Accessing emergency rest centres in the UK - lesson learnt

Emergency rest centres (ERC) are premises that are used for the temporary accommodation of evacuees during an emergency situation. They form an important part of emergency response, by providing a focal point for receiving people and providing food, shelter, information and support. The Disability Discrimination Act 2005 creates a legislative right for ‘reasonable’ access to goods and services for disabled people. This legislation does not differentiate between emergency and non emergency situations which means that those with a responsibility for emergency planning need to consider the accessibility of ERCs. This article examines ERC provision and reviews access for disabled people. It focuses on a study of three ERCs that were established in different local authority areas within the Yorkshire and Humber region in the UK during a flooding event on 25th June 2007. While uncovering many instances of good practise, the results from the research also identified a number of lessons to be learnt, in particular it was noted that the main barriers to access were encountered with: • Facilities and elements that did not comprise part of the buildings normal operation, such as the provision of bedding, medical assistance and effective communication; and • Facilities that would not normally be expected to be used to the extent, or duration, whilst the emergency rest centre was in operation, such as the provision of adequate welfare facilities. The research also noted that Civil Protection Legislation within the UK contains limited instruction or guidance to those with responsibility for Emergency Rest Centre provision. This provides little impetus for Emergency Planners to consider the needs of disabled people. This research has broad implications for local authorities and national government representatives. It identifies a need for those with responsibility for emergency planning and response to strengthen their knowledge of disabled people, and to adopt a more holistic approach to the provision of emergency planning and response

Social network markets: the influence of network structure when consumers face decisions over many similar choices

In social network markets, the act of consumer choice in these industries is governed not just by the set of incentives described by conventional consumer demand theory, but by the choices of others in which an individual's payoff is an explicit function of the actions of others. We observe two key empirical features of outcomes in social networked markets. First, a highly right-skewed, non-Gaussian distribution of the number of times competing alternatives are selected at a point in time. Second, there is turnover in the rankings of popularity over time. We show here that such outcomes can arise either when there is no alternative which exhibits inherent superiority in its attributes, or when agents find it very difficult to discern any differences in quality amongst the alternatives which are available so that it is as if no superiority exists. These features appear to obtain, as a reasonable approximation, in many social network markets. We examine the impact of network structure on both the rank-size distribution of choices at a point in time, and on the life spans of the most popular choices. We show that a key influence on outcomes is the extent to which the network follows a hierarchical structure. It is the social network properties of the markets, the meso-level structure, which determine outcomes rather than the objective attributes of the products.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Non-Fatal Strangulation and Suffocation

Reflects on the offence of strangulation or suffocation created by the Domestic Abuse Bill 2019-21. Reviews the justifications for the offence, its context, the relevance of similar offences introduced in Australia and New Zealand and its key provisions. Considers whether strangulation should have been defined, the role of consent, the offence's interaction with existing criminal law and the measures needed to improve its effectiveness

Founts of knowledge or delusions of grandeur? Limits and illusions of tourism research impact: A reply to Wood

The starting point of our paper (Thomas & Ormerod, 2017) was to assess the extent to which academic research influenced policy and practice. Others have undertaken this task and come to a broadly similar conclusion; collectively, tourism researchers appear to have little impact on anyone other than fellow academics (and perhaps their students). Whether this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, important or unimportant, depends on your perspective. In addition to illustrating the novel use of digital methods, the main contribution of our research lay in its attempt to explain why some academic researchers appear to have more non-academic impact than others. Our theorising of impact was, therefore, designed to identify variables that influenced impact and to show their inter-relationships. Readers will reach their own conclusions about the extent to which we were successful in our ambition, but few will deny that we had a very comprehensive data set to work with, albeit limited to the UK

Modelling creative innovation

The economic concept of rationality seems inappropriate in the context of creative innovation, because of its assumption that the tastes and preferences of agents are fixed. The concept of copying, of imitating the behaviour of others, has equal claim to the description 'rational' in an innovative context. Models of ‘binary choices with externalities’ are predicated on copying and potentially show us not only why most innovations fail, but also why big social changes do not necessarily require big causes. In the ‘Long-tail’ world of a huge range of choice, however, many choices are not ‘binary, either-or’. In the long-tail world, popular choices tend to become more popular, but not forever, as innovation drives a constant turnover in the popularity rankings. A very simple model of ‘neutral’ copying with occasional originality of choice can explain real-world patterns of long-tail distributions under continual turnover

Mean Field Voter Model of Election to the House of Representatives in Japan

In this study, we propose a mechanical model of a plurality election based on a mean field voter model. We assume that there are three candidates in each electoral district, i.e., one from the ruling party, one from the main opposition party, and one from other political parties. The voters are classified as fixed supporters and herding (floating) voters with ratios of $1-p$ and $p$, respectively. Fixed supporters make decisions based on their information and herding voters make the same choice as another randomly selected voter. The equilibrium vote-share probability density of herding voters follows a Dirichlet distribution. We estimate the composition of fixed supporters in each electoral district and $p$ using data from elections to the House of Representatives in Japan (43rd to 47th). The spatial inhomogeneity of fixed supporters explains the long-range spatial and temporal correlations. The estimated values of $p$ are close to the estimates obtained from a survey.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure