Price effects of an emissions trading scheme in New Zealand

Implementation of a New Zealand Emission Trading Scheme (NZ ETS) will begin in 2008, beginning with forestry, subsequently including energy and industrial emissions, and finally, agricultural GHGs from 2013. Reducing agricultural emissions is a major challenge for New Zealand as they account for over half its total GHG emissions. On the other hand, agriculture is critical to the economy, with its basic and processed products accounting for a third of exports. We use an environmental input-output model to analyse direct and indirect cost impacts of emissions pricing on food and fibre sectors. At NZ $25/t CO₂-eq, costs of energy-related emissions on the food and fibre sectors are very small; however, costs of agricultural emissions post 2013 would substantially impact on sheep, beef and dairy farming. Costeffective mitigation measures and land use changes should help reduce micro- and macroeconomic impacts, but the latter may also risk 'emissions leakage'.emissions trading, input-output price model, agricultural greenhouse gases, Demand and Price Analysis, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,

Price effects of an emissions trading scheme in New Zealand

Implementation of a New Zealand Emission Trading Scheme (NZ ETS) will begin in 2008, beginning with forestry, subsequently including energy and industrial emissions, and finally, agricultural GHGs from 2013. Reducing agricultural emissions is a major challenge for New Zealand as they account for over half its total GHG emissions. On the other hand, agriculture is critical to the economy, with its basic and processed products accounting for a third of exports. We use an environmental input-output model to analyse direct and indirect cost impacts of emissions pricing on food and fibre sectors. At NZ $25/t CO₂-eq, costs of energy-related emissions on the food and fibre sectors are very small; however, costs of agricultural emissions post 2013 would substantially impact on sheep, beef and dairy farming. Costeffective mitigation measures and land use changes should help reduce micro- and macroeconomic impacts, but the latter may also risk 'emissions leakage'

Beyond “Psychic Income”: An Exploration of Interventions to Address Work-Life Imbalances, Burnout, and Precarity in Contemporary Nonprofit Work

Nonprofit scholars and practitioners alike adhere to a long-held assumption that nonprofit work is, and will remain, inherently meaningful work. The long-term marketization of the nonprofit sector coupled with the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic has undercut this narrative. Our research on meaningful nonprofit work indicates that while many nonprofit workers do find their work meaningful, pay, flexibility, and work/life balance are increasingly important to them. This commentary suggests that nonprofit leaders can no longer presume that workers motivated by prosocial values will seek out and stay with nonprofit work, satisfied with the “psychic income” that comes from doing good work. Nonprofits must be managed and led differently such that they center workers’ contemporary needs and desires. Organizational and public policy initiatives around pay equity and flexible work can support such a transition for the nonprofit sector

Female alterity in medieval Gaelic literature

This study is a literary critical examination of two specific instances of the alterity of women in medieval Gaelic secular prose literature: that of the foreign woman, and that of the woman warrior. Within both is seen how women are treated as outsiders in much of our literature from the period, and some more so than others. Foreign women are discussed as alluring, as mothers, and as dangerous individuals (frequently abductees) who can destabilise the society into which they enter. The repeated failures of women warriors are examined, and their interactions with weaponry, space and gender, as well as how other markers of alterity, such as foreignness, impact upon the portrayals of woman warriors in the literature. Overall, it is argued that we can understand women in medieval Gaelic literature as outsiders in general, but in specific instances certain women are made so distinctly outside the norm that they can be read as deliberately alienated

