The company is here to do goodness to us:Imaginaries of development, whiteness, and patronage in Sierra Leone's agribusiness investment deals

In this paper, we consider how references to ‘development’ are deployed to convince communities to lease their land to agribusiness investors in Sierra Leone. We argue that promises of development made by companies resonate with the aspirations for development that communities already have. The already existing ‘imaginaries’ of development, actual conditions of economic hardship and the material relations of power bound up in who does the ‘asking’ for land mean that communities need little convincing to give their land. Imaginaries of development are effective not only because of the promises of development themselves, but also because of how these imaginaries function through the role of coloniality – and ‘whiteness’ in particular. Analyses that focus only on the coercive power of elites in making land deals miss the degree to which companies’ promises of development fit into already existing imaginaries of a more prosperous future

Challenger J Hockey Prosthesis Final Design Report

The content of this report is withheld as confidential. QL+ is the owner of the intellectual property created throughout the duration of this project. Dr. Tom Mase (mechanical engineering) maintains a full copy of the report and intends to disseminate it upon completion of the necessary intellectual property protection measures

Analyzing the cross-national comparability of Party Positions on the Socio-Cultural and EU Dimensions in Europe

Using survey vignettes and scaling techniques, we estimate common socio-cultural and European integration dimensions for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Previous research shows that economic left/right travels well across the EU, meaning that the placements of parties on that dimension are cross- nationally comparable; however, the social dimension is more complex, with different issues forming the core of the social dimension in different countries. The 2014 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey includes anchoring vignettes which we use as \bridge votes" to place parties from different countries on a common social liberal/authoritarian dimension and a separate common scale for European integration. We estimate the dimensions using the Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey technique. The resulting scales offer cross-nationally comparable interval-level measures of a party's social and EU ideological positions

The Effect of Sagittal Plane Mechanics on Anterior Cruciate Ligament Strain During Jump Landing

The Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) is an important ligament in the knee. Non-contact ACL injuries are a common occurrence among athletes, leading to large financial burdens and long term physical concerns. The underlying biomechanics leading to these non-contact ACL injuries are unknown, in part due to limited experimental studies investigating the mechanics of dynamic activities. Understanding these mechanics is critical for injury prevention and risk analysis. The primary objective of this study was to investigate the underlying sagittal plane mechanics leading to increasing ACL strain during jump landing. A hybrid in-vivo/computational/in-vitro approach was used to measure ACL strain in relation to these mechanics. Motion capture was performed on ten subjects performing a single leg jump landing and both whole-body kinematics and ground reaction forces were collected. Musculoskeletal models were driven using this data to estimate the lower limb muscle forces from the jump landing. Five cadaver knee specimens were instrumented to measure ACL strain and mounted on a dynamic knee simulator. Muscle forces and sagittal plane kinematics were then applied on the cadaver specimens, dynamically recreating the activity. Strain in the anterior cruciate ligament was measured for each simulation. Bivariate correlation and multivariate linear regression analyses were performed with both maximum ACL strain and time to maximum ACL strain with the sagittal plane mechanics measured during the motion capture. Correlation analysis found increasing ACL strain was correlated with increasing ground reaction forces, increasing body weight, decreasing hip flexion angles, increasing hip extension moments, and increasing trunk extension moments, among others. Time to max ACL strain was correlated with increasing knee flexion angles and increasing knee angle velocities. The multivariate linear regression revealed anatomical factors account for most of the variance in maximum ACL strain, but suggests landing softly by increasing joint angles and absorbing impact, are important strategies for reducing ACL strain. Time to max ACL strain regression was influenced by anatomic factors and knee velocities. An athlete may have little or no control over the anatomic factors contributing to ACL strain, but altering their landing strategy to reduce the chance of injury. The empirical relationship developed between increasing joint angles, energy absorption and ACL strain in this study could be used to estimate the relative strain between jumps and to develop training programs designed to reduce an athlete’s risk of injury

Re-measuring left-right: a better model for extracting left-right political party policy preference scores

