17,819 research outputs found
Balancing the urban stomach: public health, food selling and consumption in London, c. 1558-1640
Until recently, public health histories have been predominantly shaped by medical and scientific perspectives, to the neglect of their wider social, economic and political contexts. These medically-minded studies have tended to present broad, sweeping narratives of health policy's explicit successes or failures, often focusing on extraordinary periods of epidemic disease viewed from a national context. This approach is problematic, particularly in studies of public health practice prior to 1800. Before the rise of modern scientific medicine, public health policies were more often influenced by shared social, cultural, economic and religious values which favoured maintaining hierarchy, stability and concern for 'the common good'. These values have frequently been overlooked by modern researchers. This has yielded pessimistic assessments of contemporary sanitation, implying that local authorities did not care about or prioritise the health of populations. Overly medicalised perspectives have further restricted historians' investigation and use of source material, their interpretation of multifaceted and sometimes contested cultural practices such as fasting, and their examination of habitual - and not just extraordinary - health actions. These perspectives have encouraged a focus on reactive - rather than preventative - measures.
This thesis contributes to a growing body of research that expands our restrictive understandings of pre-modern public health. It focuses on how public health practices were regulated, monitored and expanded in later Tudor and early Stuart London, with a particular focus on consumption and food-selling. Acknowledging the fundamental public health value of maintaining urban foodways, it investigates how contemporaries sought to manage consumption, food production waste, and vending practices in the early modern City's wards and parishes. It delineates the practical and political distinctions between food and medicine, broadly investigates the activities, reputations of and correlations between London's guild and itinerant food vendors and licensed and irregular medical practitioners, traces the directions in which different kinds of public health policy filtered up or down, and explores how policies were enacted at a national and local level. Finally, it compares and contrasts habitual and extraordinary public health regulations, with a particular focus on how perceptions of and actual food shortages, paired with the omnipresent threat of disease, impacted broader aspects of civic life
Studies of strategic performance management for classical organizations theory & practice
Nowadays, the activities of "Performance Management" have spread very broadly in actually every part of business and management. There are numerous practitioners and researchers from very different disciplines, who are involved in exploring the different contents of performance management. In this thesis, some relevant historic developments in performance management are first reviewed. This includes various theories and frameworks of performance management. Then several management science techniques are developed for assessing performance management, including new methods in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Soft System Methodology (SSM). A theoretical framework for performance management and its practical procedures (five phases) are developed for "classic" organizations using soft system thinking, and the relationship with the existing theories are explored. Eventually these results are applied in three case studies to verify our theoretical development. One of the main contributions of this work is to point out, and to systematically explore the basic idea that the effective forms and structures of performance management for an organization are likely to depend greatly on the organizational configuration, in order to coordinate well with other management activities in the organization, which has seemingly been neglected in the existing literature of performance management research in the sense that there exists little known research that associated particular forms of performance management with the explicit assumptions of organizational configuration. By applying SSM, this thesis logically derives some main functional blocks of performance management in 'classic' organizations and clarifies the relationships between performance management and other management activities. Furthermore, it develops some new tools and procedures, which can hierarchically decompose organizational strategies and produce a practical model of specific implementation steps for "classic" organizations. Our approach integrates popular types of performance management models. Last but not least, this thesis presents findings from three major cases, which are quite different organizations in terms of management styles, ownership, and operating environment, to illustrate the fliexbility of the developed theoretical framework
Reforming the United Nations
