Domain-based perceptions of risk:a case study of lay and technical community attitudes towards managed aquifer recharge

Despite growing water scarcity, communities in many parts of the developed world often reject technically and economically sound options for water augmentation. This paper reports findings from a study investigating risk perceptions associated with a proposed Managed Aquifer Recharge scheme in Australia. Q-Methodology was used to compare decision-making frameworks of lay community and „technical expert‟ participants. Technical expert participants were also asked to approximate the decision-making framework of a „typical‟ community member. The emerging contrasts between lay community frameworks and those approximated by technical experts suggest that there are prevailing yet errant assumptions about lay community attitudes towards new technologies. The findings challenge the characterisation of the lay community and technical experts as being in entrenched opposition with one another

Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child

Settler colonialism is structured in part according to the principle of civilizational progress yet the roots of this doctrine are not well understood. Disparate ideas of progress and practices related to colonial dispossession and domination can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and as far back as ancient Greece, but there remain unexplored logics and continuities. I argue that civilizational progress and settler colonialism are structured according to the opposition between politics governed by reason or faith and the figure of the child as sinful or bestial. Thus, it is not contingent, but rather necessary that justificatory frameworks of European empire and colonialism depict Indigenous peoples as children. To illustrate how the theoretical link between Indigenous peoples and children emerges not as a simple analogy, but rather, as the source of the premodern/modern and savage/civilized binaries, I trace the various historical iterations of the political/childhood opposition through the classical, medieval, enlightenment, and modern eras. I show how the model of civilizational progress from a premodern and savage state of childhood continues to serve as the model for settler colonial exclusion and domination of Indigenous peoples

Media Ecologies

In this chapter, we frame the media ecologies that contextualize the youth practices we describe in later chapters. By drawing from case studies that are delimited by locality, institutions, networked sites, and interest groups (see appendices), we have been able to map the contours of the varied social, technical, and cultural contexts that structure youth media engagement. This chapter introduces three genres of participation with new media that have emerged as overarching descriptive frameworks for understanding how youth new media practices are defi ned in relation and in opposition to one another. The genres of participation—hanging out, messing around, and geeking out—refl ect and are intertwined with young people’s practices, learning, and identity formation within these varied and dynamic media ecologies

What Green Economy? Diverse agendas, their tensions and potential futures

The 'green economy' has become a prominent global concept for debating desirable futures, while recasting or marginalising ‘sustainable development’. The dominant agenda promotes state incentives for private-sector solutions through two parallel approaches: A techno-environmental Keynesian agenda attempts to stimulate eco-innovation which can become more resource-efficient and economically competitive. And a green markets agenda seeks to make natural resources more economically visible, as a basis to alleviate poverty. Like sustainable development, green economy agendas claim to redress the socially unequal access to natural resources. These claims have been widely questioned, thus generating extra remedial proposals, opposition and alternative frameworks. The debate features diverse agendas for co-constructing ‘green’ with ‘economy’, especially for assigning economic value to natural resources or environmental burdens. Struggles over potential futures take the form of disputes over defining, allocating and valuing resources – i.e. what counts for a ‘green economy’

Differential predictors of opposition to same-sex marriage and sexual prejudice

This study investigated attitudes toward same-sex marriage and its beneficiaries from the frameworks of social dominance orientation (SDO) and political conservatism. Unlike past research that focused mainly on sexual prejudice, the current paper explicitly examined both opposition to same-sex marriage and sexual prejudice. Additionally, the current study explored subcomponents of SDO (i.e., opposition to equality [OEQ] and group-based dominance [GBD]). Study One examined relationships and predictive difference between attitudes toward same-sex marriage and its beneficiaries before California legalized same-sex marriage. Study Two addressed attitudes before and recently after California legalized same-sex marriage. OEQ, GBD, and conservatism predicted opposition to same-sex marriage and predicted sexual prejudice in both Study One and Study Two. Sexual prejudice became less prevalent after same-sex marriage became legal in California, but opposition to same-sex marriage remained unchanged. Despite a general decrease in sexual prejudice, conservatives’ sexual prejudice became stronger in Study Two. Findings may assist clinical professionals and social policy makers to reduce future stigma of sexual minorities by understanding nuances contributing to opposition to same-sex marriage and sexual prejudice

Recommending the Most Encompassing Opposing and Endorsing Arguments in Debates

Arguments are essential objects in DirectDemocracyP2P, where they can occur both in association with signatures for petitions, or in association with other debated decisions, such as bug sorting by importance. The arguments of a signer on a given issue are grouped into one single justification, are classified by the type of signature (e.g., supporting or opposing), and can be subject to various types of threading. Given the available inputs, the two addressed problems are: (i) how to recommend the best justification, of a given type, to a new voter, (ii) how to recommend a compact list of justifications subsuming the majority of known arguments for (or against) an issue. We investigate solutions based on weighted bipartite graphs.Comment: 10 pages. This report was reviewed by a committee within Florida Tech during April 2014, and had been written in Summer 2013 by summarizing a set of emails exchanged during Spring 2013, concerning the DirectDemocracyP2P.net syste

After the crisis and beyond the new constitutionalism? The case of the free movement of capital

This article examines the ‘new constitutionalism’ of the free movement of capital at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after the global economic crisis. It is argued that the concept of new constitutionalism, as developed by Stephen Gill, is an indispensable concept to understand the still growing institutionalization of neoliberal policies in constitutions, laws, institutions, and regulations. The latest attempt to further extend the constitutionalization of the free movement of capital, one of the pillars of neoliberalism, is the IMF’s newly developed ‘institutional view’ on capital flows. This approach, while more pragmatic than earlier attempts, can be understood as a renewed effort to prevent emerging markets and developing countries from installing capital controls and deviating significantly from neoliberal policies. However, emerging markets and developing countries have opposed this new IMF framework. As such, the ability to further extend the new constitutionalism of the free movement of capital is severely weakened

From Heavy-Ion Collisions to Compact Stars: Equation of State and Relevance of the System Size

In this article, we start by presenting state-of-the-art methods allowing us to compute moments related to the globally conserved baryon number, by means of first principle resummed perturbative frameworks. We focus on such quantities for they convey important properties of the finite temperature and density equation of state, being particularly sensitive to changes in the degrees of freedom across the quark-hadron phase transition. We thus present various number susceptibilities along with the corresponding results as obtained by lattice quantum chromodynamics collaborations, and comment on their comparison. Next, omitting the importance of coupling corrections and considering a zero-density toy model for the sake of argument, we focus on corrections due to the small size of heavy-ion collision systems, by means of spatial compactifications. Briefly motivating the relevance of finite size effects in heavy-ion physics, in opposition to the compact star physics, we present a few preliminary thermodynamic results together with the speed of sound for certain finite size relativistic quantum systems at very high temperature.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures. Published version -- MDPI journal Univers

The Decision to Reactivate a First-Generation Soviet Nuclear Power Plant: Conceptual and Decision-Analytic Frameworks

Explores a variety of factors that led to reopening the Armenian Metsamor facility notwithstanding general agreement that this is unwarranted technologically

How Some Risk Frameworks Disenfranchise the Public

The author responds to recent characterizations of her work