Bridging Certification and Community Forestry through NTFPs: A Case Study from Nepal

Issue - For a variety of reasons, community forestry is not always well suited to existing forest certification schemes. Using the case of Nepal, this paper considers the extent to which promoting the trade in nontimber forest products can complement, or even provide an alternative to, forest certification for timber while promoting sustainable community forestry. The paper develops recent work on the interaction of transnational business governance (TBG) schemes to suggest how these two approaches to sustainable forest management can work together productively

Managing digital coordination of design: emerging hybrid practices in an institutionalized project setting

What happens when digital coordination practices are introduced into the institutionalized setting of an engineering project? This question is addressed through an interpretive study that examines how a shared digital model becomes used in the late design stages of a major station refurbishment project. The paper contributes by mobilizing the idea of ‘hybrid practices’ to understand the diverse patterns of activity that emerge to manage digital coordination of design. It articulates how engineering and architecture professions develop different relationships with the shared model; the design team negotiates paper-based practices across organizational boundaries; and diverse practitioners probe the potential and limitations of the digital infrastructure. While different software packages and tools have become linked together into an integrated digital infrastructure, these emerging hybrid practices contrast with the interactions anticipated in practice and policy guidance and presenting new opportunities and challenges for managing project delivery. The study has implications for researchers working in the growing field of empirical work on engineering project organizations as it shows the importance of considering, and suggests new ways to theorise, the introduction of digital coordination practices into these institutionalized settings

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

Model checking medium access control for sensor networks

We describe verification of S-MAC, a medium access control protocol designed for wireless sensor networks, by means of the PRISM model checker. The S-MAC protocol is built on top of the IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless ad hoc networks and, as such, it uses the same randomised backoff procedure as a means to avoid collision. In order to minimise energy consumption, in S-MAC, nodes are periodically put into a sleep state. Synchronisation of the sleeping schedules is necessary for the nodes to be able to communicate. Intuitively, energy saving obtained through a periodic sleep mechanism will be at the expense of performance. In previous work on S-MAC verification, a combination of analytical techniques and simulation has been used to confirm the correctness of this intuition for a simplified (abstract) version of the protocol in which the initial schedules coordination phase is assumed correct. We show how we have used the PRISM model checker to verify the behaviour of S-MAC and compare it to that of IEEE 802.11

Fostering Public Good Contributions with Symbolic Awards: A Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment at Wikipedia

This natural field experiment tests the effects of purely symbolic awards on volunteer retention in a public goods context. The experiment is conducted at Wikipedia, which faces declining editor retention rates, particularly among newcomers. Randomization assures that award receipt is orthogonal to previous performance. The analysis reveals that awards have a sizeable effect on newcomer retention, which persists over the four quarters following the initial intervention. This is noteworthy for indicating that awards for volunteers can be effective even if they have no impact on the volunteers’ future career opportunities. The awards are purely symbolic, and the status increment they produce is limited to the recipients’ pseudonymous online identities in a community they have just recently joined. The results can be explained by enhanced self-identification with the community, but they are also in line with recent findings on the role of status and reputation, recognition, and evaluation potential in online communities. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2540 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics

STREAM Journal, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp 1-19. July-September 2005

CONTENTS: One-stop Aqua Shops: an emerging phenomenon in Eastern India, by Graham Haylor, Rubu Mukerjee and S.D. Tripathi. Ranchi One-stop Aqua Shop, by Ashish Kumar. Kaipara One-stop Aqua Shop, by Kuddus Ansary. Bilenjore One-stop Aqua Shop, by Bhawani Sankar Panda. Patnagarh One-stop Aqua Shop, by Dipti Behera and Lingraj Otta. Using bar-coding in a One-stop Aqua Shop, by Christopher Keating