Evolution of Risk and Political Regimes

The risk of political predation impedes the achievement of economic prosperity. In this study, we analyze how the risk of predation evolves in different political regimes. Formally, we look at the interaction between a government and citizens in which, in each period, the government has an option to predate. Citizens prefer governments that are competent and non-predatory and strive to replace ones that are not. Regimes differ in the degree to which citizens can succeed in doing so. In pure democracies, citizens can displace incumbent governments; in pure autocracies, they cannot; and in intermediate cases, they can do so in probability. After economic downturns, the posterior probability that the government is competent and benevolent declines. According to the model, in intermediate regimes, but not in others, governments can separate by type. One implication, then, is that these regimes are politically and economically more volatile, with higher levels of variation in assessments of political risk and in economic performance. Another is that in such regimes, political leadership can make an economic difference. Empirically, we test our argument by measuring the impact of economic downturns on the perceived risk of political expropriation in different regime types, using as instruments the incidence of natural disasters and unexpected terms of trade shocks.African and African American StudiesGovernmen

Everyday domestic water and energy consumption in Shanghai homes: The resurgence and persistence of gendered practices in China

China's ecological civilization centralises households as a unit of intervention for environmental policy. The household constructed within such policy reduces complex social arrangements and processes and results in efficiency and behaviour change interventions. Such interventions have had limited success and contribute to reproducing inequality. This paper uses ethnographic methods to develop insights into everyday practices that consume energy and water within homes in urban China. In doing so, understandings of both the responsibilities and temporalities of labour for these practices are developed, and the entanglement of these practices across diverse policy arenas is explored. Focusing upon water treatment, cooking, dishwashing, and laundering - this paper demonstrates not only how women have a much greater responsibility for such practices, but that the importance of women's labour is considered greater for practices in which hygiene is considered critical and contributing to health protection. Gendered labour is connected to the resurgence of Confucian gender ideologies within CCP policy and discourse post-1968. The exacerbation of anxieties around the health of children is further connected with parents experiencing pressure in raising their children as ‘high-quality citizens’

Permeability and Protest in Lane 49: Entangling Materialities of Place with Housing Activism in Shanghai

Since China’s implementation of a neo-liberal housing regime, housing activism has boomed. Whilst activism is ultimately in place, as increasingly recognised within protest work, there is limited reflection upon how permeable material histories are entangled with the throwntogetherness of place as a site for protest. Employing ethnography over three months, this article follows the emergence, organisation and implementation of housing activism in Lane 49, a public housing community in downtown Shanghai. Utilising feminist geography and feminist political theorisations of material permeability this article contributes to Chinese geographies of protest, providing a local epistemology of housing activism which demonstrates the importance of drawing materiality into understandings of activist tactics. The article also contributes to radical geographies of protest by deconstructing the idea of public protest in a public place and thus offering opportunities to demonstrate how, through blurring public-private binaries, protest can emerge and survive in authoritative governance regimes

Reduction of Some 2-Thiazoline Benzamide and Carbamate Derivatives with Lithium Aluminum Hydride

This paper r eports the reduction with litMum aluminum hydride of 2-benzamido-5-methyl-2-thiazoline (Va) and 2-benzamido- 5,5-dimethyl-2-thiazo1\u27ine (Vb) to give the corresponding 2-benzyfamino-2-thiazolines (Via, b), and of ethyl N-(5-methyl-2- -thiazoline-2-yl)-carbamate (Ila) and ethyl N-(5,5-dimethyl-2-thiazoline- 2-yl)-carbamate (Ilb) to give the corresponding 2-methylamino- 2-thiazolines (Illa, b). No evidence of ring reduction or cleavage was observed either at room temperature or in refluxing ether or tetrahydrofuran. The structure of the products was confirmed by independent syntheses. Characteristic infrared bands ar e described

Comparing Geometrical and Delay Radio Emission Heights in Pulsars

We use a set of carefully selected published average multifrequency polarimetric observations for six bright cone dominated pulsars and devise a method to combine the multifrequency polarization position angle (PPA) sweep traverses. We demonstrate that the PPA traverse is in excellent agreement with the rotating vector model over this broad frequency range confirming that radio emission emanates from perfectly dipolar field lines. For pulsars with central core emission in our sample, we find the peak of central core component to lag the steepest gradient of the PPA traverse at several frequencies. Also significant frequency evolution of the core width is observed over this frequency range. The above facts strongly suggest: (a) the peak core emission does not lie on the fiducial plane containing the dipole magnetic axis and the rotation axis, and (b) the core emission does not originate from the polar cap surface.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Energy poverty and indoor cooling: an overlooked issue in Europe

