2,992 research outputs found

    From Aspiration to Actuality under Xi Jinping: Reinterpreting the Outcome-driven Debate towards the Role of Historical Materialism in China’s Rise, 1949–2021

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    DOES THE REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY of socialist rising powers influence their rise to power? If so, how, when, and why? The literature on rising powers works on a set of historical assumptions which, when applied to China’s rise, predict an inevitable rise to power. In this literature, a new world order is imagined with China as a new kind of leading great power. For some, this development represents the correction of imperial China’s historical position in the world. This thesis disagrees with this outcome-based analytical approach to China’s rise. It instead posits another argument: in understanding the dynamics of a socialist rising power, the role of ideology matters more than the rising power literature suggests. In the Chinese context, this means bringing the Communist Party of China back into the story of its rise. This Party- state builds on a genuine belief in historical materialism and a teleology of success which it, presumably, represents. Treating the Xi Jinping era (2012 to the present) as a pivotal moment, this thesis understands the Chinese Dream of Great Rejuvenation as promethean. While it fits within the Chinese tradition of organising China in its own image, as a political actor it is entirely new. China’s rise, then, becomes much more than simply ensuring the Party’s self- perpetuation of its political rule. It is a grand historical narrative which may only be understood, and problema

    Proceedings of SIRM 2023 - The 15th European Conference on Rotordynamics

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    It was our great honor and pleasure to host the SIRM Conference after 2003 and 2011 for the third time in Darmstadt. Rotordynamics covers a huge variety of different applications and challenges which are all in the scope of this conference. The conference was opened with a keynote lecture given by Rainer Nordmann, one of the three founders of SIRM “Schwingungen in rotierenden Maschinen”. In total 53 papers passed our strict review process and were presented. This impressively shows that rotordynamics is relevant as ever. These contributions cover a very wide spectrum of session topics: fluid bearings and seals; air foil bearings; magnetic bearings; rotor blade interaction; rotor fluid interactions; unbalance and balancing; vibrations in turbomachines; vibration control; instability; electrical machines; monitoring, identification and diagnosis; advanced numerical tools and nonlinearities as well as general rotordynamics. The international character of the conference has been significantly enhanced by the Scientific Board since the 14th SIRM resulting on one hand in an expanded Scientific Committee which meanwhile consists of 31 members from 13 different European countries and on the other hand in the new name “European Conference on Rotordynamics”. This new international profile has also been emphasized by participants of the 15th SIRM coming from 17 different countries out of three continents. We experienced a vital discussion and dialogue between industry and academia at the conference where roughly one third of the papers were presented by industry and two thirds by academia being an excellent basis to follow a bidirectional transfer what we call xchange at Technical University of Darmstadt. At this point we also want to give our special thanks to the eleven industry sponsors for their great support of the conference. On behalf of the Darmstadt Local Committee I welcome you to read the papers of the 15th SIRM giving you further insight into the topics and presentations

    Improving patient safety by learning from near misses – insights from safety-critical industries

