Healthier homes and the ongoing saga of permitted development

Appalling space standards and lack of access to natural light, fresh air and thermal comfort are just some of the seriously detrimental outcomes of the government’s determination to pursue the extended permitted development route to the creation of new homes in England, as Ben Clifford explains

America is becoming more secular, but citizens still see political candidates’ religion as a mark of trustworthiness

American politicians have always had a close relationship with religion, and despite the increasingly secular nature of US society, it is nearly unthinkable that a politician would openly identify themselves as an atheist. In new research, Scott Clifford and Ben Gaskins find that voters perceive religious candidates as being more trustworthy and moral and atheist candidates as less trustworthy and less moral. They write that when politicians remind people that they are religious, they are playing on Americans’ bias towards trusting and favoring the religious

Preparing a Flexibility Toolkit. Project A: Consultation and Engagement in the DCO process

Following the publication of the first research in 2017, NIPA has now commissioned further work to prepare a ‘flexibility toolkit’ to address these issues in practice. This involves work across five workstreams, one of which is engagement, that is the subject of this report. The scope for this workstream notes that ‘NIPA Insights I highlighted the need for improved engagement for stakeholders of all kinds2 to be able to understand the need for, and to give support to, greater project flexibility. Concerns have been raised about ‘engagement’ only occurring at the pre-application consultation stage, rather than in a more active on-going basis post-application and post-consent. It is considered that commitments to engage post consent may help engender more support for flexibility’

Preparing a Flexibility Toolkit. Project A continuation project: Consultation and Engagement in the DCO process

Following the preparation of the report in relation to Project A, NIPA decided to commission an extension to this project that would focus on case studies of three specific examples of consultation within the whole NSIP process, with a focus on consultation following the issuing of the Development Consent Order (DCO) to the point of operational handover

Towards Loosely-Coupled Programming on Petascale Systems

We have extended the Falkon lightweight task execution framework to make loosely coupled programming on petascale systems a practical and useful programming model. This work studies and measures the performance factors involved in applying this approach to enable the use of petascale systems by a broader user community, and with greater ease. Our work enables the execution of highly parallel computations composed of loosely coupled serial jobs with no modifications to the respective applications. This approach allows a new-and potentially far larger-class of applications to leverage petascale systems, such as the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer. We present the challenges of I/O performance encountered in making this model practical, and show results using both microbenchmarks and real applications from two domains: economic energy modeling and molecular dynamics. Our benchmarks show that we can scale up to 160K processor-cores with high efficiency, and can achieve sustained execution rates of thousands of tasks per second.Comment: IEEE/ACM International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SuperComputing/SC) 200

Perfectoid covers of abelian varieties

For an abelian variety $A$ over an algebraically closed non-archimedean field of residue characteristic $p$, we show that there exists a perfectoid space which is the tilde-limit of $\varprojlim_{[p]}A$. Our proof also works for the larger class of abeloid varieties

Our vulnerable high streets – death by permitted development?

Ben Clifford, Adam Dennett, Bin Chi and Daniel Slade outline some of the key findings of research on the likely impacts of the latest expansion of permitted development rights

Appraisal of Youths’ Involvement in Social Conflicts and the Implications on Nigeria’s Image and Tourism Development

This study undertook a critical appraisal of the correlation between the intractable social conflicts like the Boko-Haram and the Niger Delta crises, where youths are the key players, on the international image of Nigeria and tourism development in the country. It is motivated by the avalanche of media reports that the country’s image is being seriously battered abroad by these internal social problems. The specific objectives sought were to: ascertain the correlation between the Boko-Haram crisis and the nation’s image ratings abroad; the Niger Delta crisis and the nation’s image ratings abroad and their impacts on tourism development in the country. Survey design was adopted in the study, where electronic questionnaires (E-questionnaire) via the Internet were used to gather the primary data. The data so sourced were statistically presented/analyzed with Likert’s 5-points scale, Spearman’s correlation coefficient and Friedman chi-square. Results obtained show that both the Boko Haram crisis and the Niger Delta crisis have adverse impact on the country’s international image and tourism development, consequently on youths’ unemployment rate. It was then recommended that proactive public relations crisis management strategies should be used in nipping such crisis in their buds in future. Keywords: Boko Haram crisis, Niger Delta crisis, National Image, Tourism Development

Relational and instrumental perspectives on compliance with the law among people experiencing homelessness

Objective: We conducted an exploratory study testing procedural justice theory with a novel population. We assessed the extent to which police procedural justice, effectiveness, legitimacy, and perceived risk of sanction predict compliance with the law among people experiencing homelessness. Hypotheses: We did not develop formal a priori hypotheses but examined five general research questions. First, are there positive associations between police procedural justice, police legitimacy, and compliance? Second, do procedural justice and legitimacy differentially predict compliance, depending on the particular type of offending? Third, are there positive associations between police effectiveness, perceived risk of sanction, and compliance? Fourth, does the perceived risk of sanction differentially predict compliance, depending on the particular type of offending? And fifth, are there positive associations between moral judgments about different offending behaviors and compliance? Method: Two hundred people (87% male, 49% aged 45–64, 37% White British) experiencing homelessness on the streets of an inner London borough completed a survey that included measures of procedural justice, police legitimacy, perceived risk of sanction, morality, and compliance with the law. Results: Procedural justice and police legitimacy were only weakly (and not significantly) associated with any of the three types of compliance (compliance with laws prohibiting low-level crimes, behaviors specific to the street population, and high-level crimes). Police effectiveness positively predicted compliance via perceived risk of sanction, but only for street-populationspecific offenses that can be important for survival on the streets, such as begging and sleeping in certain localities. Morality was positively associated with all three types of compliance behaviors. Supplementary analyses suggested a small amount of instability in the results, however, possibly because of the relatively small sample size. Conclusions: The lack of relevant relational connections to legal authority may explain why procedural fairness and perceptions of police legitimacy were not particularly important predictors of compliance in this context. More research is needed into the types of marginalized communities for whom structural factors of alienation and lack of access to resources may serve to reduce normative group connections. Future work should test whether the need to survive on the streets leads people to discount some social and relational constraints to behavior, making people (almost by definition) more instrumental in relation to law and law enforcement