The thesis deals with the financial crisis that the United Nations faced starting in 1985 when the US Congress decided to withhold a significant part of the US contribution to the UN regular budget in order to force a greater say for the major contributors on budgetary issues, budgetary restraint and greater efficiency. The UN responded by the adoption of resolution 41/213 of 19 December 1986 that was based on the recommendations of a Group of High-level Intergovernmental Experts ("G-18") set up a year earlier. A new system was introduced regarding the formulation of the regular budget of the United Nations Organisation and a broader process of reform was initiated including a restructuring of the Secretariat and of the intergovernmental machinery in the economic and social fields. After an introductory chapter (Chapter I), the thesis examines the UN problems at the budgetary/financial and administrative/structural levels, the solutions proposed from within and without the United Nations established framework and the actual attempts at reform (Chapters II and ifi). The realisation that the implementation of reforms is rather disjointed and often unsuccessful (e.g. the failure to restructure the intergovernmental machi.neiy) prompts a search for the deeper causes of the UN problems at the political level and the attitudes of the main actors, namely the USA, the USSR, some up-and-coming states, notably Japan, the Third World states and, finally, of the UN Secretary-General and the Secretariat (Chapter 1V). Although the financial crisis may have subsided since 1988 and the USA seem committed to paying up their dues, the deeper UN crisis of identity has not been resolved and is expected to resurface if no bold steps are taken. In that direction, some possible alternative courses for the UN in the future are discussed drawing upon theory and practice (Chapte
Pontus in Antiquity: aspects of identity
The purpose of this thesis is the presentation of the interaction between the successive inhabitants of Pontus in antiquity, indigenous Anatolians, Greeks, Persians and Romans. Limited archaeological evidence cannot determine the precise extent of interaction, although the available information substantiates the notion of a slow, but steady amalgamation. Initially, the intermingling was based on mutual trading links. Although the Hellenic cultural element tended to surface, Eastern factors remained visible. The Mithridatic dynasty was established around the vicinity of Pontus, creating the 'Kingdom of Pontus' which reached its height under Mithridates VI. His administrative and military policy appears to have placed the foundations for the later, Roman corresponding structures. His policies-propaganda reflected the GraecoEastern image of a king, which appealed to the Greek and Persian-Eastern inhabitants of his kingdom, Asia Minor and, to a lesser extent, mainland Greece. This GraecoEastern image might have nourished the concept of a shared history among the inhabitants of Pontus. Their interactions appear to have given rise to an unnamed, local culture, which was enriched with the relevant Roman practices. Around the third century A.D., the Roman administrative patterns might have established an externally defined appellation. During Roman times, Christianity started to be established in Pontus. Although it was not yet a socio-political factor, its non-racial nature prevailed in later centuries. The influence of the Roman-Christian elements can still be observed in the modern Ponti an identity. In antiquity, (lack of) evidence indicates that no group defined themselves as 'Pontics' or 'Pontians' and an internally defined Pontic identity is unlikely to have existed. However, people associated themselves with the geographical area of Pont us, cultural and religious concepts were frequently amalgamated, while the notion of a common descent and a shared history might have been unconsciously fostered. These factors can assist in the understanding of the 'Pontians' today
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'Hampers' as an effective strategy to shift towards sustainable diets in South African low-income communities
Transitioning towards sustainable diets is imperative to avoid the worst effects of climate change, environmental degradation, and malnutrition. In South Africa, households most vulnerable to food insecurity employ various strategies to access food. These include purchasing hampers; a combination of staple foods sold in bulk at a discounted price, which are cake wheat flour, super maize meal, white sugar, cooking oil, and white parboiled rice. We explore the barriers and opportunities for hampers to advance sustainable diets in the context of Cape Town. Our findings show hampers contain energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods. Furthermore, we find that brand loyalty plays an important role in householdsâ purchase of hampers. We conclude there is potential to leverage hampers to become a sustainable strategy through which people can access healthier food by working with retailers to offer nutritious and sustainably produced alternatives. Such change would require challenging retailersâ and consumersâ understanding of what ânecessitiesâ are
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Using Digital Storytelling in Science: Meaning Making with Students aged 10-12 years old
Meaning making is an essential aspect of learning as a process of interpreting and negotiating information while sharing it with others. One way of meaning making is through (digital) storytelling. The process of creating and telling a story depends on how one can see their understanding of something come together and make sense and it is considered a (socio) constructivist strategy of learning. The purpose and contribution of this research are to explore how digital storytelling may support engagement in meaning-making as students externalise their understanding of the science topic of matter. To this aim, two digital storytelling activities were constructed â SEeDS (Sequencing of Events enabling Digital Storytelling) and Narration. The two activities included the same content but differed in structure. SEeDS presented the story scenes in an order that was not predefined and Narration in a predefined order. Both activities derived elements from the theoretical concept of Tricky Topics and Stumbling Blocks (SBs). This research was informed by the theory of Problem-based learning.