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    Background Patients are at risk of being harmed by the very processes meant to help them. To improve patient safety, healthcare organisations attempt to identify the factors that contribute to incidents and take action to optimise conditions to minimise repeats. However, improvements in patient safety have not matched those observed in other safety-critical industries. One difference between healthcare and other safety-critical industries may be how they learn from near misses when seeking to make safety improvements. Near misses are incidents that almost happened, but for an interruption in the sequence of events. Management of near misses includes their identification, reporting and investigation, and the learning that results. Safety theory suggests that acting on near misses will lead to actions to help prevent incidents. However, evidence also suggests that healthcare has yet to embrace the learning potential that patient safety near misses offer. The aims of this research, in support of this thesis, were to explore how best healthcare can learn from patient safety near misses to improve patient safety, and to identify what guidance non-healthcare safety-critical industries, which have implemented effective near-miss management systems, can offer healthcare. As this research progressed the aims were updated to include consideration of whether healthcare should seek to learn from patient safety near misses. Methods This research took a mixed-methods approach augmented by scoping reviews of the healthcare (study 1) and non-healthcare safety-critical industry (study 3) literature. A qualitative case study (study 2) was undertaken to explore the management of patient safety near misses in the English National Health Service. Seventeen interviews were undertaken with patient safety leads across acute hospitals, ambulance trusts, mental health trusts, primary care, and national bodies. A questionnaire was also used to help access the views of frontline staff. A grounded theory (study 4) was used to develop a set of principles, based on learning from non-healthcare safety-critical industries, around how best near misses can be managed. Thirty-five interviews were undertaken across aviation, maritime, and rail, with nuclear later added as per the theoretical sampling. Results The scoping reviews contributed 125 healthcare and 108 non-healthcare safety-critical industry academic articles, published internationally between 2000 and 2022, to the evidence gained from the qualitative case study and grounded theory. Safety cultures and maturity with safety management processes were found to vary in and across the different industries, and there was a reluctance for healthcare to learn about safety and near misses from other industries. Healthcare has yet to establish effective processes to manage patient safety near misses. There is an absence of evidence that learning has led to improvements in patient safety. The definition of a patient safety near miss varies, and organisations focus their efforts on reporting and investigating incidents, with limited attention to patient safety near misses. In non-healthcare safety-critical industries, near-miss management is more established, but process maturity varies in and across industries. Near misses are often defined specifically for an industry, but there is limited evidence that learning from them has improved safety. Information about near misses are commonly aggregated and may contribute to company and industry safety management systems. Exploration of the definition of a patient safety near miss led to the identification of the features of a near miss. The features have not been previously defined in the manner presented in this thesis. A patient safety near miss is context-specific and complex, involves interruptions, highlights system vulnerabilities, and is delineated from an incident by whether events reach a patient. Across healthcare and non-healthcare safety-critical industries the impact of learning from near misses is often assumed or extrapolated based on the common cause hypothesis. The hypothesis is regularly cited in safety literature and is used as the basis for justifying a focus on patient safety near misses. However, the validity of the hypothesis has been questioned and has not been validated for different patient safety near miss and incident types. Conclusions The research findings challenge long-held beliefs that learning from patient safety near misses will lead to improvements in patient safety. These beliefs are based on traditional safety theory that is unlikely to now be valid in the complexity of modern-day systems where incidents are the result of multiple factors and can emerge without apparent warning. Further research is required to understand the relationship between learning from patient safety near misses and patient safety, and whether the common cause hypothesis is valid for different types of healthcare safety event. While there are questions about the value of learning directly from patient safety near misses, the contribution of near misses to safety management systems in non-healthcare safety-critical industries looks to be beneficial for safety improvement. Safety management systems have yet to be implemented in the National Health Service and future research should look to understand how best this may be achieved and their value. In the meantime, patient safety near misses may help healthcare’s understanding of systems and their optimisation to create barriers to incidents and build resilience. This research offers an evidence-based definition of a patient safety near miss and describes principles to support identification, reporting, prioritisation, investigation, aggregation, learning, and action to help improve patient safety

