302,650 research outputs found
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
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