Participants were sixty-one Greek primary students aged 10-12 years old and twenty-two English secondary students aged 11-12 years old. Half students worked through the SEeDS activity and the rest through the Narration activity. Students worked cooperatively in small teams to implement the two activities. A systematic analysis of the collected data was conducted using qualitative methods. Findings revealed that the two activities had supported the Greek and English students in externalising their understanding of many scientific concepts included in the topic of matter, while it identified gaps in their prior knowledge. The two activities have also facilitated the instinctive use of exploratory talk over the other two types (cumulative and disputational talk) that can often be found in peer talk in science learning. Finally, the two activities appeared to have engaged students in the two contexts, as they allowed them to own the story creation whilst working independently. Finally, the Greek and English students viewed the SEeDS activity as challenging, making it hard to complete and at times tiring and confusing, and the Narration activity as easy to implement, giving students the opportunity to mainly focus on inventing the story plot.
This research makes a valuable contribution to the literature on making meaning in science, offering new insights about the use of problem-based stories supported by mobile technology. The findings provide opportunities to further explore the practical application of problem-based digital storytelling activities, which are hard thinking and challenging, across different age groups and cultural contexts. There is a need for teaching practices to be based on socio-constructivist learning approaches that focus on studentsâ thinking, not performance. Therefore, the implications of this research are relevant to a number of educational contexts and levels
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Dynamics and seismic performance of asymmetric rocking bridges
The governing equations of motion for bridges with rocking piers of unequal height and unequal span lengths are derived accounting for the effect of end joint gaps and the abutment-backfill system. The attenuation of the rocking motion stems from the impacts at the rocking interfaces, described through the coefficient of restitution, and also from the impacts (pounding) of the superstructure on the abutment backwalls. This is the first study that combines both energy dissipation sources in the analytical derivation of the equations of motion. The results of response-history analysis of bridges with different levels of asymmetry in their pier height show that the performance of both the symmetric and asymmetric configurations is very similar with regard to longitudinal displacements. Although the studied bridges safely resisted ground motions with an intensity about twice that of the design earthquake, regardless of the degree of asymmetry, it was found that the higher the difference in the pier height, the larger is the rotation of the superstructure due to the differential uplift of the piers, a point that has to be addressed in seismic design for rocking response
Multi-dimensional barrier identification for wind farm repowering in Spain through an expert judgment approach
.Spain was one of the pioneers in the deployment of wind energy systems worldwide and thus since 2014 has a potential for repowering that reaches between 3.3 and 8.7 GW in 2021 (12%â32% of its current installed wind capacity). However, despite the technical and economic advantages, we have observed little interest from promoters in the repowering of already amortized wind farms. The aim of the proposed study is to depict the background framework of barriers for repowering wind farms, which is specially affecting to Spain, but that can also extend to other EU countries. Therefore, we conducted a systematic survey study with academics, promoters, financial experts, manufacturers, operators, maintainers and policymakers to identify and understand the existing real and practical barriers. As a result, we have identified 34 major barriers covering five categories: technical issues, economics, environmental considerations, social concerns, and regulatory and administrative hurdles. We then asked the experts to rate these barriers based on their impact or relevance. We found that the experts agree that regulatory and administrative barriers have the maximum impact, while economic, environmental and technical barriers have only a mid-high impact. Therefore, we can conclude that, in general, the Administration must develop a concise and stable regulatory framework for all RES, especially for repowering projects, and carry out a review of both the technical requirements and the incentives schemes, with a focus on energy efficiency.S
