Prefigurative Partaking: Employees’ Environmental Activism in an Energy Utility

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record The separation between an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of organizational politics has become untenable in a rapidly changing political landscape, where people engage in environmental activism in many different domains. To understand contemporary environmental activism, we situate ourselves empirically within an energy utility, Ordalia [pseudonym], a large corporation active across Europe and heavily criticized by external activists for its carbon emitting operations. By merging Rancière’s method of equality and notion of ‘partaking’ with literature on prefiguration in social movements, we analyse everyday green actions pursued by Ordalia’s employees, which we conceptualize as ‘prefigurative partaking’. By focusing on six characterizing themes of prefigurative partaking – aspirational, individual, professional, critical, loyal and communal – we have found that employee activism is incremental, horizontal and boundaryless. We discuss these findings in relation to recent calls for more fruitful exchanges between social movement theory and organization studies, arguing that Rancière’s conceptualization of politics can help us study actions that span civil society and business. This complements and expands our understanding of environmental activism as a dispersed set of actions that can take place anywhere, and hence also at work.Swedish Energy AgencyBritish Academy Mid-Career Fellowshi

Wavenet based low rate speech coding

Traditional parametric coding of speech facilitates low rate but provides poor reconstruction quality because of the inadequacy of the model used. We describe how a WaveNet generative speech model can be used to generate high quality speech from the bit stream of a standard parametric coder operating at 2.4 kb/s. We compare this parametric coder with a waveform coder based on the same generative model and show that approximating the signal waveform incurs a large rate penalty. Our experiments confirm the high performance of the WaveNet based coder and show that the speech produced by the system is able to additionally perform implicit bandwidth extension and does not significantly impair recognition of the original speaker for the human listener, even when that speaker has not been used during the training of the generative model.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Best Practice Recommendations for a Corporate Wiki in the Research & Development Department of Software Company

Alexandria is the departmental wiki knowledge management system of the Software Company’s Research and Development department. According to a survey crafted for this project and completed by 84% of the department, Alexandria could be made more effective in three primary ways: increased contribution by all users, increased updating of existing topics, and increased education of its user base. The survey also revealed two groups of users, a smaller group of “Power Users” and a larger group of “Learners,” who have different interactions with the wiki and different levels of comfort with it. Recommended improvements for addressing these three issues include beginning a program of quarterly Lunch and Learn seminars, encouraging new employees to customize their wiki user pages, and creating and using a mechanism for capturing user feedback on wiki topics

Growth and feed standards for broilers -- 1959, Station Bulletin, no.466

The Bulletin is a publication of the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station, College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire

Survival and Recruitment of Rehabilitated Caspian Terns in Southern California

Thousands of birds are taken in by animal care centers each year for rehabilitation. Birds returned to health by some centers are banded for later identification, but very few are ever reencountered following their return to the wild. We report here, information on the post-release survival of Caspian Terns (Hydroprogne caspia) in southern California as well as on their recruitment into a local breeding population and colony site fidelity

Stable isotope records for the last 10 000 years from Okshola cave (Fauske, northern Norway) and regional comparisons

The sensitivity of terrestrial environments to past changes in heat transport is expected to be manifested in Holocene climate proxy records on millennial to seasonal timescales. Stalagmite formation in the Okshola cave near Fauske (northern Norway) began at about 10.4 ka, soon after the valley was deglaciated. Past monitoring of the cave and surface has revealed stable modern conditions with uniform drip rates, relative humidity and temperature. Stable isotope records from two stalagmites provide time-series spanning from c. 10 380 yr to AD 1997; a banded, multi-coloured stalagmite (Oks82) was formed between 10 380 yr and 5050 yr, whereas a pristine, white stalagmite (FM3) covers the period from ~7500 yr to the present. The stable oxygen isotope (δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>c</sub>), stable carbon isotope (δ<sup>13</sup>C<sub>c</sub>), and growth rate records are interpreted as showing i) a negative correlation between cave/surface temperature and δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>c</sub>, ii) a positive correlation between wetness and δ<sup>13</sup>C<sub>c</sub>, and iii) a positive correlation between temperature and growth rate. Following this, the data from Okshola show that the Holocene was characterised by high-variability climate in the early part, low-variability climate in the middle part, and high-variability climate and shifts between two distinct modes in the late part. <br><br> A total of nine Scandinavian stalagmite δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>c</sub> records of comparable dating precision are now available for parts or most of the Holocene. None of them show a clear Holocene thermal optimum, suggesting that they are influenced by annual mean temperature (cave temperature) rather than seasonal temperature. For the last 1000 years, δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>c</sub> values display a depletion-enrichment-depletion pattern commonly interpreted as reflecting the conventional view on climate development for the last millennium. Although the δ<sup>18</sup>O<sub>c</sub> records show similar patterns and amplitudes of change, the main challenges for utilising high-latitude stalagmites as palaeoclimate archives are i) the accuracy of the age models, ii) the ambiguity of the proxy signals, and iii) calibration with monitoring data