Locating and mitigating risks to children associated with major sporting events

Despite recent efforts to blend sport and human rights, activism for children's rights in sport has historically been marginalised. The positive 'social legacy' of sport events frequently masks more problematic issues, including child exploitation. We argue that harms to children in hosting communities of major sporting events (MSEs) should be a focus for both research and intervention since the plight of such children is currently a political blind spot. The article examines the evidence for four major sources of risk for children associated with such events: child labour, displacement resulting from forced evictions for infrastructure development and street clearance, child sexual exploitation, and human trafficking affecting children. The weakness of the resulting evidence is explained in relation to the methodological and ethical difficulties of conducting research on such hidden and marginal populations and to the fact that risks to children are often masked by adult social problems. It is argued that much more robust research designs, focused specifically on children, are essential in order to verify the many assertions made about risks to children associated with MSEs. Some mitigating interventions are briefly examined and an action plan for risk-mitigation work at future MSEs is proposed. Finally, drawing on wider debates about Centres and Peripheries in social and economic theory, we question whether major international sport organisations might choose to engage with projects like child protection for strategic rather than humanitarian reasons, using them as a kind of ethical fig leaf in order to bolster their power bases against threats from the margins. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.The Oak Foundation under Grant code OCAY-13-052

Orbiting Geophysical Observatory Attitude Control Subsystem design survey

Development history and design modifications for attitude control subsystem of OG

Stories of Community: The First Ten Years of Nike Women\u27s Advertising

This semiotic analysis of early Nike women\u27s advertising explores the evolution of the women\u27s brand from its launch in 1990 through 2000, and includes twenty-seven print campaigns. The semiotic analysis is enhanced by in-depth interviews of the creative team. The study is framed by a single research question. What symbolically ties these ten years of advertising into a cohesive whole and how? Ultimately, three distinct mediated communities emerge. The story behind these communities, expressed semiotically and orally, suggests that the power of this advertising lies in its mediated construction of community life. The resonance of these ads is rooted in the creatives\u27 ability to construct signifiers that reflect the cultural and social experiences of women, with storytelling as the single most binding force across this ten-year period

Understanding Preferences For Income Redestribution

Recent research suggests that income redistribution preferences vary across identity groups. We employ a new pattern recognition technology, tree regression analysis, to uncover what these groups are. Using data from the General Social Survey, we present a new stylized fact that preferences for governmental provision of income redistribution vary systematically with race, gender, and class background. We explore the extent to which existing theories of income redistribution can explain our results, but conclude that current approaches do not fully explain the findings.

New evidence connecting exchange rates to business cycles

Gross domestic product ; Business cycles ; Foreign exchange rates

Motivation

The ability of humans and animals to survive in a constantly changing environment is a testament to the power of biological processes. At any given instant in our lives, we are faced with an enormous number of sensory stimuli, and we can typically generate an equally large number of behaviors. How do we learn to ignore irrelevant information and suppress inappropriate behavior so that we may function in a complex environment? In this chapter we discuss motivation, the internal force that produces actions reflecting the interactions between our needs and the demands of our environment. We will first discuss what psychologists mean when they refer to motivation, and then review neural network theories that can expbin how motivation arises within biological nervous systems.Sloan Fellowship (BR-3122): Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-92-J-0499, F49620-92-J-0334

Educating for sustainability: a case study in effectiveness

Educating Australians on sustainable living is becoming increasingly important and is the primary discussion topic in this article. Clothes will often automatically be washed without too much consideration because it involves little effort and because the environmental effects of that washing process remain unseen and consequently unconsidered. Reducing paper consumption in the College has been identified as a sustainability challenge because of the associated economic and environmental costs related to the depletion of natural resources. However it is in examining the various social dimensions embedded in the attitudes, systems and structures within the school that we find the barriers to, and opportunities for, a reduction in paper consumption as part of a range of sustainability gains. The College is a non-government high school in Canberra, with students from year 7 to 12. A study conducted by The Australia Institute in 2005 revealed that there is a correlation between a higher level of disposable income and levels of waste in Canberra, with its young people being the most wasteful in the country (Hamilton, Denniss & Baker 2005, p.viii). Drawing on this contextual study, we can assume that the students at the College are generally from a demographic that has a high level of consumption and waste. In addition, the school can be regarded as an institution that perpetuates what Illich described as “the Myth of Unending Consumption. This modern myth is grounded in the belief that process inevitably produces something of value and, therefore, production necessarily produces demand” (1970, p.38). This phenomenon is reflected in the amount of paper consumption and waste at the College

The Forward- and the Equity-Premium Puzzles: Two Symptoms of the Same Illness?

We build a pricing kernel using only US domestic assets data and checkwhether it accounts for foreign markets stylized facts that escape consumptionbased models. By interpreting our stochastic discount factor as the projection ofa pricing kernel from a fully specified model in the space of returns, our results indicatethat a model that accounts for the behavior of domestic assets goes a longway toward accounting for the behavior of foreign assets. We address predictabilityissues associated with the forward premium puzzle by: i) using instrumentsthat are known to forecast excess returns in the moments restrictions associatedwith Euler equations, and; ii) by pricing Lustig and Verdelhan (2007)'s foreigncurrency portfolios. Our results indicate that the relevant state variables that explainforeign-currency market asset prices are also the driving forces behind U.S.domestic assets behavior.

Development of a superconductor magnetic suspension and balance prototype facility for studying the feasibility of applying this technique to large scale aerodynamic testing

The basic research and development work towards proving the feasibility of operating an all-superconductor magnetic suspension and balance device for aerodynamic testing is presented. The feasibility of applying a quasi-six-degree-of freedom free support technique to dynamic stability research was studied along with the design concepts and parameters for applying magnetic suspension techniques to large-scale aerodynamic facilities. A prototype aerodynamic test facility was implemented. Relevant aspects of the development of the prototype facility are described in three sections: (1) design characteristics; (2) operational characteristics; and (3) scaling to larger facilities