    Swiper and Dora: efficient solutions to weighted distributed problems

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    The majority of fault-tolerant distributed algorithms are designed assuming a nominal corruption model, in which at most a fraction fnf_n of parties can be corrupted by the adversary. However, due to the infamous Sybil attack, nominal models are not sufficient to express the trust assumptions in open (i.e., permissionless) settings. Instead, permissionless systems typically operate in a weighted model, where each participant is associated with a weight and the adversary can corrupt a set of parties holding at most a fraction fwf_w of total weight. In this paper, we suggest a simple way to transform a large class of protocols designed for the nominal model into the weighted model. To this end, we formalize and solve three novel optimization problems, which we collectively call the weight reduction problems, that allow us to map large real weights into small integer weights while preserving the properties necessary for the correctness of the protocols. In all cases, we manage to keep the sum of the integer weights to be at most linear in the number of parties, resulting in extremely efficient protocols for the weighted model. Moreover, we demonstrate that, on weight distributions that emerge in practice, the sum of the integer weights tends to be far from the theoretical worst-case and, often even smaller than the number of participants. While, for some protocols, our transformation requires an arbitrarily small reduction in resilience (i.e., fw=fnϵf_w = f_n - \epsilon), surprisingly, for many important problems we manage to obtain weighted solutions with the same resilience (fw=fnf_w = f_n) as nominal ones. Notable examples include asynchronous consensus, verifiable secret sharing, erasure-coded distributed storage and broadcast protocols. While there are ad-hoc weighted solutions to some of these problems, the protocols yielded by our transformations enjoy all the benefits of nominal solutions, including simplicity, efficiency, and a wider range of possible cryptographic assumptions

    Fairness Testing: A Comprehensive Survey and Analysis of Trends

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    Unfair behaviors of Machine Learning (ML) software have garnered increasing attention and concern among software engineers. To tackle this issue, extensive research has been dedicated to conducting fairness testing of ML software, and this paper offers a comprehensive survey of existing studies in this field. We collect 100 papers and organize them based on the testing workflow (i.e., how to test) and testing components (i.e., what to test). Furthermore, we analyze the research focus, trends, and promising directions in the realm of fairness testing. We also identify widely-adopted datasets and open-source tools for fairness testing

    Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

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    This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

    How did Britain come to this? A century of systemic failures of governance

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    If every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, what is wrong with the design of the systems that govern Britain? And how have they resulted in failures in housing, privatisation, outsourcing, education and healthcare? In How Did Britain Come to This? Gwyn Bevan examines a century of varieties of systemic failures in the British state. The book begins and ends by showing how systems of governance explain scandals in NHS hospitals, and the failures and successes of the UK and Germany in responding to Covid-19 before and after vaccines became available. The book compares geographical fault lines and inequalities in Britain with those that have developed in other European countries and argues that the causes of Britain’s entrenched inequalities are consequences of shifts in systems of governance over the past century. Clement Attlee’s postwar government aimed to remedy the failings of the prewar minimal state, while Margaret Thatcher’s governments in the 1980s in turn sought to remedy the failings of Attlee’s planned state by developing the marketised state, which morphed into the financialised state we see today. This analysis highlights the urgent need for a new political settlement of an enabling state that tackles current systemic weaknesses from market failures and over-centralisation. This book offers an accessible, analytic account of government failures of the past century, and is essential reading for anyone who wants to make an informed contribution to what an innovative, capable state might look like in a post-pandemic world

    Learning, future cost and role of offshore renewable energy technologies in the North Sea energy system

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    The pace of cost decline of offshore renewable energy technologies significantly impacts their role in the North Sea energy transition. However, a good understanding of their remains a critical knowledge gap in the literature. Therefore, this thesis aims to quantify the future role of offshore renewables in the North Sea energy transition and assess the impact of cost development on their optimal deployments. The following findings were observed in this thesis, 1) Fixed-bottom offshore wind is well established in the North Sea region and is already competitive with onshore renewables 2) Floating wind is emerging and their current costs are high, but it can reach about 40 EUR/MWh by early 2040 and would require 44 billion EUR of learning investment.3) Grid connection costs will become a major factor as wind farm moves further away. Policy actions and innovation is needed in this space to avoid increasing integration costs. 4) Offshore wind (fixed-bottom and floating) can play a significant role in the North Sea energy system, comprising 498 GW of deployments in 2050 (222 GW of fixed-bottom and 276 GW of floating wind) and contributing up to a maximum of 51% of total power generation in the North Sea power system. 5) The role of the investigated low-TRL offshore renewables, including the tidal stream, wave technology, and bioethanol, was limited in all scenarios considered, as they remain expensive compared to other mature technologies in the system
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