Magnetized accretion disks around compact objects
Los recientes avances observacionales logrados por la colaboracioÌn LIGO-Virgo- KAGRA â con las primeras detecciones histoÌricas de ondas gravitacionales de fusiones de sistemas binarios de objetos compactos â junto con la colaboracioÌn Event Horizon Telescope - con la imagen del agujero negro supermasivo que reside en el centro de la galaxia M87 - han brindado una oportunidad sin precedentes para investigar la fiÌsica de la gravedad en el regimen de campo intenso e incluso analizar la TeoriÌa General de la Relatividad de Einstein en esta situacioÌn tan extrema. En esta tesis se discute un caso particular de sistema astrofiÌsico relativista que suele considerarse como el ejemplo paradigmaÌtico de sistema en el reÌgimen de campo intenso â un agujero negro rodeado de un disco grueso de acrecioÌn (o toro). Se presentan nuevas prescripciones para construir datos iniciales de discos de acrecioÌn magnetizados alrededor de objetos compactos, extendiendo el estado actual del tema en varias direcciones, a saber, acomodando diferentes configuraciones de campo magneÌtico, distribuciones de momento angular, y tipos de espacio-tiempo (incluyendo agujeros negros de Kerr, agujeros negros con pelo escalar y agujeros negros de Yukawa) sobre los que evoluciona el fluido. Los resultados obtenidos en esta tesis nos proporcionan valiosa informacioÌn sobre los efectos que tiene anÌadir diferentes fenoÌmenos fiÌsicos en las propiedades morfoloÌgicas y fiÌsicas del sistema. AdemaÌs, los resultados de esta investigacioÌn tambieÌn proporcionan una amplia muestra de datos iniciales de dominio puÌblico para que puedan ser usados en simulaciones evolutivas del sistema toro de acrecioÌn-agujero negro, gobernado por las ecuaciones de la magnetohidrodinaÌmica relativista .The recent observational breakthroughs accomplished by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration â with the historical first detections of gravitational waves from mergers of compact binaries â and by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration â with the image of the supermassive black hole lurking in the centre of the M87 galaxy â have provided an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the physics of strong gravity and to even test Einsteinâs General Theory of Relativity in such a extreme situation. This thesis discusses one particular relativistic astrophysical system which is often invoked as a paradigmatic example of such strong-gravity realm â a black hole surrounded by a geometrically thick accretion disk (or torus). New prescriptions to build initial data of magnetized accretion disks around compact objects are presented, extending the current state-of-the-art in several directions, namely accommodating diverse magnetic field configurations, angular momentum distributions, and types of spacetimes (including Kerr black holes, black holes with scalar hair, and Yukawa black holes) where the fluid evolves. The results reported in this thesis provide insight on the eff ects that adding diff erent physics has in the systemâs morphological and physical properties. In addition, this research o ers large new samples of open-source initial data to conduct time-dependent general-relativistic, magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of black hole-torus systems
Is prime matter energy?
This paper tests the following hypothesis: that the prime matter of classical Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics is numerically identical to energy. Is P=E? After outlining the classical Aristotelian concept of prime matter, I provide the master argument for it based on the phenomenon of substantial change. I then outline what we know about energy as a scientific concept, including its role and application in some key fields. Next, I consider the arguments in favour of prime matter being identical to energy, followed by the arguments against. The method used is that of ontological profile comparison: does the profile of prime matter match, in key features, that of energy? An affirmative answer, that P=E, would be a momentous discovery: it would show that one of the most neglected and derided ideas of pre-modern metaphysics â a contributor to its downfall in the wake of the Scientific Revolution â was right all along. From a negative answer we would still learn much about the interaction of science and metaphysics. It turns out, however, given what we currently know, that the answer is not quite as simple as one might hope
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