1,059 research outputs found
The rise and rise of environmental NGOs: unforeseen risks to democratic environmental governance in Australia
Current approaches to environmental policy and management in Australia designate non-government organisations (NGOs) an increasingly central role. This paper considers that the extent of NGO involvement, both formal and informal, in environmental governance is now so widespread, the magnitude of changes to democratic governance so far-reaching and the claims made of NGO participation so bold, that a critical gaze on NGOs is overdue. To foreground the analysis that follows, the paper interrogates the relationship between NGOs and civil society, and explores the structural transformation of western democracies which has provided the preconditions for the rise of NGOs in environmental governance. The paper then considers the diverse ways in which such NGOs are currently implicated in environmental governance in Australia and identifies a series of risks associated with these approaches when used uncritically. The paper concludes by calling for a more nuanced and critical appraisal of the role of NGOs in environmental governance which takes care to reserve political space for the articulation of diverse values and interests in environmental policy and management
Resource development and resource dependency of indigenous communities: Australia\u27s Jawoyn aborigines and mining at coronation hill
Indigenous people and their communities are often critical actors in resource development networks dominated by large-scale private and public sector organizations. Development policies and projects have often been contentious in Australia because lands on which development has occurred or been proposed are frequently areas of spiritual and traditional significance to Aboriginal people. Conflicts over development are therefore intense, occur in the context of a history of social and political exploitation of Aboriginal people, and focus on issues of symbolic value, local autonomy, power, and participation in planning. This article applies social assessment models recognizing resource development as a power network to the analysis of the social impacts of development and focuses on the political involvement of local communities as basic to social justice. Research results suggest that social impact assessments should include assessments of community competency to participate in corporate resource development networks and should study the institutional basis of local participation
Public involvement in regional planning: A case analysis of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, North Queensland, Australia
Universal Parametric Correlations of Conductance Peaks in Quantum Dots
We compute the parametric correlation function of the conductance peaks in
chaotic and weakly disordered quantum dots in the Coulomb blockade regime and
demonstrate its universality upon an appropriate scaling of the parameter. For
a symmetric dot we show that this correlation function is affected by breaking
time-reversal symmetry but is independent of the details of the channels in the
external leads. We derive a new scaling which depends on the eigenfunctions
alone and can be extracted directly from the conductance peak heights. Our
results are in excellent agreement with model simulations of a disordered
quantum dot.Comment: 12 pages, RevTex, 2 Postscript figure
Quantum chaos in a deformable billiard: Applications to quantum dots
We perform a detailed numerical study of energy-level and wavefunction
statistics of a deformable quantum billiard focusing on properties relevant to
semiconductor quantum dots. We consider the family of Robnik billiards
generated by simple conformal maps of the unit disk; the shape of this family
of billiards may be varied continuously at fixed area by tuning the parameters
of the map. The classical dynamics of these billiards is well-understood and
this allows us to study the quantum properties of subfamilies which span the
transition from integrability to chaos as well as families at approximately
constant degree of chaoticity (Kolmogorov entropy). In the regime of hard chaos
we find that the statistical properties of interest are well-described by
random-matrix theory and completely insensitive to the particular shape of the
dot. However in the nearly-integrable regime non-universal behavior is found.
Specifically, the level-width distribution is well-described by the predicted
distribution both in the presence and absence of magnetic flux when
the system is fully chaotic; however it departs substantially from this
behavior in the mixed regime. The chaotic behavior corroborates the previously
predicted behavior of the peak-height distribution for deformed quantum dots.