Conceptually, many energy poverty studies to date have been narrowly focused on inadequate indoor heating, paying little attention to other domestic energy services. Yet there are indications that a growing number of households in Europe are struggling to achieve adequate levels of indoor cooling, with adverse consequences for their health, well-being and productivity. This situation is exacerbated by changing global weather patterns, with many countries facing increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme heatwaves. There is limited understanding of the ways in which households respond to extreme heat, and consequently how this might create greater demand for indoor space cooling and air conditioning, and the consequences for increased stress on power grids and conflicts with carbon reduction goals. Using custom-built survey data collected from 2,337 households in Gdańsk (Poland), Prague (Czech Republic), Budapest (Hungary) and Skopje (FYR Macedonia), along with in-depth qualitative fieldwork with 55 households in the same cities, this paper presents novel evidence on the issue of summertime energy poverty and space cooling difficulties. We identify the driving forces of household vulnerability to excessive indoor heat, in terms of risk of exposure, adaptive capacity, and sensitivity, and explore the implications for addressing energy poverty

Towards a Unifying View of QoS-Enhanced Web Service Description and Discovery Approaches

The number of web services increased vastly in the last years. Various providers offer web services with the same functionality, so for web service consumers it is getting more complicated to select the web service, which best fits their requirements. That is why a lot of the research efforts point to discover semantic means for describing web services taking into account not only functional characteristics of services, but also the quality of service (QoS) properties such as availability, reliability, response time, trust, etc. This motivated us to research current approaches presenting complete solutions for QoS enabled web service description, publication and discovery. In this paper we present comparative analysis of these approaches according to their common principals. Based on such analysis we extract the essential aspects from them and propose a pattern for the development of QoS-aware service-oriented architectures

Computer simulating of stellar tracks for observations with the lunar polar telescope

A brief description of targets and problems of the future Japanese project ILOM (In situ Lunar Orientation Measurement), which is planned to be realized as one of kinds of observations of lunar rotation at the second stage of SELENE-2 mission, is given in the article. One of the important elements of the project is placing of a small optical telescope on the lunar surface with the purpose to detect the lunar physical libration with high accuracy of 0.001 arc sec. Computer simulation of the future observations is being done with the purpose of their optimisation: effective placement of measuring system on the lunar surface and formation of scheduling of observations for monitoring the physical libration of the Moon. The results of the first stage of the simulation are presented in the paper. At this stage the software for the selection of stars and reduction of their coordinates onto the period of observations is developed, the tracks for the selected stars are constructed and analysed, their sensitivity to the internal characteristics of the lunar body, in the first place, to the selenopotential coefficients, is tested. Analyses of simulated stellar tracks observable from the lunar surface (in a polar zone) revealed a difference from daily parallels of stars in comparison with ground based observations. During one lunar day equal to 27.3 terrestrial days, a star moves along a spiral. In dependence on the longitude of the star, these spirals can be untwisted or twisted. In the latter case a star can describe a loop in the sky of the Moon during the observation period. The reason of such unusual astrometry phenomenon is the combination of the slow rotation of the Moon as compared with the Earth and the fast precession motion of the lunar pole (in comparison with precession motion of a terrestrial pole). Due to the physical libration the shifts of all tracks will be observed towards direction opposite the Earth. The tracks are sensitive to gravity model of the Moon and are different even for the most accurate modern gravity field models - LP150Q (Konopliv, 2000) and SGM100h (Matsumoto et al.; 2010). © 2011 Elsevier Ltd

Reducing Disorder in Artificial Kagome Ice

Artificial spin ice has become a valuable tool for understanding magnetic interactions on a microscopic level. The strength in the approach lies in the ability of a synthetic array of nanoscale magnets to mimic crystalline materials, composed of atomic magnetic moments. Unfortunately, these nanoscale magnets, patterned from metal alloys, can show substantial variation in relevant quantities such as coercive field, with deviations up to 6%. By carefully studying the reversal process of artificial kagome ice, we can directly measure the distribution of coercivities, and by switching from disconnected islands to a connected structure, we find that the coercivity distribution can achieve a deviation of only 3.3%. These narrow deviations should allow the observation of behavior that mimics canonical spin-ice materials more closely