Conflict and contract law

This article examines an under-explored reason to have contract law: conflict minimization. An important function of contract law, the article contends, is to diminish the wasted time, effort, and resources spent on disputes over economic exchange, and to reduce the incidence of harm resulting from these disputes. Minimizing conflict typically serves the parties’ own interests, and it also serves the public interest in social peace. These insights have implications not just for contract law as a whole but also for its doctrinal details. The article thus discusses how several doctrines of substantive contract law help to minimize conflict, without claiming that currently prevailing contract law regimes are perfectly adapted to this aim. Finally, it defends the normative claim that conflict minimization should be considered one of contract law’s goals

Bosonic behavior of entangled fermions

Two bound, entangled fermions form a composite boson, which can be treated as an elementary boson as long as the Pauli principle does not affect the behavior of many such composite bosons. The departure of ideal bosonic behavior is quantified by the normalization ratio of multi-composite-boson states. We derive the two-fermion-states that extremize the normalization ratio for a fixed single-fermion purity P, and establish general tight bounds for this indicator. For very small purities, P<1/N^2, the upper and lower bounds converge, which allows to quantify accurately the departure from perfectly bosonic behavior, for any state of many composite bosons.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted by PR

Shifting the EU Taxonomy from Theory to Practice: A Review of the Literature highlighting Potential Academic Contributions to its Adoption, Implementation, and Impact

The EU Taxonomy seeks to identify those sustainable economic activities, thereby supporting climate change mitigation and adaptation. Recent legislation underpinning the EU Taxonomy, such as the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), highlight the urgency for academic contributions that might shed light on its operationalisation. At this embryonic stage in the Taxonomy’s lifecycle, there is potential for the academic community to contribute to understanding its implications. Hence, we undertake a thematic analysis of predominantly, but not exclusively, professional literature to prioritise potential empirical research or conceptualisations that might offer insights for finance and accounting professionals, regulators, policymakers, investors and businesses. Our literature search is limited to literature that makes explicit reference to the Taxonomy between 2018 and 2021. We find that little is understood on how investors or businesses intend to disclose against the taxonomy or on the challenges associated with disclosure. With sustainable finance emerging in Ireland, we propose an exploratory study of this sector’s readiness to operationalise the taxonomy and offer a conceptual framework based on co-evolution theory (Foxon, 2011) bounded by three initial conditions: [1] skills and capability and [2] access to ESG data and [3] regulatory alignment

Design of a Professional Development Framework in Teaching and Learning for Engineering Educators

Ireland’s National Professional Development Framework for Those who Teach in Higher Education, aims to provide guidance and leadership in the planning, developing and engaging in professional development practices. A series of pilot projects have been initiated to help explore the framework’s likely utility and acceptance by educators and their institutions. These projects require engagement with staff in the interpretation and adaption of the framework within their working contexts. The purpose of this paper is to outline the development of one such project with engineering educators at three Institutes of Technology seeking designation as a technological university. The initiative aims to gain traction in the acceptance of the framework with the engineering education community by linking core and discipline-specific teaching and learning competencies with professional development activities most valued by engineering educators. Informed by three strands of literature: professional development in higher education; engineering education; and teaching and learning training provisions, the project begins with a survey of all those involved in teaching and learning in engineering across the three institutes. Based on engagement with key stakeholders, subsequent qualitative research informs the contextualization of the national framework for discipline-specific and institutional piloting. The paper concludes by exploring engineering educator perceptions of the national framework’s utility based on their engagement with the pilot process. Feedback from the pilot indicates that there is a significant gap between the professional development needs of engineering educators and the current professional development provision in teaching and learning

Empowering Responsible and Sustainability-Aware Business Graduates Through Digital Authentic Assessment

Business schools must engage in fundamental change to retain their legitimacy and position themselves as providers of solutions to urgent economic, social and environmental crises. Achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has emerged as a megatrend and business education must enhance graduate skills to contribute to their achievement. The world requires the next generation of graduates to become responsible business leaders who will address wicked sustainability problems. Hence, we need pedagogy that enables students to become sustainability literate and thus develop appropriate knowledge, skills and mindsets. Authentic assessment provides transformative learning opportunities that empower students to achieve meaningful impact in the real world. Despite some recent research that connects authentic assessment and sustainability, there is a dearth of empirical research on authentic assessments for sustainability in business disciplines. We outline a pedagogical initiative designed with the aim of enhancing sustainability literacy among business students using innovative digital tools as part of authentic assessment strategy. We designed and implemented authentic assessment strategies that engage students with learning across a number of different delivery modes and in a ‘deep’ reflective manner with meaningful tasks. Business students on undergraduate, postgraduate and executive programmes follow the same format with some adjustments made to reflect the different discipline/module focus. This includes completion of: (i) a sustainability literacy test through the UN supported Sulitest platform, (ii) a written reflection on learning, stemming from the Sulitest that utilises the DIEP reflective model, (iii) the creation of digital artefacts such as a short video shared on LinkedIn; student activism involving contacting political representatives/brands; creation of social media content in partnership with sustainability-focused organisations; podcasts with invited guests; writing of opinion pieces for media; and creation of e-portfolios that showcase students\u27 work. We believe this deep reflection and awareness signposts efficacious action emerging from our transformative learning pedagogy, based digital authentic assessment design. This pedagogical approach equips students with sustainability-specific knowledge, global citizenship skills, digital skills, and creative and inquisitive mindsets

