Stakeholder engagement in sustainable housing refurbishment in the UK

The UK government is committed to effectively implement a viable sustainable agenda in the social housing sector. To this end housing associations and local authorities are being encouraged to improve the environmental performance of their new and existing homes. Whilst much attention has been focused on new housing (e.g. the Code for Sustainable Homes) little effort has been focussed on improving the 3.9 (approx) million homes maintained and managed by the public sector (in England), which, given the low rate of new build and demolition (<1% in England), will represent approximately 70% of the public housing stock in 2050. Thus, if UK is to achieve sustainable public housing the major effort will have to focus on the existing stock. However, interpreting the sustainability agenda for an existing housing portfolio is not a straight foreword activity. In addition to finding a ‘technical’ solution, landlords also haveto address the socio-economic issues that balance quality of expectations of tenants with the economic realities of funding social housing refurbishment. This paper will report the findings of a qualitative study (participatory approach) that examined the processes by which a large public landlord sought to develop a long-term sustainable housing strategy. Through a series of individual meetings and group workshops the research team identified: committed leadership; attitudes towards technology; social awareness; and collective understanding of the sustainability agenda as key issues that the organisation needed to address in developing a robust and defendable refurbishment strategy. The paper concludes that the challenges faced by the landlord in improving the sustainability of their existing stock are not primarily technical, but socio-economic. Further, while the economic challenges: initial capital cost; lack of funding; and pay-back periods can be overcome, if the political will exists, by fiscal measures; the social challenges: health & wellbeing; poverty; security; space needs; behaviour change; education; and trust; are much more complex in nature and will require a coordinated approach from all the stakeholders involved in the wider community if they are to be effectively addressed. The key challenge to public housing landlords is to develop mechanisms that can identify and interpret the complex nature of the social sustainability agenda in a way that reflects local aspirations (although the authors believe the factors will exist in all social housing communities, their relative importance is likely to vary between communities) whilst addressing Government agendas

The Development And Cytology Of The Epibiotic Phase Of Physoderma Pulposum

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141147/1/ajb206996.pd

Methods of Training Task Decompositions in Gated Modular Neural Networks

Mixture of experts (MoE), introduced over 20 years ago, is the simplest gated modular neural network architecture. The gate in the MoE architecture learns task decompositions and individual experts (modules) learn simpler functions appropriate to the gate’s task decomposition. This could inherently make MoE interpretable as errors can be attributed either to gating or to individual experts thereby providing either a gate or expert level diagnosis. Due to the specialization of experts they could modularly be transfered to other tasks. However, our initial experiments showed that the original MoE architecture and its end-to-end expert and gate training method does not guarantee intuitive task decompositions and expert utilization, indeed it can fail spectacularly even for simple data such as MNIST. This thesis therefore explores task decompositions among experts by the gate in existing MoE architectures and training methods and demonstrates how they can fail for even simple datasets without additional regularizations. We then propose five novel MoE training algorithms and MoE architectures: (1) Dual temperature gate and expert training that uses a softer gate distribution for training experts and a harder gate distribution to train the gate; (2) Two no- gate expert training algorithms where the experts are trained without a gate: (a) loudest expert method which selects the expert with the lowest estimate of its own loss for the sample both during training and inference; and (b) peeking expert algorithm that selects and trains the expert with the best prediction probability for the target class of a sample during training. A gate is then reverse distilled from the pre-trained experts for conditional computation during inference; (3) Attentive gating MoE architecture that computes the gate probabilities by attending to the expert outputs with additional attention weights during training. We then distill the trained attentive gate model to a simpler original MoE model for conditional computation during inference; and (4) Expert loss gating MoE architecture where the gate output is not the expert distribution but the expert log loss.We also propose a novel flexible data driven soft constraint, Ls, that uses similarity between samples to regulate the gate’s expert distribution. We empirically validate our methods on MNIST, FashionMNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. The empirical results show that our novel training and regularization algorithms outperform benchmark MoE training methods