The left-right dimension of political party competition is one of the most fundamental concepts used in political science. Several measures of this concept are available for use by scholars in the field. In this dissertation, I examine the strengths and weaknesses of two of the most prominently used sources of these placements: party manifestos and expert survey data. I then develop a more sophisticated technique for extracting such a dimension from these data and demonstrate its superior reliability and validity

The European Common Space: Extending the Use of Anchoring Vignettes

In this article, we combine advances in both survey research and scaling techniques to estimate a common dimension for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Most previous scholarship has either ignored or assumed cross-national comparability of party placements across a variety of dimensions. The 2010 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey includes anchoring vignettes which we use as “bridge votes” to place parties from different countries on a common space. We estimate our dimensions using the “blackbox” technique. Our results demonstrate both the usefulness of anchoring vignettes and the broad applicability of the blackbox scaling routine. Further, the resulting scale offers a cross-nationally comparable interval-level measure of a party’s left/right ideological position with a high degree of face validity. In short, we argue that the left/right economic dimension travels well across European countries

The Israeli parties' positions in comparative perspective

The multidimensionality of the Israeli political system is expected given Israel’s electoral system and cleavage structure. We introduce a new dataset and measurement of party positions in Israel and provide evidence that Israel’s party system is comparable to other multiparty systems in Europe (CHES-EU) and Latin America (CHES-LA). We argue and provide evidence that the most important dimension in the Israeli party system, similar to other multiparty systems, is the general Left-Right continuum, which combines both economic and cultural policy issues. Yet, unlike other established democracies, parties’ positions on the Left-Right continuum are closely related to their positions on policies related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. We also discuss Israeli-specific issues which structure the Israeli party competition. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it allows scholars of party competition to include Israel as a comparative case in their research. Second, it is the first study that provides valid and reliable measurement of Israeli parties’ positions across multiple issues

Breaking psychological contracts with the burden of workload: a weekly study of job resources as moderators

This intra-individual study examined relationships over time of job demands and resources with employee perceptions of psychological contract breach and violation, or the emotional impact of breach. Based on Conservation of Resources Theory, we expected job demands to increase the susceptibility of experiencing contract breach and violation over time, and we expected this relationship to be moderated by available job resources. In particular, autonomy and social support were expected to buffer relationships of job demands with breach, while development was expected to intensify relationships between job demands and breach. For violation, we expected job resources to intensify the relationships between job demands and breach, in line with the betrayal hypothesis. Analyses on weekly diary data showed that weekly job demands were related to higher contract breach perceptions in the following week when autonomy and social support were low and when development was high. Moreover, weekly job demands were related to higher violation in the next week, especially when social support was high. The study shows that job demands may be related to higher odds of experiencing a breach and higher violation, and job resources may play opposite roles in moderating the relationships of job demands with breach and violation

Multidimensional Incongruence, Political Disaffection, and Support for Anti-Establishment Parties.

To what extent do representational gaps between parties and voters destabilize party systems and create electoral opportunities for anti-establishment parties on the left and right? In this paper, we use multiple measures of party-partisan incongruence to evaluate whether issue-level incongruence contributes to an increase of political disaffection and anti-establishment politics. For this analysis, we use data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) for party positions and public opinion data from the European Election Study (EES). Our fi ndings indicate that multidimensional incongruence is associated with disaffection at the national and European level, and that disffected mainstream party voters are in turn more likely to consider voting for anti-establishment challenger parties. This nding suggests that perceived gaps in party-citizen substantive representation have important electoral ramifi cations across European democracies

Who opposes the EU? continuity and change in party Euroscepticism between 2014 and 2019

A new round of data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, covering 2019, is due to be released. The survey, which estimates the positions of political parties on a variety of ideological and policy issues, offers an invaluable tool for assessing political competition in Europe. Ryan Bakker, Liesbet Hooghe, Seth Jolly, Gary Marks, Jonathan Polk, Jan Rovny, Marco Steenbergen, and Milada Anna Vachudova draw on the latest data to examine where European political parties now stand on European integration, and how their positions have changed since the last full survey was conducted in 2014