Climate risk perceptions in the Ontario (Canada) electricity sector

This thesis examines management cognition of climate risks in the electricity sector in Ontario (Canada). Risk perception literature is combined with corporate adaptation and risk management literature to offer a broad conceptual framework of climate risk readiness among power producers and utilities. This research aims to move management cognition of climate change past prior contributions which considered climate risk as being solely physical in nature. In this work, eight exogenous and endogenous factors relating to climate risk are examined for their influence on how management may view a wider spectrum of climate change impacts. Using an inductive research approach, 20 in depth case studies explore how electricity executives/senior managers perceive those risks using construct elicitation (repertory grid technique). Findings are triangulated with a narrative analysis of their corporate reportage of climate risks, to gain deeper insight into the complex phenomena of climate risks for the sector. Findings show some similarities and some appreciable differences in both groups’ view of climate risks despite their legitimately contending positions in industry. Overall both power producers and utilities are predominantly concerned with risk analysis and assessment of climate related risks, and less with risk response, suggesting at present the sector remains in an analytical state. The potential benefits of this research approach will provide useful insights to multiple groups including managers and policy makers

Innovations are rarely (if ever) the product of a single individual

Instead, they're a product of our collective brains, people sharing thoughts and learning from each other, write Katie Dowbiggin and Michael Muthukrishn

Mental health care and resistance to fascism

Mental health nurses have a critical stake in resisting the right-wing ideology of British fascism. Particularly concerning is the contemporary effort of the British National Party (BNP) to gain credibility and electoral support by the strategic re-packaging of a racist and divisive political manifesto. Evidence that some public sector workers are affiliated with the BNP has relevance for nursing at a series of levels, not least the incompatibility of party membership with a requirement of the Professional Code to avoid discrimination. Progressive advances, though, need to account for deep rooted institutionalized racism in the discourse and practice of healthcare services. The anomalous treatment of black people within mental health services, alongside racial abuse experienced by ethnic minority staff, is discussed in relation to the concept of race as a powerful social category and construction. The murder of the mentally ill and learning disabled in Nazi Germany, as an adjunct of racial genocide, is presented as an extreme example where professional ethics was undermined by dominant political ideology. Finally, the complicity of medical and nursing staff in the state sanctioned, bureaucratic, killing that characterized the Holocaust is revisited in the context of ethical repositioning for contemporary practice and praxis

Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy

For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886