14,275 research outputs found
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Extraordinary Emergencies: Reproducing Moral Discourses of the Child in Institutional Interaction
This report uses audio recorded telephone calls and textual data from an emergency medical services call center to examine the interactional practices through which speakers produce what we call “extraordinary emergencies”, treating the events concerned as requiring moral, as well as medical, attention. Since one of the overarching institutional aims of emergency call centers is to facilitate the efficient provision of medical services, call-takers typically treat reported emergencies as routine events. However, in some instances speakers produce practices that do not contribute toward the institutional agenda of providing medical assistance, thereby treating them as extraordinary cases. These practices occurred recurrently in calls involving reports of emergencies relating to child sexuality, including sexual assaults against children and obstetric emergencies where the mother was particularly young. We discuss the implications of these findings for the situated reproduction of particular moral norms, especially with respect to the category of the child in society
To Greener Pastures: An Action Research Study on the Environmental Sustainability of Humanitarian Supply Chains
Purpose: While humanitarian supply chains (HSCs) inherently contribute to social sustainability by alleviating the suffering of afflicted communities, their unintended adverse environmental impact has been overlooked hitherto. This paper draws upon contingency theory to synthesize green practices for HSCs, identify the contingency factors that impact on greening HSCs and explore how focal humanitarian organizations (HOs) can cope with such contingency factors. Design/methodology/approach: Deploying an action research methodology, two-and-a-half cycles of collaboration between researchers and a United Nations agency were completed. The first half-cycle developed a deductive greening framework, synthesizing extant green practices from the literature. In the second and third cycles, green practices were adopted/customized/developed reflecting organizational and contextual contingency factors. Action steps were implemented in the HSC for prophylactics, involving an operational mix of disaster relief and development programs. Findings: First, the study presents a greening framework that synthesizes extant green practices in a suitable form for HOs. Second, it identifies the contingency factors associated with greening HSCs regarding funding environment, stakeholders, field of activity and organizational management. Third, it outlines the mechanisms for coping with the contingency factors identified, inter alia, improving the visibility of headquarters over field operations, promoting collaboration and resource sharing with other HOs as well as among different implementing partners in each country, and working with suppliers for greener packaging. The study advances a set of actionable propositions for greening HSCs. Practical implications: Using an action research methodology, the study makes strong practical contributions. Humanitarian practitioners can adopt the greening framework and the lessons learnt from the implementation cycles presented in this study. Originality/value: This is one of the first empirical studies to integrate environmental sustainability and HSCs using an action research methodology
A semantic ontology for disaster trail management system
Disasters, whether natural or human-made, leave
a lasting impact on human lives and require mitigation measures.
In the past, millions of human beings lost their lives and
properties in disasters. Information and Communication
Technology provides many solutions. The issue of so far
developed disaster management systems is their inefficiency in
semantics that causes failure in producing dynamic inferences.
Here comes the role of semantic web technology that helps to
retrieve useful information. Semantic web-based intelligent and
self-administered framework utilizes XML, RDF, and ontologies
for a semantic presentation of data. The ontology establishes
fundamental rules for data searching from the unstructured
world, i.e., the World Wide Web. Afterward, these rules are
utilized for data extraction and reasoning purposes. Many
disaster-related ontologies have been studied; however, none
conceptualizes the domain comprehensively. Some of the domain
ontologies intend for the precise end goal like the disaster plans.
Others have been developed for the emergency operation center
or the recognition and characterization of the objects in a
calamity scene. A few ontologies depend on upper ontologies that
are excessively abstract and are exceptionally difficult to grasp
by the individuals who are not conversant with theories of the
upper ontologies. The present developed semantic web-based
disaster trail management ontology almost covers all vital facets
of disasters like disaster type, disaster location, disaster time,
misfortunes including the causalities and the infrastructure loss,
services, service providers, relief items, and so forth. The
objectives of this research were to identify the requirements of a
disaster ontology, to construct the ontology, and to evaluate the
ontology developed for Disaster Trail Management. The ontology
was assessed efficaciously via competency questions; externally
by the domain experts and internally with the help of SPARQL
queries
Challenges in Complex Systems Science
FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT.
The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the
context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the
Complex Systems route to Social Sciences. This include complex systems having:
many heterogeneous interacting parts; multiple scales; complicated transition
laws; unexpected or unpredicted emergence; sensitive dependence on initial
conditions; path-dependent dynamics; networked hierarchical connectivities;
interaction of autonomous agents; self-organisation; non-equilibrium dynamics;
combinatorial explosion; adaptivity to changing environments; co-evolving
subsystems; ill-defined boundaries; and multilevel dynamics. In this context,
science is seen as the process of abstracting the dynamics of systems from
data. This presents many challenges including: data gathering by large-scale
experiment, participatory sensing and social computation, managing huge
distributed dynamic and heterogeneous databases; moving from data to dynamical
models, going beyond correlations to cause-effect relationships, understanding
the relationship between simple and comprehensive models with appropriate
choices of variables, ensemble modeling and data assimilation, modeling systems
of systems of systems with many levels between micro and macro; and formulating
new approaches to prediction, forecasting, and risk, especially in systems that
can reflect on and change their behaviour in response to predictions, and
systems whose apparently predictable behaviour is disrupted by apparently
unpredictable rare or extreme events. These challenges are part of the FuturICT
agenda
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Occupational Cultures as a Challenge to Technological Innovation
This paper explains conflict over technological process innovation in cultural terms, drawing primarily on a case study of electric power distribution and strategies to automate its operation
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