Towards an integrated perspective on fleet asset management: engineering and governance considerations

The traditional engineering perspective on asset management concentrates on the operational performance the assets. This perspective aims at managing assets through their life-cycle, from technical specification, to acquisition, operation including maintenance, and disposal. However, the engineering perspective often takes for granted organizational-level factors. For example, a focus on performance at the asset level may lead to ignore performance measures at the business unit level. The governance perspective on asset management usually concentrates on organizational factors, and measures performance in financial terms. In doing so, the governance perspective tends to ignore the engineering considerations required for optimal asset performance. These two perspectives often take each other for granted. However experience demonstrates that an exclusive focus on one or the other may lead to sub-optimal performance. For example, the two perspectives have different time frames: engineering considers the long term asset life-cycle whereas the organizational time frame is based on a yearly financial calendar. Asset fleets provide a relevant and important context to investigate the interaction between engineering and governance views on asset management as fleets have distributed system characteristics. In this project we investigate how engineering and governance perspectives can be reconciled and integrated to enable optimal asset and organizational performance in the context of asset fleets

Reconstructing past atmospheric circulation changes using oxygen isotopes in lake sediments from Sweden

Here we use lake sediment studies from Sweden to illustrate how Holocene-aged oxygen isotope records from lakes located in different hydrological settings, can provide information about climate change. In particular changes in precipitation, atmospheric circulation and water balance. We highlight the importance of understanding the present lake hydrology, and the relationship between climate variables and the oxygen isotopic composition of precipitation (18Op) and lake waters (18Olakewater) for interpretation of the oxygen isotopic record from the sediments (18O). Both precipitation reconstructions from northern Sweden and water balance reconstructions from south and central Sweden show that the atmospheric circulation changed from zonal to a more meridional airflow over the Holocene. Superimposed on this Holocene trend are δ18Op minima resembling intervals of the negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), thus suggesting that the climate of Northern Europe is strongly influenced by atmospheric and oceanic circulation changes over the North Atlantic

Which older women could benefit from interventions to decrease sitting time and increase physical activity? [Letter to the Editor]

In addition to the well-known health risks associated with lack of physical activity (PA), evidence is emerging about the health risks of sedentary behaviour (sitting). Research about patterns and correlates of sitting and PA in older women is scarce. METHODS: Self-report data from 6,116 women aged 76-81 years were collected as part of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Woman’s Health. Linear regression models were computed to examine whether demographic, social and health factors were associated with sitting and PA. RESULTS: Women who did no PA sat more than women who did any PA (p<0.001). Seven correlates were associated with sitting and PA (p<0.05). Five of these were associated with more sitting and less PA: three health-related (BMI, chronic conditions, anxiety/depression) and two social correlates (caring duties, volunteering). One demographic (being from another English-speaking country) and one social correlate (more social interaction) were associated with more sitting and more PA. Four correlates, two demographic (living in a city; post-high school education), one social (being single), and one health-related correlate (dizziness/loss of balance) were associated with more sitting only. Two other health-related correlates (stiff/painful joints; feet problems) were associated with less PA only. CONCLUSION: Sedentary behaviour and PA are distinct behaviours in older Australian women. Information about the correlates of both behaviours can be used to identify population groups who might benefit from interventions to reduce sedentary behaviour and/or increase PA

Theorizing Autistic Sexualities as Collective Poetic Experiences

This article is a palimpsest emerging as part of a project of collective autoethnographic writing on the theme of sexuality. It draws on the intensification of friendly writing, friendly as in friends with benefits. We write as autistic and neuroqueer subjects, writing until our textualities becomes sexualities. We write until the text becomes a room – call it Earth or call it Body, call it Brain or call it Heart – in which one could crack meanings―but these are not the most important ones. Instead of meanings and positions, we want to write about movements in time. The time it takes to read a body that is never a body of your own but a part of a tiny orchestra. The time it takes to formulate a voice that speaks through mutism. This peculiar collection of letters works with our writing subjects as moments of memories. Reliving sexual moments – renaming sexual moments as sexual moments. Writing becomes an act of embodied and embrained tension and fusing. Maybe the text will revive in your hands—by reading it, you will write another version with us, of you. We are sensory strangers fucking through texts. Come play with us

Conclusion: theorising transgressive developmental trajectories and understanding children seen as ‘different’

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses the three interrelated themes to explore how they offer possibilities with which to refine and extend knowledge about non/normative development and 'different' childhoods. It has been structured around three core themes that speak to critiques of developmental psychology. The book discloses several issues that are relevant to understanding and developing theory about non-normative or different childhoods. It discusses geographical location as it intersects with understandings of nation, childhood and gender for child migrants in a host country; gender and role models within families and other care settings; the location of the child as a vulnerable subject; and development as located within particular understandings of mothers' work, food and social class. The book highlights that the construction of a child was in relation to the duties of adults to provide for and protect children and to ensure that they develop appropriately

Introducing normative and different childhoods, developmental trajectory and transgression

This chapter discusses the difference and transgression through a series of empirical, conceptual and literature-based exemplars. It addresses the ways in which normative ideas about childhood impact on understandings of particular kinds of children and set up assumptions about the norms against which 'others' are judged. The chapters draws on a range of dimensions of difference, including how difference is manifested through geographical location; economic differentiation and identification through social class; embodied differences such as gender and disability; and through a developmental lens, which demarcates activities as congruent within a particular developmental age or as transgressive. It discusses these instances in ways that attend to the local, contingent and partial knowledges about contexts of development and movements through time. The introduction chapter then presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book