Achieving Low Carbon Social Housing Through Innovation

Achieving a low carbon future continues to be one of the most challenging issues facing today’s built environment professionals. While significant advances have been made in the area of new build, the same cannot be said for the existing housing stock. In the UK 70% of the housing that will exist in 2050 has already been built. If the UK is to have any chance of meeting its 2050 carbon reduction targets, effective refurbishment strategies that significantly reduce the carbon footprint of existing housing need to be developed. However, whilst it is generally acknowledged that retrofit to existing buildings is more complicated than new build, the issues that need to be addressed are not primarily technical, but organisational and managerial. The combination of attitudes towards risk and awareness of innovative solutions result in organisational barriers to the wide uptake of low/zero carbon technologies. This paper presents the findings of a research study into the level of perceived organisational sustainability and factors that influence refurbishment decision making amongst 57 UK social housing providers. It identifies a range of maturity indicators from Initiation, through Contagion and Control, to Maturity that can be used to distinguish between approaches to sustainable refurbishment. A research questionnaire was used to establish the level of maturity (in the sustainability innovation context) and decision making characteristics of the responding organisation along with their experiences of sustainable refurbishment of their housing stock. The paper identifies a range of organisational characteristics and maps these against the organisation’s position along a “general” innovation journey through an S curve maturity model. The paper identifies a shift from national level drivers and barriers to local level interpretation of the wider sustainability agenda as the key differences between Initiator and Mature organisations. The paper concludes that it is possible to profile UK social housing providers and develop management instruments to accelerate their journey along the sustainable innovation curve. This in turn will accelerate the uptake of sustainable refurbishment programmes

ZAKAT: Government Fiscal Policy Instruments in the Covid-19 Pandemic

This study is a literature research that uses qualitative methods, the data is presented in a narrative and focuses on the direction of the description. Sources of data come from primary and secondary data sources. This study focuses on an overview of zakat in Islamic economics and zakat in Indonesian legal policy in order to find out zakat from the perspective of Islamic economics and law in Indonesia. Instruments of fiscal policy in Indonesia to determine the fiscal policy of the Indonesian government. The relevance of zakat as an instrument of fiscal policy in Indonesia during the covid-19 pandemic to find out the potential of zakat as a government policy instrument in the covid-19 pandemic. The results of the study are zakat in Islamic economics including:  source of state revenue while in Indonesian law it is not included in the state budget. The reflection of the Indonesian government's fiscal policy is the APBN. Zakat has great potential, role and benefits as an instrument of government fiscal policy in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. Modern management and laws are still needed to maximize zakat collection

ZAKAT: Government Fiscal Policy Instruments in the Covid-19 Pandemic

This study is a literature research that uses qualitative methods, the data is presented in a narrative and focuses on the direction of the description. Sources of data come from primary and secondary data sources. This study focuses on an overview of zakat in Islamic economics and zakat in Indonesian legal policy in order to find out zakat from the perspective of Islamic economics and law in Indonesia. Instruments of fiscal policy in Indonesia to determine the fiscal policy of the Indonesian government. The relevance of zakat as an instrument of fiscal policy in Indonesia during the covid-19 pandemic to find out the potential of zakat as a government policy instrument in the covid-19 pandemic. The results of the study are zakat in Islamic economics including:  source of state revenue while in Indonesian law it is not included in the state budget. The reflection of the Indonesian government's fiscal policy is the APBN. Zakat has great potential, role and benefits as an instrument of government fiscal policy in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. Modern management and laws are still needed to maximize zakat collection

Determinants of profitability in the banking sector : a study with special reference to private commercial banks in Sri Lanka

Profitability of the bank has become vital for financial stability. In this study, internal variables namely capital ratio, activity mix, size, overheads and liquidity are considered as variables which have impact on banks’ profitability. The results reveal capital ratio, size and liquidity have positive impact on banks’ profitability whereas activity mix and overheads have negative impact. Our results shows that the banks’ profitability can be increased by increasing banks’ asset base, and size of the banks, and by managing the overhead efficiently to promote financial stability in Sri Lank