Resilience Thinking for Peacebuilders

The concept of resilience is currently making its way into the field of peace and conflict studies, but it is a concept with different meanings and implications. The argument advanced in this paper is that in order to make the most of resilience thinking, the field should not conceive of resilience merely as the ability to bounce back to an original state after a disturbance, a conceptualization usually referred to as “engineering resilience.” Instead, it should engage with “ecological resilience,” which refers to the amount of disturbance that a system can absorb before being pushed across a threshold from one stable state to another. I also relate these different types of resilience to another distinction between specified resilience to anticipated disturbances and general resilience to unknown ones. Finally I consider a few other implications of resilience thinking for research on peace and conflict

Monitoring sickness insurance claimants: evidence from a social experiment

The paper exploits a unique social experiment carried out in 1988 in Sweden to identify the effect of monitoring on sickness absence. The treatment consists of postponing the first formal point of monitoring during a sickness absence spell, a requirement for a doctor’s certificate, from day eight to day fifteen. The experiment was conducted in two geographical areas, and the treatment group was randomized by birth date. The results show strong effects on sickness absence duration from extending the waiting period in both areas. On average, the durations increased by 6.6 percent. No effect on incidence of sickness absence is found. A heterogeneity analysis reveals that monitoring affects men more than women.Absenteeism; sickness insurance; monitoring; social experiment

Sick of Your Colleagues' Absence?

We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how coworkers affect each other's effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Göteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the treatment status of all workers in more than 3,000 workplaces. We first document that employees in workplaces with a high proportion treated coworkers increase their own absence level significantly. We then examine the heterogeneity of the treatment effect in order to explore what mechanisms are underlying the peer effect. While a strong effect of having a high proportion of treated coworkers is found for the nontreated workers, no significant effects are found for the treated workers. These results suggest that pure altruistic social preferences can be ruled out as the main motivator for the behaviour of a nonnegligible proportion of the employees in our sample.social interactions, employer employee data, work absence, fairness, reciprocal preferences

Sick of your colleagues' absence?

We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how coworkers affect each other’s effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Göteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the treatment status of all workers in more than 3,000 workplaces. We first document that employees in workplaces with a high proportion treated co-workers increase their own absence levels significantly. We then examine the heterogeneity of the treatment effect in order to explore what mechanisms are underlying the peer effect. While a strong effect of having a high proportion of treated coworkers is found for the nontreated workers, no significant effects are found for the treated workers. These results suggest that pure altruistic social preferences can be ruled out as the main motivator for the behaviour of a nonnegligible proportion of the employees in our sample.Social interactions; employer emkloyee data; work absence; fairness; reciprocal preferences

Electrochemical oxidation stability of anions for modern battery electrolytes: a CBS and DFT study

The electrochemical stability vs. oxidation is a crucial property of anions in order to be suitable as components in lithium-ion batteries. Here the applicability of a number of computational approaches and methods to assess this property, employing a wide selection of DFT functionals, has been studied using the CCSD(T)/CBS method as the reference. In all, the vertical anion oxidation potential, Delta E-v, is a fair way to calculate the stability vs. oxidation, however, a functional of at least hybrid quality is recommended. In addition, the chemical hardness, eta, is identified as a novel approach to calculate the stability vs. oxidation

A novel approach to ligand-exchange rates applied to lithium-ion battery and sodium-ion battery electrolytes

A novel approach based on analyzing the forces and velocities of solvents and anions to compute ligand-exchange rates is here presented and applied to lithium-ion battery (LIB) and sodium-ion battery (SIB) electrolytes. By using ab initio molecular dynamics generated data, we find the ligand-exchange rates to increase as functions of electrolyte salt concentration and to be higher in SIB electrolytes as compared to LIB electrolytes. This indicates both that Na+ transport will be more non-vehicular in nature and have improved kinetics vs Li+, and that increasing the salt concentration is beneficial. The systems studied were basically the first cation solvation shells of Li/NaPF6 in propylene carbonate and acetonitrile using three solvent to salt ratios. Overall, the solvation shells are solvent rich at low salt concentrations, and as functions of concentration, the solvents are replaced by anions. As the SIB electrolytes display higher cation coordination and solvation numbers, we also expect an earlier onset of highly concentrated electrolyte behavior for SIB than LIB electrolytes. These observations should all have an impact on the design of electrolytes for optimal bulk properties, but also be useful with respect to interfacial dynamics

