special Issue gives evidence of the state of econophysics before the current situation. Therefore, it can provide excellent econophysics or an inter-and cross-disciplinary starting point of a rational approach to a new era

Finishing the job: How American presidents justify exit strategies in humanitarian interventions

Humanitarian interventions to stop mass atrocities are among America's most controversial uses of military force overseas since the end of the Cold War. While there is much research analysing justifications for and conduct of humanitarian interventions, there is very little scholarly investigation of how and why interventions end. Indeed, successive US presidents have struggled to implement exit strategies from humanitarian interventions with the outcome often dismissed as 'mission creep'. In this thesis, I use US presidential rhetoric as a way to understand exit strategy dynamics in humanitarian interventions. In particular, I explore how American presidents publicly justified their exit strategies in four interventions from 1991--2011---northern Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo and Libya. My normative concepts analysis of more than 700 texts shows how presidents craft exit strategies through practices of public justification and legitimation to their domestic audience. I argue a president's discursive engagement is constrained by three groups of normative expectations shaping the realm of imagined possibilities for how America should use force when responding to humanitarian crises; specifically the US should: (1) fulfil its moral responsibility to stop atrocities, fight evil and promote political transformation; (2) win its military engagements; and (3) avoid quagmires. These expectations frame justifiable uses of military force, but also exist in tension with one another, and are in turn affected by changing battlefield conditions, past intervention experiences, domestic and international pressures, and personal preferences. How presidents navigate these tensions affects their exit decisions, including failures to implement exit strategies. My thesis is the first comparative analysis of America's exit strategies in four of the most significant humanitarian interventions of the post-Cold War era. By using public justification analysis to illuminate decision-making dynamics, I overcome the shortcomings of applying extant victory, war termination and end state planning theories to humanitarian interventions. By identifying the normative constraints on exit strategy decision-making, I demonstrate how and why mission creep occurs. My thesis provides evidence for military planners and policy advisers, having decided to use force to stop a mass atrocity, to take normative expectations seriously in considering when and how troops will withdraw

“It’s like living in a house with constant tremors, and every so often, there’s an earthquake” A Glaserian Grounded Theory study into harm to parents, caused by the explosive and controlling impulses of their pre-adolescent children

Children instigating harms, particularly in pre-adolescence, contradict our conceptualisations of what children ‘should’ be and how they ‘should’ behave. This creates further dissonance when the harm is inflicted upon parents and is often shrouded in silence and shame. As such, there is little known about the earliest indicators of child-to-parent violence, and this research was an attempt to improve this knowledge. Using a Glaserian Grounded Theory approach, underpinned by participatory principles, I worked alongside individuals from families who were living with child-to-parent violence. Through exploring their everyday experiences, I sought to identify the main concern of the substantive population (families living with childto-parent violence) and identify how they attempted to resolve this main concern. 34 parents living with child-to-parent violence engaged in diary-based methods and interactive interviews; whilst 21 pre-adolescent children instigating these harms were involved in weekly arts-based workshops. These two methods assisted in the generation of the ‘rescaling Grounded Theory’. A Delphi method with experts-by-experience and expert practitioners, alongside extant literature, was used to test the boundaries of the theory and its respective framework. This thesis presents rescaling in a ‘nested’ way with all chapters revolving around the respective chapter, rather than as a ‘big book’. The rescaling process involves the social space in which each family member takes up, and how they adapt to one another whilst attempting to achieve the idealised ‘good parent’ or ‘good child’ identity. Furthermore, ‘child-to-parent violence and abuse’ was identified as an umbrella term which captures all forms of harm to a parent caused by their child; whereas ‘explosive and controlling impulses’ is introduced as a new term for harms instigated by children which does not involve an effort to control a parent but are an attempt to meet a specific need in the child but result in harm to others