We also investigate the energy-level correlation functions which are found to
agree well with the behavior calculated for quasi-zero-dimensional disordered
systems.Comment: 25 pages (revtex 3.0). 16 figures are available by mail or fax upon
request at [email protected]
Signatures of Chaos in the Statistical Distribution of Conductance Peaks in Quantum Dots
Analytical expressions for the width and conductance peak distributions of
irregularly shaped quantum dots in the Coulomb blockade regime are presented in
the limits of conserved and broken time-reversal symmetry. The results are
obtained using random matrix theory and are valid in general for any number of
non-equivalent and correlated channels, assuming that the underlying classical
dynamic of the electrons in the dot is chaotic or that the dot is weakly
disordered. The results are expressed in terms of the channel correlation
matrix which for chaotic systems is given in closed form for both point-like
contacts and extended leads. We study the dependence of the distributions on
the number of channels and their correlations. The theoretical distributions
are in good agreement with those computed in a dynamical model of a chaotic
billiard.Comment: 19 pages, RevTex, 11 Postscript figure
Modulation of emotional appraisal by false physiological feedback during fMRI
BACKGROUND
James and Lange proposed that emotions are the perception of physiological reactions. Two-level theories of emotion extend this model to suggest that cognitive interpretations of physiological changes shape self-reported emotions. Correspondingly false physiological feedback of evoked or tonic bodily responses can alter emotional attributions. Moreover, anxiety states are proposed to arise from detection of mismatch between actual and anticipated states of physiological arousal. However, the neural underpinnings of these phenomena previously have not been examined.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS
We undertook a functional brain imaging (fMRI) experiment to investigate how both primary and second-order levels of physiological (viscerosensory) representation impact on the processing of external emotional cues. 12 participants were scanned while judging face stimuli during both exercise and non-exercise conditions in the context of true and false auditory feedback of tonic heart rate. We observed that the perceived emotional intensity/salience of neutral faces was enhanced by false feedback of increased heart rate. Regional changes in neural activity corresponding to this behavioural interaction were observed within included right anterior insula, bilateral mid insula, and amygdala. In addition, right anterior insula activity was enhanced during by asynchronous relative to synchronous cardiac feedback even with no change in perceived or actual heart rate suggesting this region serves as a comparator to detect physiological mismatches. Finally, BOLD activity within right anterior insula and amygdala predicted the corresponding changes in perceived intensity ratings at both a group and an individual level.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE
Our findings identify the neural substrates supporting behavioural effects of false physiological feedback, and highlight mechanisms that underlie subjective anxiety states, including the importance of the right anterior insula in guiding second-order "cognitive" representations of bodily arousal state
Modulation of emotional appraisal by false physiological feedback during fMRI
BACKGROUND
James and Lange proposed that emotions are the perception of physiological reactions. Two-level theories of emotion extend this model to suggest that cognitive interpretations of physiological changes shape self-reported emotions. Correspondingly false physiological feedback of evoked or tonic bodily responses can alter emotional attributions. Moreover, anxiety states are proposed to arise from detection of mismatch between actual and anticipated states of physiological arousal. However, the neural underpinnings of these phenomena previously have not been examined.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS
We undertook a functional brain imaging (fMRI) experiment to investigate how both primary and second-order levels of physiological (viscerosensory) representation impact on the processing of external emotional cues. 12 participants were scanned while judging face stimuli during both exercise and non-exercise conditions in the context of true and false auditory feedback of tonic heart rate. We observed that the perceived emotional intensity/salience of neutral faces was enhanced by false feedback of increased heart rate. Regional changes in neural activity corresponding to this behavioural interaction were observed within included right anterior insula, bilateral mid insula, and amygdala. In addition, right anterior insula activity was enhanced during by asynchronous relative to synchronous cardiac feedback even with no change in perceived or actual heart rate suggesting this region serves as a comparator to detect physiological mismatches. Finally, BOLD activity within right anterior insula and amygdala predicted the corresponding changes in perceived intensity ratings at both a group and an individual level.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE
Our findings identify the neural substrates supporting behavioural effects of false physiological feedback, and highlight mechanisms that underlie subjective anxiety states, including the importance of the right anterior insula in guiding second-order "cognitive" representations of bodily arousal state
Parametric Conductance Correlation for Irregularly Shaped Quantum Dots
We propose the autocorrelator of conductance peak heights as a signature of
the underlying chaotic dynamics in quantum dots in the Coulomb blockade regime.
This correlation function is directly accessible to experiments and its decay
width contains interesting information about the underlying electron dynamics.
Analytical results are derived in the framework of random matrix theory in the
regime of broken time-reversal symmetry. The final expression, upon rescaling,
becomes independent of the details of the system. For the situation when the
external parameter is a variable magnetic field, the system-dependent,
nonuniversal field scaling factor is obtained by a semiclassical approach. The
validity of our findings is confirmed by a comparison with results of an exact
numerical diagonalization of the conformal billiard threaded by a magnetic flux
line.Comment: Minor corrections added to the text and references (36 pages RevTeX
3, epsf, 10 figure
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