Communities in Action. The Handbook

Focuses on ways to enable and improve the practice of participatory design, urban design and neighbourhood regeneration

Sources of Data for Micro Level Planning from Village Level Institutions: An Overview

A study was conducted to compile the databases related to agricultural development available at the local level that could be used for micro level planning. For this purpose, the details of legacy databases in offices of the department of agriculture and local self government institutions were collected to find out the frequency of updating information and completeness of data. Further investigation was done to find out the static and dynamic nature of legacy registers and how best they could be used in building up a comprehensive database for facilitating micro level planning in agriculture

Peaks and Valleys: Experimental Asset Markets With Non-Monotonic Fundamentals

We report the results of an experiment designed to measure how well asset market prices track fundamentals when the latter experience peaks and troughs. We observe greater price efficiency in markets in which fundamentals rise to a peak and then decline, than in markets in which fundamentals decline to a trough and undergo a subsequent increase. The findings demonstrate that the characteristics of the time path of the fundamental value can influence the degree of market efficiency.Bubble;Peak;Experiment

Exploring NOy chemistry in levitated aqueous aerosol droplets

Chemistry of reactive nitrogen oxides, NOy, is crucial for our understanding of composition and properties of the Earth’s atmosphere. The proof-of-principle experiments demonstrated that we are able to study the atmospheric fate of nitrogen oxides that has significant impact on global climate and hydrological cycle, thus affecting the likelihood of local floods and acid rain

Iterative design for active control of fluid flow

This paper considers iterative controller design for planar Poiseuille flow by model unfalsification and controller redesign. The main contribution is to show that model-unfalsification-based iterative design can be useful in flow control problems. The a priori knowledge of the dynamics of the sampled system is obtained from the analytic approximation of the Navier-Stokes equations by a Galerkin method. Pole-positions, expected model orders and feasible dynamic variations are valuable prior knowledge which can be taken into account in the uncertainty-model unfalsification-based iterative design scheme developed

Turbo Detection of Symbol-Based Non-Binary LDPC-Coded Space-time Signals using Sphere Packing Modulation

A recently proposed space-time signal construction method that combines orthogonal design with sphere packing, referred to here as (STBC-SP), has shown useful performance improvements over Alamouti’s conventional orthogonal design. As a further advance, non-binary LDPC codes have been capable of attaining substantial performance improvements over their binary counterparts. In this paper, we demonstrate that the performance of STBC-SP systems can be further improved by concatenating sphere packing aided modulation with non-binary LDPC codes and performing symbolbased turbo detection. We present simulation results for the proposed scheme communicating over a correlated Rayleigh fading channel. At a BER of 10?6, the proposed symbolbased turbo-detected STBC-SP scheme was capable of achieving a coding gain of approximately 26.6dB over the identical throughput 1 bit/symbol uncoded STBC-SP benchmarker scheme. The proposed scheme also achieved a coding gain of approximately 3dB at a BER of 10?6 over a recently proposed bit-based turbo-detected STBC-SP benchmarker scheme

Leveraging Offshore IT Outsourcing by SMEs through Online Marketplaces

Following their larger counterparts, an increasing number of small firms outsource their IT tasks to lower cost offshore destinations. For small firms, however, offshore outsourcing is a difficult undertaking as it involves high transaction costs. Online marketplaces for IT services, which have recently become available to small firms, make offshore IT outsourcing more accessible and manageable, although differences in the marketplace design result in varying outcomes across the marketplaces. This has consequences for SME’s decision as to which online marketplace to use, because different markets may have different types of benefits and costs. This paper sets to analyze some of the similarities and differences between online marketplaces for IT services and their effects for small firms. First, we analyze if and how online marketplaces reduce small firms’ transaction costs in offshore IT outsourcing. Second, we examine the effects of market entry barriers on outcomes of online marketplaces and their implications for small firms. The results indicate that online marketplaces for IT services do reduce transaction costs for small firms in offshore outsourcing across ten specific market processes. More surprising, however, is the finding that the lower market entry barriers for suppliers result in lower prices for buyers without compromising other aspects of market performance.Offshore IT Outsourcing;Online Market;Process-Stakeholder Analysis;Reverse Auction

Buyer Commitment and Opportunism in the Online Market for IT Services

Companies increasingly outsource IT-related tasks using reverse auction mechanisms embedded into online marketplaces. However, a considerable proportion of auctions at these marketplaces do not result in a contract between buyer and supplier. Extant literature mostly refers to costly bidding and bid evaluation to explain this phenomenon. Another possible explanation is that because of the low entry barriers, buyers with a low commitment to exchange can use the marketplace solely for information gath-ering purposes such as price benchmarking and obtaining free consultations, having little or no intention to contract a supplier. We test this explanation by looking at how different types of costs incurred by the buyer during the sourcing process, are related to the outcome of reverse auctions in terms of contract award. We argue that higher levels of search, preparation and negotiation costs are associated with higher commitment to exchange and find that opportunistic behaviour does indeed play a part in the non-contracted projects, while committed buyers are more likely to enter into a contract with a supplier. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 2,574 reverse auctions at a leading online marketplace for IT services and further verified across projects of different value and different levels of buyer experience. On the practical side, we recommend setting up entry barriers for buyers with a low level of commitment.IT Outsourcing;Online Markets;Opportunism;Reverse Auctions;Transaction Costs

THE RELATION BETWEEN THE BOARD AND THE EXECUTIVE IN CO-OPERATIVES

Management .in a co-operative society has a distinguishing feature.Unlike the management in other forms of enterprise, it has to operate within the framework of democracy. The members of a co-operative society are not mere shareholders but are patrons as well. Their main interest is not in the rate of return on capital contributed by them, but in the quality and cost of the services rendered by the society to them, and accordingly they exercise control over the society as memberpafrons on the basis of ‘one man, one vote’, and not as mere shareholders. Therefore, their control over the co-operative is deeper and democratic. Accordingly, the management in a co-operative is subject to a complex system of democratic decision-making, which is why it is often found slow and cumbersome. This poses the problem of whether managerial efficiency is compatible with democracy