Teaching and Learning Competencies Valued by Engineering Educators: A Pilot Study

At the onset of this paper, it is important to provide context by highlighting two backdrop narratives, which have prompted and guided this research project:-(i) Since 2015, The National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching & Learning in Ireland has undergone an extensive consultation process on professional development, resulting in a guiding document entitled the National Professional Development Framework (NPDF) for Staff Who Teach in Higher Education [1].(ii) The Technological University Alliance for Dublin has placed Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Institute of Technology Blanchardstown (ITB) and Institute of Technology Tallaght (ITT) on a merger trajectory towards technological university designation [2] under the Technological Universities Act 2018. Project Levitus is a cross-institute initiative tasked to develop and pilot a disciplinaryspecific (engineering) version of the NPDF, transferrable to other academic disciplines. A steering committee, comprising of engineering educators, teaching and learning specialists, academic managers and HR representatives, has guided the project

Prior events predict cerebrovascular and coronary outcomes in the PROGRESS trial

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Background and Purpose:&lt;/b&gt; The relationship between baseline and recurrent vascular events may be important in the targeting of secondary prevention strategies. We examined the relationship between initial event and various types of further vascular outcomes and associated effects of blood pressure (BP)–lowering.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Methods:&lt;/b&gt; Subsidiary analyses of the Perindopril Protection Against Recurrent Stroke Study (PROGRESS) trial, a randomized, placebo-controlled trial that established the benefits of BP–lowering in 6105 patients (mean age 64 years, 30% female) with cerebrovascular disease, randomly assigned to either active treatment (perindopril for all, plus indapamide in those with neither an indication for, nor a contraindication to, a diuretic) or placebo(s).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Results:&lt;/b&gt; Stroke subtypes and coronary events were associated with 1.5- to 6.6-fold greater risk of recurrence of the same event (hazard ratios, 1.51 to 6.64; P=0.1 for large artery infarction, P&#60;0.0001 for other events). However, 46% to 92% of further vascular outcomes were not of the same type. Active treatment produced comparable reductions in the risk of vascular outcomes among patients with a broad range of vascular events at entry (relative risk reduction, 25%; P&#60;0.0001 for ischemic stroke; 42%, P=0.0006 for hemorrhagic stroke; 17%, P=0.3 for coronary events; P homogeneity=0.4).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Conclusions:&lt;/b&gt; Patients with previous vascular events are at high risk of recurrences of the same event. However, because they are also at risk of other vascular outcomes, a broad range of secondary prevention strategies is necessary for their treatment. BP–lowering is likely to be one of the most effective and generalizable strategies across a variety of major vascular events including stroke and myocardial infarction.&lt;/p&gt

An evaluation of a computational technique for measuring the embeddedness of sustainability in the curriculum aligned to AASHE-STARS and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Introduction: SDG 4.7 mandates university contributions to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through their education provisions. Hence, universities increasingly assess their curricular alignment to the SDGs. A common approach to the assessment is to identify keywords associated with specific SDGs and to analyze for their presence in the curriculum. An inherent challenge is associating the identified keywords as used in the diverse set of curricular contexts to relevant sustainability indicators; hence, the urgent need for more systematic assessment as SDG implementation passes its mid-cycle. Method: In this study, a more nuanced technique was evaluated with notable capabilities for: (i) computing the importance of keywords based on the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) method; (ii) extending this computation to the importance of courses to each SDG and; (iii) correlating such importance to a statistical categorization based on the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) criteria. Application of the technique to analyze 5,773 modules in a university’s curriculum portfolio facilitated categorization of the modules/courses to be “sustainability-focused” or “sustainability-inclusive.” With the strategic objective of systematically assessing the sustainability content of taught curricula, it is critical to evaluate the precision and accuracy of the computed results, in order to attribute text with the appropriate SDGs and level of sustainability embeddedness. This paper evaluates this technique, comparing its results against a manual and labor-intensive interpretation of expert informed assessment of sustainability embeddedness on a random sample of 306 modules/courses. Results and discussion: Except for SDGs 1 and 17, the technique exhibited a reasonable degree of accuracy in predicting module/course alignment to SDGs and in categorizing them using AASHE criteria. Whilst limited to curricular contexts from a single university, this study indicates that the technique can support curricular transformation by stimulating enhancement and reframing of module/course contexts through the lens of the SDG