15 research outputs found
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Using discrete event simulation to explore food wasted in the home
Food waste is an issue of global importance. Households generate more food waste than any other source in high- and middle-income countries. There are many solutions to reduce household food waste, but measurement of the impact of each solution is costly, and therefore usually not undertaken. This is a major barrier to decision makers adopting the most effective solutions. Discrete event simulation (DES) modelling is ideally placed to overcome these problems. This paper presents the most developed application of DES to household food waste to date: The Household Simulation Model (HHSM). The HHSM has the flexibility to model several food items. It includes many household dynamics that can affect food waste (e.g. purchasing, storage, consumption). The HHSM simulates a range of household types to reflect the diversity of the population in question (for this paper, the United Kingdom). This paper demonstrates the innovation of the HHSM: it provides a framework allowing different types of evidence to be brought together to help understand how food waste is influenced by a range of factors. To illustrate its usefulness, we provide an analysis of six potential interventions to reduce milk waste, covering both product innovation and behaviour change
How do civilians attribute blame for state indiscriminate violence?
State indiscriminate violence against civilians has been viewed as counterproductive for the government. This conclusion hinges on the assumption that indiscriminate violence aggrieves civilians against the government even when the rebels provoke the state by using civilians as human shields. An alternative view suggests that civilians recognize if the rebels exploit them as human shields and blame the rebels if such provocation occurs. We ask: do civilians evaluate all state indiscriminate violence in the same way or do they think of state indiscriminate violence differently when it is provoked by insurgents? Accounting for the covariate differences between individuals with and without personal experience of warfare in the survey data from postwar Ukraine, we find that personal exposure to violence shapes one’s blame attribution for provoked state attacks on civilians. Individuals unexposed to violence tend to take into account whether the government was provoked by the rebels. By contrast, individuals with personal experience of warfare tend to blame the government for indiscriminate attacks regardless of rebel provocation. This finding has implications for counterinsurgency scholarship and policy. It is likely that the difference between unexposed and exposed to violence civilians emerges in geographically isolated conflicts. If so, targeting of civilians may have different effects on the escalation of insurgency in geographically concentrated as opposed to widespread cases of violence