215 research outputs found

    Lost in Transition! An Analysis of Justice Implications for Energy Transition in India

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    This study offers an analysis of India's transition to renewable energy sources, viz., solar and wind power, and the social justice implications of this transition. It adopts a comprehensive historical approach and situates India's renewable energy policy within the historical legacy of post-colonialism and the influence of neoliberalism since the 1990s. The analysis covers the entire commodity chain, ranging from the manufacturing of solar panels to the generation and distribution of energy. The study finds that the existing scholarship on energy transition in India overlooks the distributed forms of renewable energy, such as community solar power and the concerns of certain sections of society, particularly ordinary consumer citizen, farmers, and pastoralists. The study examines the justice implications of India's transition to renewable energy, including mass human rights violation and forced labour during the manufacturing of solar cells and modules in China’s Xinjiang province. Additionally, the study analyses land acquisition for solar power in India, elucidating the potential for social injustices and loss of livelihoods to ensue throughout renewable energy value chains. The study enlarges ethical evaluations of energy technology development and policy during energy transition, positing energy as a socially and environmentally integrated justice issue. It also identifies need for locating and integrating human rights violations in any country that is part of renewable energy supply chain of India's as a "dark side" of India's energy transition. Overall, the study advocates for prioritizing social justice considerations in energy transitions and calls for a more equitable and sustainable energy system. It expands the concept of energy justice to include geographies and spaces of large-scale transboundary human rights violations

    Architecture-based Evolution of Dependable Software-intensive Systems

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    This cumulative habilitation thesis, proposes concepts for (i) modelling and analysing dependability based on architectural models of software-intensive systems early in development, (ii) decomposition and composition of modelling languages and analysis techniques to enable more flexibility in evolution, and (iii) bridging the divergent levels of abstraction between data of the operation phase, architectural models and source code of the development phase

    2023-2024 Boise State University Undergraduate Catalog

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    This catalog is primarily for and directed at students. However, it serves many audiences, such as high school counselors, academic advisors, and the public. In this catalog you will find an overview of Boise State University and information on admission, registration, grades, tuition and fees, financial aid, housing, student services, and other important policies and procedures. However, most of this catalog is devoted to describing the various programs and courses offered at Boise State

    Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en Ciberseguridad: actas de las VIII Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en ciberseguridad: Vigo, 21 a 23 de junio de 2023

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    Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en Ciberseguridad (8ª. 2023. Vigo)atlanTTicAMTEGA: Axencia para a modernización tecnolóxica de GaliciaINCIBE: Instituto Nacional de Cibersegurida

    Developing a fire robustness index for the built environment

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    In recent years, resilience in fire has been recognised as a potential complement in risk assessments to achieve a more sustainable future. Robustness is a key component of resilience, in order to avoid the structure’s disproportionate failure to the original cause. The aim of this project is to develop an assessment methodology for the fire robustness of buildings, in the form of a risk index. The lack of available metrics, the relative immaturity of the discipline, rapid developments in the field of fire safety regulation, and issues around the potential liability of users and developers rendered this project a challenging endeavour. In the first part of this work, insurance rating methods were investigated. Their mechanics, development history, and impact are outlined, given their thematic relativity to the focus of this work. Fire risk indexing, which is a multi-attribute evaluation to produce a single ordinal measure of risk, and its existing body of knowledge was reviewed. This clarified issues of terminology and navigated concepts that up until now were convoluted, all in a harmonised body of work. Finally, modern fire risk indexing methods were presented in an exhaustive historical order, explaining the motivation for their creation, links with other methods, developmental tools used, along with their utility and impact. The dearth of information available in the published literature led to a series of interviews with past developers to address knowledge gaps and document unpublished findings. This is presented in a dedicated chapter. The review in the first part of this thesis, with the collation of the unpublished information, allowed for a historical highlighting of patterns and tendencies in the employment of fire risk indexing in fire safety, placing even this project within this pattern. This can inform practitioners and developers of potential pitfalls that have been repeated historically, yet remained unrecognised prior to this analysis In the last part of the work, tools from Decision Theory are explained and employed, expanding the existing scientific base of fire risk indexing approaches as it was suggested in existing works, but also highlighting their limitations. Prior to outlining an assessment methodology, a review of resilience and robustness is conducted, to link these concepts to the fire safety practice. A discussion on the practicalities of each available metric to quantify robustness is presented, supporting the developmental decisions of this work. Using these tools, a proposed fire robustness index structure is conceptualised, but the principles followed remain of value for building methods assessing any design objective that future developers would need to address. Following this approach is intended to improve the transparency of the decision-making in the design process, allow the comparison of different solutions, potentially reduce costs, and eventually lead to safer and more robust buildings while avoiding unintended consequences and pitfalls of the past. The assessment of a structure’s fire robustness through this method can facilitate an easier communication to stakeholders of different backgrounds, using this method as a means to promote fire safety in the design process

