Agape and Ecstasy: considering post-secular orientations

This article addresses issues contemporary sexual and religious identity and orientation through an exploration of the unexpected compatibility of post-secular and queer theories

Free to Write: a case study in the impact of cultural history research and creative writing practice.

An account of LJMU's Free to Write project, exploring the impact of creative writing practice, informed by cultural-historical research, on prisoners and probationers

Organizational energy: A behavioral analysis of human and organizational factors in manufacturing

This paper seeks to explore the behavior and embodied energy involved in the decision-making of information technology/information systems (IT/IS) investments using a case within a small- to medium-sized manufacturing firm. By analyzing decision making within a given case context, this paper describes the nature of the investment through the lens of behavioral economics, causality, input-output (IO) equilibrium, and the general notion of depletion of executive energy function. To explore the interplay between these elements, the authors structure the case context via a morphological field in order to construct a fuzzy cognitive map of decision-making relationships relating to the multidimensional and nonquantifiable problems of IT/IS investment evaluation. Noting the significance of inputs and outputs relating to the investment decision within the case, the authors assess these cognitive interrelationships through the lens of the Leontief IO energy equilibrium model. Subsequently, the authors suggest, through an embodied energy audit, that all such management decisions are susceptible to decision fatigue (so-called 'ego depletion'). The findings of this paper highlight pertinent cognitive and IO paths of the investment decision-making process that will allow others making similar types of investments to learn from and draw parallels from such processes

A smart contract system for decentralized borda count voting

In this article, we propose the first self-tallying decentralized e-voting protocol for a ranked-choice voting system based on Borda count. Our protocol does not need any trusted setup or tallying authority to compute the tally. The voters interact through a publicly accessible bulletin board for executing the protocol in a way that is publicly verifiable. Our main protocol consists of two rounds. In the first round, the voters publish their public keys, and in the second round they publish their randomized ballots. All voters provide Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge (NIZK) proofs to show that they have been following the protocol specification honestly without revealing their secret votes. At the end of the election, anyone including a third-party observer will be able to compute the tally without needing any tallying authority. We provide security proofs to show that our protocol guarantees the maximum privacy for each voter. We have implemented our protocol using Ethereum's blockchain as a public bulletin board to record voting operations as publicly verifiable transactions. The experimental data obtained from our tests show the protocol's potential for the real-world deployment

Attacking Poverty: Is It Globalisation?… Or Is It the Institutions?

We empirically analyze the relationship between globalisation and poverty. Deviating from the mainstream literature, we use ‘synthetic’ globalisation and poverty indicators, which combine multiple single indicators into single-valued statistics. Further, we study a sample that includes OECD countries as well as non-OECD countries, which allows us to examine the effect of structural differences between countries (summarized in a OECD dummy). Our results reveal no significant effect of globalisation on poverty when correcting for the OECD effect. We argue that this suggests institutional quality as a more fundamental determinant of a country’s poverty performance than the degree of integration with the global economy. On the methodological level, our use of synthetic indicators entails a parsimonious specification of the globalisation-poverty relationship, which increases its transparency.

TEM investigation of YBa2Cu3O7 thin films on SrTiO3 bicrystals

YBa2Cu3O7 films in c-axis orientation on bicrystalline SrTiO3 substrates are investigated by TEM. The films and the substrates are examined in cross-section and in plane view. The grain boundary of the bicrystal substrate contains (110) faceted voids, but is otherwise straight on a nanometer scale. Contrary to this, the film grain boundary is not straight grain boundary can be up to 100 nm for a 100 nm thick film. The deviation from the intended position of the YBCO grain boundary can already occur at the film/substrate interface where it can be as much as ±50 nm

XIV Trobada d'Escoles Mallorquines

Abstract not availabl