Developing children's agency within a children's rights education framework: 10 propositions

This article considers children's agency within the framework of children's rights education. It starts by considering the ways in which agency is conceptualised within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the implications for education. The main part of the article offers 10 propositions that offer teachers a variety of tools for thinking about what children's agency means and what they can consciously do to develop it. The article suggests that teachers can plan to develop agency through their curriculum, through the relationships they establish, and through the wider life of the school

Unseen Vulnerabilities: Emergency Planning for Carless and Vulnerable Populations in Ontario

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina made impact on southern Louisiana, devastating the city of New Orleans and surrounding communities. The high death toll of the hurricane revealed problems with public emergency planning, as many carless and vulnerable people were unable to evacuate New Orleans before the arrival of the hurricane, contributing to the high death toll. In recent years, scholarship has developed around emergency planning for carless and vulnerable populations in order to determine the most effective policy recommendations to improve evacuations plans for these populations. As climate change continues to occur around the world, the frequency and severity of severe weather events will increase. In 2023, Canada has experienced multiple severe weather events that have required evacuations. This paper assesses municipal emergency plans in Ontario to determine whether provincial and municipal officials have taken carless and vulnerable populations into account when planning for emergencies and potential evacuations. To complete the assessment, this paper utilizes a theoretical framework for analyzing emergency plans developed by Renne and Mayorga (2022). By evaluating the plans across five dimensions provided by the framework, this paper concludes that emergency planning for carless and vulnerable populations in Ontario is generally overlooked in emergency planning. To correct this oversight, this paper provides policy recommendations, including implementing vulnerable persons registries supported by emergency services, determining fixed locations for evacuation centres, and requiring planning for carless and vulnerable populations through provincial legislation

Economics of Managing Invasive Species in Tropical and Sub-Tropical Areas of the U.S.A.: Case Study Development

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Linked open government data: lessons from Data.gov.uk

The movement to publish government data is an opportunity to populate the linked data Web with data of good provenance. The benefits range from transparency to public service improvement, citizen engagement to the creation of social and economic value. There are many challenges to be met before the vision is implemented, and this paper describes the efforts of the EnAKTing project to extract value from data.gov.uk, through the stages of locating data sources, integrating data into the linked data Web, and browsing and querying it

Moth-Eye Anti-Reflection for Small Satellites

In this paper we report on the design, fabrication and characterization of a bio-inspired moth-eye antireection (AR) surface designed to operate in the space environment. Nano and micro-satellites do not generally employ active solar arrays, opting instead for pas- sive, body mounted solar panels which perform poorly at highly oblique angles. We design a moth-eye AR surface to increase power production on nano and micro-satellites by improving transmission of light, particularly at angles of incidence at or above 50◦ . We determine that during typical nano-satellite Earth observation missions (altitude 750 km, sun-synchronous orbit, 3U CubeSat configuration with surface mounted solar pan- els) the cumulative effect of increased transmission of light by moth-eye AR technology is to increase power production by 10% over each orbit. Moth-eye surface is fabricated on quartz coverglass using a combination of nano-sphere lithography, inductively coupled plasma etching and reactive ion etching techniques. The surface consists of a hexagonal array of quartz nano-cones; the spacing and height of the cones is optimized to suppress reection of incoming light for wavelengths between 350nm and 1800nm. We characterize the transmission and reection of the moth-eye AR surface as well as the performance of commercially available triple junction cells using moth-eye enhanced coverglas

The Influence of Molecular Architecture on the Macroscopic Lubrication Properties of the Brush-Like Co-polyelectrolyte Poly(L-lysine)- g -poly(ethylene glycol) (PLL- g -PEG) Adsorbed on Oxide Surfaces

The co-polymer poly(L-lysine)-g-poly(ethylene glycol) (PLL-g-PEG) has been investigated as a potential biomimetic boundary-lubrication additive for aqueous lubrication systems. In this work, the influence of the co-polymer's architecture on its tribological performance has been investigated. The architectural parameters investigated comprise side-chain (PEG) length, Lys/PEG grafting ratio and backbone chain (PLL) length. The tribological approaches applied in this work include ultra-thin-film interferometry, the mini-traction machine (MTM), and pin-on-disk tribometry. Both an increase in the molecular weight of the PEG side chains and a reduction in the grafting ratio result in an improvement in the lubricating properties of aqueous PLL-g-PEG solution at low speeds. MTM measurements show that an increase in the molecular weight of the PLL backbone results in an increase of the coefficient of frictio