Collective Action and Responses to Poor‐Quality Recycling in St. John’s

This paper discusses the lack of proper recycling programs in St John’s, NL and explains the relevance of collective action and rational choice theories in addressing the matter. The city has done a poor job of implementing proper recycling programs, and is one of only two provincial capitals that does not offer a government-funded curb‐side recycling program. While some private recycling programs do exist in the city, they are inefficient and thus viewed by the populace as a waste of time. As most people believe that their individual waste contributions will not make much difference to the overall state of the environment, waste continues to accumulate and negatively impact the environment, as well as the image and state of the city. Collective action theory, as discussed by Ostrom, offers several possible solutions, such as privatization of territory or discussion amongst the populace. Unfortunately, such solutions are impractical for this particular problem. The government must step in and impose a recycling “Leviathan” by implementing mandatory recycling and forcing citizens to recycle or be left with their own refuse. Only by making recycling a self-interested priority for the populace will St John’s be able to improve its waste management practices

Enter the Anthropocene : an epoch of time characterised by humans

In the first years of the 21st century Earth was being influenced by forces greater than our own and yet as vulnerable. With infinite complacency men and women went to and fro over this globe about their affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. And yet, across the vastness of time Earth viewed the actions of people with increasing despair. And slowly, but surely, she drew her plans against us….. We have borrowed these words, with some poetic licence, from H.G. Wells’ late Victorian science fiction spectacular The War of Worlds. Wells’ carefully crafted opening salvo to his novel contains words prescient in the early 21st century as we face the prospect of rapid change to our climate, and warns us about complacency in the belief of our dominion over nature. Already in the late 19th century many scientists were commenting on the extent of human influence on planet Earth. The Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani (1873) was perhaps the first to moot these ideas. Later, as the 19th century drew to a close the Swede Arrhenius and the American Chamberlain worked out the relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and global warming. Arrhenius suggested that future generations of humans would need to raise surface temperatures to provide new areas of agricultural land and thus feed a growing population. But he could not have conceived of the massive rate of human population increase in the 20th century. In 2002 the Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen resurrected the concept of the Anthropocene to denote the ever increasing influence of humans on Earth. The word has now entered the scientific literature as a vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth caused by humans (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008 and references therein). For the Anthropocene to become useful though, it needs some quantification. How might an Anthropocene Epoch be unique relative to the Holocene or the Pleistocene epochs that preceded it? What criteria could we use to quantify when the Anthropocene began, and how might future generations of geologists recognise its signal in the rock record? More importantly though, does the term Anthropocene help us to understand the influence of humans on our world and how that affects the environment of the near future

Moving Beyond Human and Organizational Incongruence

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is offer an understanding on how value creation, on both a human and organizational level can be found and constructed through a shift away from Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes theoretical foundations on the concept of congruence and it purports to demonstrate the co-relation between incongruence and dysfunction in both organizations than individuals. Findings – The congruence theory, originally developed by Williams, co-author of this paper, refers to the capacity of individuals to align the individual stances to the organizational ones, thus leading to a system based on a system of balance among elements, conceptually paradoxical among themselves. The paper manages to demonstrate that performance needs to be found in system of reference other than the fiscal or financial diligence and more within the human dimensionality. Originality value – This paper explores the factors that block the creation of congruence in people and organizations and explores strategies that can simultaneous and congruently move people and organizations to a path of sustainabilityhuman sustainability; congruence and system thinking and theory

The vulnerability of the low-skilled

The low-skilled are a critical category for analyses of labour market marginalization. Class analysis has tended to depict low-skilled employees as sharing a broadly similar position with respect to both employment and labour market conditions. Their employment relationship is defined by a specific type of contract – the labour contract – characterized by precarious pay, low asset specificity and high job insecurity. This contrasts with employees who benefit from a service relationship which is designed to bind employees to the organization on a longer term basis. Recent neo-institutional theories however have emphasized the diversity of employment conditions between advanced capitalist societies, depending in particular on the nature of their production, employment and welfare regimes. An important issue is whether such divergences apply only to more skilled categories of the workforce (and hence lead to accentuated polarization) or also affect the employment conditions of the low-skilled. Are the low-skilled significantly more integrated into the labour market in some countries than in others and hence less vulnerable in times of economic restructuring? The paper will examine this by comparing a number of EU-15 countries that have been regarded as reflecting contrasting institutional regimes. It will focus in particular on the position of the low-skilled with respect to pay, training and job security

Computer‐based interactive tutorial versus traditional lecture for teaching introductory aspects of pain

In the health sciences, a wide range of computer‐based courseware is now available. The aim of the study described in this paper has been to compare the effectiveness of a computer‐based learning (CBL) software package and a traditional lecture (TL) for the delivery, of introductory material on pain. Nineteen undergraduate nursing students were divided into two groups to attend a one‐hour learning session which introduced clinical aspects of pain and which was delivered by either CBL or TL. Students were assessed for prior knowledge by a pre‐session test, and for knowledge gain by an identical post‐session test. In addition, a multiple‐choice question paper was used to examine differences in pain knowledge between the two groups, and a questionnaire was used to examine the students’ views on their experience during the learning session. The results demonstrated that both groups showed significant knowledge gain after their respective learning sessions. No significant differences between the groups in the magnitude of knowledge gain were found for clinical aspects of pain delivered during the learning sessions. The attitude questionnaire revealed that students attending CBL reported similar learning experiences to those attending the lecture

Synopsis of biological data on the blue crab, Callinectes sapidus Rathbun

This synopsis reviews taxonomy, morphology, distribution, life history, commercial hard and soft shell crab fisheries, physiology, diseases, ecology, laboratory culture methodology, and influences of environmental pollutants on the blue crab, Callinecles sapidus. Over 300 selected, published reports up to and including 1982 are covered. (PDF file contains 45 pages.