The governance of economic regeneration in England: Emerging practice and issues

How spatial economies are governed across the different places of England recently (re)commenced a process of fervent renegotiation following the 2010 election of a coalition government. As the third paper in a series examining state-led restructuring of sub-national development, the principal concern and analytical focus of this paper is the evolving governance landscape. Based on a review of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), the state reterritorialisation strategy is explored. Analysing the motives, interests, attributes and accountability of some primary actors entangled in these new and recast multilevel governance networks, the paper directs some much needed critical attention towards ‘the who’ aspects of economic regeneration partnership working. The paper argues that if LEPs are to be understood as a radical departure from what has gone before, then the form and mode of governance must, in turn, undergo a radical transformation of substance that transcends symbolic politics

Inserting extant corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities of international oil companies in the Niger Delta Region

In this paper, the author aims to draw on his thesis to discuss extant CSR activities of IOCs in the NDR. The paper presents a compelling insight on the CSR activities of select IOCs in the NDR and how such activities identify in Carroll’s Pyramid of CSR for the purposes of relevance and generalisability. The issue of equitable distribution of oil resources has been very contentious in the NDR within the last couple of decades and its implications can hardly be exaggerated. The paper confirms the salient role of some IOCs in the provision of social welfare packages and the overall development of the region. Furthermore, the paper examines the Global Memorandum of Understanding (GMOU) framework, an approach considered as ``best practice’’ model by IOCs in the region. The model combines IOCs’ expertise with local stakeholder intelligence to achieve the desired results. The author presents a summary of the evolution of CSR in the NDR underscoring the significance of localized ``best practice`` approach. The paper concludes by highlighting the limitations of CSR in the sustainable development of the NDR

Prominent Attribute Modification using Attribute Dependent Generative Adversarial Network

Modifying the facial images with desired attributes is important, though challenging tasks in computer vision, where it aims to modify single or multiple attributes of the face image. Some of the existing methods are either based on attribute independent approaches where the modification is done in the latent representation or attribute dependent approaches. The attribute independent methods are limited in performance as they require the desired paired data for changing the desired attributes. Secondly, the attribute independent constraint may result in the loss of information and, hence, fail in generating the required attributes in the face image. In contrast, the attribute dependent approaches are effective as these approaches are capable of modifying the required features along with preserving the information in the given image. However, attribute dependent approaches are sensitive and require a careful model design in generating high-quality results. To address this problem, we propose an attribute dependent face modification approach. The proposed approach is based on two generators and two discriminators that utilize the binary as well as the real representation of the attributes and, in return, generate high-quality attribute modification results. Experiments on the CelebA dataset show that our method effectively performs the multiple attribute editing with preserving other facial details intactly

SECaps: A Sequence Enhanced Capsule Model for Charge Prediction

Automatic charge prediction aims to predict appropriate final charges according to the fact descriptions for a given criminal case. Automatic charge prediction plays a critical role in assisting judges and lawyers to improve the efficiency of legal decisions, and thus has received much attention. Nevertheless, most existing works on automatic charge prediction perform adequately on high-frequency charges but are not yet capable of predicting few-shot charges with limited cases. In this paper, we propose a Sequence Enhanced Capsule model, dubbed as SECaps model, to relieve this problem. Specifically, following the work of capsule networks, we propose the seq-caps layer, which considers sequence information and spatial information of legal texts simultaneously. Then we design a attention residual unit, which provides auxiliary information for charge prediction. In addition, our SECaps model introduces focal loss, which relieves the problem of imbalanced charges. Comparing the state-of-the-art methods, our SECaps model obtains 4.5% and 6.4% absolutely considerable improvements under Macro F1 in Criminal-S and Criminal-L respectively. The experimental results consistently demonstrate the superiorities and competitiveness of our proposed model.Comment: 13 pages, 3figures, 5 table

Incremental Discovery of Prominent Situational Facts

We study the novel problem of finding new, prominent situational facts, which are emerging statements about objects that stand out within certain contexts. Many such facts are newsworthy---e.g., an athlete's outstanding performance in a game, or a viral video's impressive popularity. Effective and efficient identification of these facts assists journalists in reporting, one of the main goals of computational journalism. Technically, we consider an ever-growing table of objects with dimension and measure attributes. A situational fact is a "contextual" skyline tuple that stands out against historical tuples in a context, specified by a conjunctive constraint involving dimension attributes, when a set of measure attributes are compared. New tuples are constantly added to the table, reflecting events happening in the real world. Our goal is to discover constraint-measure pairs that qualify a new tuple as a contextual skyline tuple, and discover them quickly before the event becomes yesterday's news. A brute-force approach requires exhaustive comparison with every tuple, under every constraint, and in every measure subspace. We design algorithms in response to these challenges using three corresponding ideas---tuple reduction, constraint pruning, and sharing computation across measure subspaces. We also adopt a simple prominence measure to rank the discovered facts when they are numerous. Experiments over two real datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our techniques

Plain Tobacco Packaging: A Systematic Review

(From the Executive Summary): This systematic review outlines findings from 37 studies that provide evidence of the impacts of plain tobacco packaging. The review was conducted following the publication of the March 2011 White Paper Healthy Lives: Healthy People which set out a renewed Tobacco Control Plan for England. One of the key actions identified in the plan was to consult on possible options to reduce the promotional impact of tobacco packaging, including plain packaging. This systematic review was commissioned to provide a comprehensive overview of evidence on the impact of plain packaging in order to inform a public consultation on the issue

Audience responses to news media images of Pacific health

News media contain a multitude of images of Pacific peoples and health. This paper presents findings from a social psychological study of audience responses to such images. Two Pacific and two Palagi groups took part in discussions in which they responded to specific print media articles. These discussions were used to explore how different New Zealand audiences view and respond to the portrayals of Pacific people and their health. Responses from the Pacific and Palagi focus groups were compared showing both salience and difference in audience reactions. In appropriating aspects of news coverage, audience members do not simply regurgitate what they are shown by the media. They engage in complex dialogues with other audience members regarding issues raised by media coverage and in the process socially negotiate shared interpretations

Consumer behavioural biases in competition: A survey

This is a survey of studies that examine competition in the presence of behaviourally biased or boundedly rational consumers. It will tackle questions such as: How does competition and pricing change when consumers are biased? Can inefficiencies that arise from consumer behavioural biases be mitigated by lowering barriers to entry? Do biased consumers make rational ones better or worse off? And will biased consumer behaviour be overcome through learning or education?Behavioural Economics, Industrial Organization, Biased Consumers