    LIPIcs, Volume 258, SoCG 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 258, SoCG 2023, Complete Volum

    An autoethnography of lifestories recorded on the community radio on the island of Barra

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    In agreeing with Geertz’s claim that culture is experiential (1973), I aim to present an interpretation of a lived experience. It is an autoethnographic reflection of my experience as a volunteer radio host for the community radio station on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. At the heart of my argument is spoken language and its meaning. From a selection of themes of transcribed lifestory interviews, I aim to show that culture, diachronically shaped in the island’s collective historical experience of its past relationship to the sea, transforms itself through language to create a coherency of our present living experience. Indeed, my argument is that the collective conceptualisation of community and tradition, and the more individualised concept of identity, as conduits of culture, are constructed through contextually significant linear and non-linear narrative language, which is the result of temporal, ever-changing phenomenological processes. This synchronic interpretation, based on a snapshot of a collective public space, uses a critical discourse analysis of the island’s oral history to demonstrate how lifestory narratives reflect and refract coherency of a historical specific time. In such slightly skewed reflections, the locality finds itself. But in its refracted form, it moves beyond the parochial into territory where themes uncover age gender differences. The differentiation of meaning produces a coherency that is echoed in feminist discourse. Looking through the theoretical lenses of anthropological and sociological perspectives, I argue that in the construction of lifestory narratives, the power relationships of a wider capitalist society are embedded, and, as such, reflect our lived experience, which gives meaning to what we understand as culture

    The 7th Annual Conference on "Relooking at Development, Value for Money and Public Service Delivery"

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    The fire services are a salient contestation which are often overlooked by the Social Science scholars. The Department of Cooperative Governance has ultimately promulgated a White Paper on fire services in May 2020. This study therefore aims to review and examine the legislation with a purpose of traversing the intricacies entrenched within the fire landscape. The review and analysis of policies have the potential to analyse the realities and the misnomer which are a perfect avenue to create dialogue. The theoretical framework of manipulation and elitism are employed for attributing meaning towards the study perspectives for practicality and simplicity. The paper follows a systematic procedure of reviewing documents, and policies to elicit information as a methodology adopted for the study. Gaps identified in the White Paper are uncovered and fully discussed. The content was studied, contextualised, and synthesised intellectually to derive meaning on all the aspects. It is the contention of this paper to attribute meaning to policy improvement in the fire services with a consequential contribution to the world of science for sustainable development.University of South AfricaDevelopment Studie

    History of Construction Cultures Volume 2

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    Volume 2 of History of Construction Cultures contains papers presented at the 7ICCH – Seventh International Congress on Construction History, held at the Lisbon School of Architecture, Portugal, from 12 to 16 July, 2021. The conference has been organized by the Lisbon School of Architecture (FAUL), NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, the Portuguese Society for Construction History Studies and the University of the Azores. The contributions cover the wide interdisciplinary spectrum of Construction History and consist on the most recent advances in theory and practical case studies analysis, following themes such as: - epistemological issues; - building actors; - building materials; - building machines, tools and equipment; - construction processes; - building services and techniques ; -structural theory and analysis ; - political, social and economic aspects; - knowledge transfer and cultural translation of construction cultures. Furthermore, papers presented at thematic sessions aim at covering important problematics, historical periods and different regions of the globe, opening new directions for Construction History research. We are what we build and how we build; thus, the study of Construction History is now more than ever at the centre of current debates as to the shape of a sustainable future for humankind. Therefore, History of Construction Cultures is a critical and indispensable work to expand our understanding of the ways in which everyday building activities have been perceived and experienced in different cultures, from ancient times to our century and all over the world
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