Love and gender in medieval Gaelic saga

This thesis examines the portrayal of love in medieval Gaelic secular tales. In particular, the focus is on tales written before medieval Gaelic literature experiences the influence of chivalric romance from the thirteenth century onwards. The idea that romantic love was not a concern in Gaelic literature before the appearance of chivalric literature from the twelfth century onwards is taken as a starting point for investigation. Beyond solely romantic love, the thesis takes an expansive approach, also examining religious and familial love. Instances of these different types of love in conflict with one another form nexus points for study. Particular attention is paid to how love is gendered. The saga texts being compared are approached through a literary critical lens informed by feminist and post-structuralist scholarship, along with the history of emotions. The main body of the thesis comprises four areas. The first is a study of love terms in medieval Gaelic, setting out their semantic ranges and investigating their applications. Three types of love are then examined. The first is romantic love, covering phenomena such as men’s lovesickness, women’s love-in-absence, and interactions between the human and the Otherworldly. Love of the divine is then examined, manifestations of which range from maternal nursing, to fear of God, to sacrificing romantic fulfilment and earthly pleasures. The gendering of love of the divine is also scrutinised, taking in tropes of ‘foolish’ women and wild men. Finally, familial love is examined. An overview is given of familial and foster relationships in medieval Gaelic saga, followed by discussion of moments of loss in those contexts: through events animated by revenge and lamentation, some of the clearest examples of familial love are expressed. Overall, it is shown that love was of concern to the creators of pre-chivalric medieval Gaelic saga. Love, in different forms, is portrayed with complexity and nuance in numerous saga texts. Love is also clearly gendered: women’s and men’s experiences of love are portrayed as different, causing different outcomes. There are also exceptions to gendered expectations in the texts, showing men and women as being capable of experiencing a full range of nuanced emotions relating to love. Further areas for research are then suggested

The Spoken BNC2014:Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations

This paper introduces the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, an 11.5-million-word corpus of orthographically transcribed conversations among L1 speakers of British English from across the UK, recorded in the years 2012–2016. After showing that a survey of the recent history of corpora of spoken British English justifies the compilation of this new corpus, we describe the main stages of the Spoken BNC2014’s creation: design, data and metadata collection, transcription, XML encoding, and annotation. In doing so we aim to (i) encourage users of the corpus to approach the data with sensitivity to the many methodological issues we identified and attempted to overcome while compiling the Spoken BNC2014, and (ii) inform (future) compilers of spoken corpora of the innovations we implemented to attempt to make the construction of corpora representing spontaneous speech in informal contexts more tractable, both logistically and practically, than in the past

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NorthStar, a support tool for the design and evaluation of quality improvement interventions in healthcare

Background: The Research-Based Education and Quality Improvement (ReBEQI) European partnership aims to establish a framework and provide practical tools for the selection, implementation, and evaluation of quality improvement (QI) interventions. We describe the development and preliminary evaluation of the software tool NorthStar, a major product of the ReBEQI project. Methods: We focused the content of NorthStar on the design and evaluation of QI interventions. A lead individual from the ReBEQI group drafted each section, and at least two other group members reviewed it. The content is based on published literature, as well as material developed by the ReBEQI group. We developed the software in both a Microsoft Windows HTML help system version and a web-based version. In a preliminary evaluation, we surveyed 33 potential users about the acceptability and perceived utility of NorthStar. Results: NorthStar consists of 18 sections covering the design and evaluation of QI interventions. The major focus of the intervention design sections is on how to identify determinants of practice (factors affecting practice patterns), while the major focus of the intervention evaluation sections is on how to design a cluster randomised trial. The two versions of the software can be transferred by email or CD, and are available for download from the internet. The software offers easy navigation and various functions to access the content. Potential users (55% response rate) reported above-moderate levels of confidence in carrying out QI research related tasks if using NorthStar, particularly when developing a protocol for a cluster randomised trial Conclusion: NorthStar is an integrated, accessible, practical, and acceptable tool to assist developers and evaluators of QI interventions

Stable isotopes are quantitative indicators of trophic niche

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this recordHette-Tronquart (2019, Ecol. Lett.) raises three concerns about our interpretation of stable isotope data in Sheppard et al. (2018, Ecol. Lett., 21, 665). We feel that these concerns are based on comparisons that are unreasonable or ignore the ecological context from which the data were collected. Stable isotope ratios provide a quantitative indication of, rather than being exactly equivalent to, trophic niche.Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)European Commissio

Word embeddings reveal growing moral concern for people, animals, and the environment

The Enlightenment idea of historical moral progress asserts that civil societies become more moral over time. This is often understood as an expanding moral circle and is argued to be tightly linked with language use, with some suggesting that shifts in how we express concern for others can be considered an important indicator of moral progress. Our research explores these notions by examining historical trends in natural language use during the 19th and 20th centuries. We found that the associations between words denoting moral concern and words referring to people, animals, and the environment grew stronger over time. The findings support widely-held views about the nature of moral progress by showing that language has changed in a way that reflects greater concern for others