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference

The self-identity of the young transracially adopted child

Middle childhood is marked by latent physical and psychosocial growth, not least of which is the development of the personal and social self-identity. The presentation of this burgeoning self-identity of the six to ten year-old transracially adopted child was the focus of the current study. Of the 5,2 million vulnerable children in South Africa, more than 500 000 may benefit from adoption. This pressing welfare problem has forced Social Services to consider alternatives to traditional adoption, hence the escalation of transracial adoption. This is a universally contentious issue, possibly more so in South Africa, with its omnipresent racial tension following a long, well-documented history of forced segregation and racial disputes. While middle childhood has many normative identity developmental tasks, any adopted child must address the persistent need to belong while simultaneously dealing with intrinsic adoptive associated loss. Furthermore, transracially adopted children face these normative and adoption associated challenges in the presence of their observable physical differences from their family. The visible differences that distinguish their family unit deny the biological bond and evoke public scrutiny, and cultural dissent may compromise the building blocks that promote healthy identity development. Using multiple case studies (seven children) within a qualitative research design, the self-identity of the young school-going transracially adopted Black child was explored. Various sources of data were used, such as semi-structured interviews with the parents and teachers, who were requested to complete a child behaviour checklist. The parents also completed an additional biographical questionnaire and a Lickert-style response scale and were asked to describe their adoption journey with their child(ren). The children were psychometrically assessed by an independent psychologist using the draw-a-person test, the kinetic family drawing and scene building loosely based on the Von Staabs Sceno Test. The body of data generated from all the sources was subjected to Thematic analysis. The qualitative results were thematically analysed to identify themes that emerged for the two questions. Six themes emerged from the Thematic analysis and appear to be conducive to healthy self-identity development. The first two themes identified social strategies employed by the children, namely advanced communicative skills and a novel approach to group membership. These coping skills increased their accessibility to people and enhanced belonging and acceptance. The importance of having a dedicated space of their own and possessions to mark their permanence in the family emerged as a distinctive theme, and the importance of acceptance and the avoidance of rejection was confirmed. Intentional parenting was apparent throughout, and the need to school the children in an accommodating and sensitive environment to promote the wellbeing of the developing identity was noted. While this was not a comparative study, and the number of participants was small, the data revealed that transracially adopted (TRA) children growing up in a supportive system, i.e., a conducive home and school environment, have the opportunity to develop a healthy selfidentity. The sensitive and purposeful environment established by the parents and school allows them ix to learn appropriate coping and social strategies that facilitate access to significant interpersonal relationships, favourable group membership, and healthy self-esteem and worth. In the presence of the building blocks that nurture healthy psychosocial and identity development, the TRA child presents as “just a typical child”. Key Concepts • Adoption • Transracial adoption • Personal identity • Social identity • Racial awareness • Adoption identity • Sense of belonging and acceptance • Coping strategies • Intentional parenting • Conducive school environmentThesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2022.Early Childhood EducationPhDUnrestricte

‘Secret Towns’ : British intelligence in Asia during the Cold War

The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) remains one of the most obscure and elusive government agencies. Despite its rich and often tangled past, the SIS withstood various challenges in the twentieth century to become a vital instrument in Britain’s foreign policy, offering both traditional intelligence gathering, and a covert action capability. Despite recent revelations about its Cold War history, knowledge about this organisation is uneven at best, and this is particularly so in Asia. Despite Britain’s imperial history, which anchored informal intelligence gathering networks on a global scale, SIS’s presence in Asia is largely undiscovered. This thesis asks why this lacuna exists in SIS’s history; what was SIS activity in this region during the Cold War? Moreover, what was the value of this activity? Utilising a primarily archival methodology, this thesis sheds light on British intelligence activity in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Hanoi in the late 1960s. The strategic aims are twofold. Firstly, it explores the kinds of intelligence gathered, and the difficulties encountered from operating within the heart of a secure communist state in order to gauge an ‘enemy society’. In doing so, it challenges conventional definitions of intelligence, pointing to the notion of a dual identity diplomat-intelligence officer, that provided alternative means of acquiring intelligence within denied areas. In this way, it opens a window into a new dimension of SIS history, and, by extension, GCHQ, both of whom operated from the grey space between diplomacy and intelligence. Secondly, it examines this intelligence through the broader framework of the Anglo-American Special Relationship, given that these three case study countries were areas where the SIS operated, but where the CIA encountered real hindrances due to a lack of diplomatic premises. By tracing the path of British intelligence material, and analysing its reception by its American audience, it ultimately assesses the value of such intelligence. It argues that the granular detail afforded, and the insight on broader strategic relationships it provided, inverted the Special Relationship, rendering Britain a valued partner when it came to intelligence collection in this region and off-setting imbalances elsewhere