Supervised Machine Learning-Based Classification of Li-S Battery Electrolytes

Machine learning (ML) approaches have the potential to create a paradigm shift in science, especially for multi-variable problems at different levels. Modern battery R&D is an area intrinsically dependent on proper understanding of many different molecular level phenomena and processes alongside evaluation of application level performance: energy, power, efficiency, life-length, etc. One very promising battery technology is Li-S batteries, but the polysulfide solubility in the electrolyte must be managed. Today, many different electrolyte compositions and concepts are evaluated, but often in a more or less trial-and-error fashion. Herein, we show how supervised ML can be applied to accurately classify different Li-S battery electrolytes a priori based on predicting polysulfide solubility. The developed framework is a combined density functional theory (DFT) and statistical mechanics (COSMO-RS) based quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) model which easily can be extended to other battery technologies and electrolyte properties

Sustainability and Technical Performance of An All-Organic Aqueous Sodium-Ion Hybrid Supercapacitor

Development of all-organic aqueous energy storage devices (ESDs) is a promising pathway towards meeting the needs of technically medium/low-demanding electrical applications. Such ESDs should favour low cost, low environmental impact, and safety, and thereby complement more expensive, high voltage, and energy/power dense ESDs such as lithium-ion batteries. Herein, we set out to assemble all-organic aqueous Na-ion hybrid supercapacitors, exclusively using commercial materials, with the aim to provide a truly sustainable and lowcost ESD. Overall, the created ESD delivers adequate technical performance in terms of capacity retention, Coulombic efficiency, energy efficiency, and energy/power density. Finally, we apply a straight-forward and qualitative biodegradability method to the ESD

Early stage techno-economic and environmental analysis of aluminium batteries

For any proper evaluation of next generation energy storage systems technological, economic, and environmental performance metrics should be considered. Here conceptual cells and systems are designed for different aluminium battery (AlB) concepts, including both active and passive materials. Despite the fact that all AlBs use high-capacity metal anodes and materials with low cost and environmental impact, their energy densities differ vastly and only a few concepts become competitive taking all aspects into account. Notably, AlBs with high-performance inorganic cathodes have the potential to exhibit superior technological and environmental performance, should they be more reversible and energy efficient, while at the system level costs become comparable or slightly higher than for both AlBs with organic cathodes and lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Overall, with continued development, AlBs should be able to complement LIBs, especially in light of their significantly lower demand for scarce materials

Li-Salt Doped Single-Ion Conducting Polymer Electrolytes for Lithium Battery Application

Traditionally solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs) for lithium battery application are made by dissolving a Li-salt in a polymer matrix, which renders both the Li+ cations, the charge carriers of interest, and the anions, only by-standers, mobile. In contrast, single-ion conductors (SICs), with solely the Li+ cation mobile, can be created by grafting the anions onto the polymer backbone. SICs provide the safety, mechanical stability, and flexibility of SPEs, but often suffer in ionic conductivity. Herein an intrinsically synergetic design is suggested and explored; one dopes a promising SIC, LiPSTFSI (poly[(4-styrenesulfonyl) (trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide]), with a common battery Li-salt, LiTFSI. This way one both increases the Li+ concentration and transport. Indeed, systematically exploring doping, it is found that 50-70 wt% of LiTFSI renders materials with considerable improvements in both the (Li+) dynamics and the ionic conductivity. A deeper analysis allows to address connections between the ion transport mechanism(s) (Arrhenius/VTF), the charge carrier speciation and concentration, and the free volume and glass transition temperature. While no silver bullet is even remotely found, the general findings open paths to be further explored for SPEs in general and Li-salt doped SICs in particular