Environmental concern as a triadic system

In this article I examine Frank Fisher’s “three stages of environmental concern” and compare these with each of Charles S. Peirce’s “three grades of clearness.” The aim of the article is to provide a framework within which supporters of the deep ecology movement will be better able to distinguish between three progressively deeper levels of environmental concern: whistleblowing; oppositional struggle (e.g., non-violent protesting); and deep ecology as enquiry. I argue that while each level of concern is necessary, it is only at the third grade of clearness, or stage of concern, that supporters of the deep ecology movement can effectively construct and communicate an ongoing community of deep enquiry for ecosophical living

Planning research and educational partnerships with Indigenous communities : practice, realities and lessons

Increasingly planning practice and research are having to engage with Indigenous communities in Australia to empower and position their knowledge in planning strategies and arguments. But also to act as articulators of their cultural knowledge, landscape aspirations and responsibilities and the need to ensure that they are directly consulted in projects that impact upon their &lsquo;country&rsquo; generally and specifically. This need has changed rapidly over the last 25 years because of land title claim legal precedents, state and Commonwealth legislative changes, and policy shifts to address reconciliation and the consequences of the fore-going precedents and enactments. While planning instruments and their policies have shifted, as well as research grant expectations and obligations, many of these Western protocols do not recognise and sympathetically deal with the cultural and practical realities of Indigenous community management dynamics, consultation practices and procedures, and cultural events much of which are placing considerable strain upon communities who do not have the human and financial resources to manage, respond, co-operate and inform in the same manner expected of non-Indigenous communities in Australia. This paper reviews several planning formal research, contract research and educational engagements and case studies between the authors and various Indigenous communities, and highlights key issues, myths and flaws in the way Western planning and research expectations are imposed upon Indigenous communities that often thwart the quality and uncertainty of planning outcomes for which the clients, research agencies, and government entities were seeking to create.<br /

An enhanced random early marking algorithm for Internet flow control

We propose earlier an optimization based flow control for the Internet called Random Early Marking (REM). In this paper we propose and evaluate an enhancement that attempts to speed up the convergence of REM in the face of large feedback delays. REM can be regarded as an implementation of an optimization algorithm in a distributed network. The basic idea is to treat the optimization algorithm as a discrete time system and apply linear control techniques to stabilize its transient. We show that the modified algorithm is stable globally and converges exponentially locally. This algorithm translates into an enhanced REM scheme and we illustrate the performance improvement through simulation

A Review of Papua New Guinea's Red Meat Industry

Livestock Production/Industries,

Optimization flow control -- I: Basic algorithm and convergence

We propose an optimization approach to flow control where the objective is to maximize the aggregate source utility over their transmission rates. We view network links and sources as processors of a distributed computation system to solve the dual problem using a gradient projection algorithm. In this system, sources select transmission rates that maximize their own benefits, utility minus bandwidth cost, and network links adjust bandwidth prices to coordinate the sources' decisions. We allow feedback delays to be different, substantial, and time varying, and links and sources to update at different times and with different frequencies. We provide asynchronous distributed algorithms and prove their convergence in a static environment. We present measurements obtained from a preliminary prototype to illustrate the convergence of the algorithm in a slowly time-varying environment. We discuss its fairness property

Modelling and stability of FAST TCP

We introduce a discrete-time model of FAST TCP that fully captures the effect of self-clocking and compare it with the traditional continuous-time model. While the continuous-time model predicts instability for homogeneous sources sharing a single link when feedback delay is large, experiments suggest otherwise. Using the discrete-time model, we prove that FAST TCP is locally asymptotically stable in general networks when all sources have a common round-trip feedback delay, no matter how large the delay is. We also prove global stability for a single bottleneck link in the absence of feedback delay. The techniques developed here are new and applicable to other protocols

University-Community Engagement: A grid-group analysis

University-community engagement involves complex issues, entangling multiple and interacting points of view, all of which operate in a wider dynamic evolving social environment. For this reason, there is often disagreement about why engagement is necessary or desirable, and whether there is one optimal method to practice it. To address this issue, I argue that university-community engagement can be examined as a form of enquiry. In this view, engagement is viewed as a system that arises through the recognition of the dissent it embodies. As such, enquiry functions to process disagreements into diverse methods of communication. Most of the disagreements utilised by universities are derived from external sources, thus university-based enquiry must necessarily involve a dialogue with a broader community or environment. In this sense, university-community engagement can be viewed most generally as a method that processes disagreements into shared understandings through enquiry. To demonstrate how university-community engagement functions from an enquiry point of view, I use Mary Douglas’ grid-group diagramming method to develop a critical typology for classifying university-community engagement. My modified grid-group diagram provides a structured typological space within which four distinct methods of university-community engagement can be identified and discussed – both in relation to their internal communicational characteristics, and in relation to each other. The university-engagement grid-group diagram is constructed by locating each of Douglas’ four quadrants within Charles Peirce’s four methods of enquiry. Peirce’s work is introduced because each of his four methods of enquiry deals specifically with how disagreements are processed and resolved. When Peirce’s methods for fixing belief are located in Douglas’ grid-group diagram, they create a sense-making framework for university-community engagement. It is argued that the model offers a heuristic structure through which to view the diversity of university-community engagement and create shared understandings of the appropriateness of a wide range of possible engagement methods

Heterogeneous Congestion Control: Efficiency, Fairness and Design

When heterogeneous congestion control protocols that react to different pricing signals (e.g. packet loss, queueing delay, ECN marking etc.) share the same network, the current theory based on utility maximization fails to predict the network behavior. Unlike in a homogeneous network, the bandwidth allocation now depends on router parameters and flow arrival patterns. It can be non-unique, inefficient and unfair. This paper has two objectives. First, we demonstrate the intricate behaviors of a heterogeneous network through simulations and present a rigorous framework to help understand its equilibrium efficiency and fairness properties. By identifying an optimization problem associated with every equilibrium, we show that every equilibrium is Pareto efficient and provide an upper bound on efficiency loss due to pricing heterogeneity. On fairness, we show that intra-protocol fairness is still decided by a utility maximization problem while inter-protocol fairness is the part over which we don¿t have control. However it is shown that we can achieve any desirable inter-protocol fairness by properly choosing protocol parameters. Second, we propose a simple slow timescale source-based algorithm to decouple bandwidth allocation from router parameters and flow arrival patterns and prove its feasibility. The scheme needs only local information

Are Overconfident CEOs Better Innovators?

Using options- and press-based proxies for CEO overconfidence (Malmendier and Tate 2005a, 2005b, 2008), we find that over the 1993-2003 period, firms with overconfident CEOs have greater return volatility, invest more in innovation, obtain more patents and patent citations, and achieve greater innovative success for given research and development (R&D) expenditure. Overconfident managers only achieve greater innovation than non-overconfident managers in innovative industries. Overconfidence is not associated with lower sales, ROA, or Q.CEO Overconfidence; Innovation; R&D; Patent