Coherent Definition Research Articles

From Navas to Kaltoft

This article will examine the definition of disability developed by the European Court of Justice (CJEU) for the purposes of the Employment Equality Directive and whether it is sufficient for the purpose of bringing people living with human immunodeficiency virus/AIDS (PLHA) within its scope. The article will argue that in order to adequately protect PLHA within the European Union (EU) from discrimination, the CJEU needs to ensure that a coherent EU-wide definition of disability, based fully upon the social model of disability, is adopted. This is necessary in order to ensure adequate protection not only for PLHA but for all individuals with disabilities from discrimination throughout the EU. In addition to this central argument, this article will argue that the lack of a coherent definition of disability grounded in the social model fragments protection for PLHA across the EU leading to a number of possible unintended consequences.

A concept analysis of 'Meaning in work' and its implications for nursing.

To report an analysis of the concept of 'meaning in work'. Associated with initiatives to improve the quality of working life and the emerging movement of positive organizations, 'meaning in work' has been studied as a positive individual-level state. 'Meaning in work' has potential benefits that will improve the nursing workforce if this concept is embraced in nursing. However, the concept is not clearly defined because it has been approached from diverse theoretical perspectives and used interchangeably with analogous terms. A concept analysis. Three key terms (using 'work', 'meaning' or 'meaningful', 'meaning of work', 'logotherapy') were searched in the CINAHL, PsycINFO, Business Source Complete and ABI/INFORM Global online databases from January 1940-March 2015. Among 346 articles retrieved, 28 studies were included for this concept analysis. The procedure of concept analysis developed by Walker and Avant (2011) was used. Four critical attributes are identified: (1) experienced positive emotion at work; (2) meaning from work itself; (3) meaningful purpose and goals of work; and (4) work as a part of life that contributes towards meaningful existence. The identified antecedent of 'meaning in work' was a cognitive shift and the identified consequences were positive personal experience and positive impact on peers and organizations. This article provides a clear definition of 'meaning in work'. The resulting coherent definition will facilitate the use of 'meaning in work' in nursing research.

On resilient behaviors in computational systems and environments

The present article introduces a reference framework for discussing resilience of computational systems. Rather than a property that may or may not be exhibited by a system, resilience is interpreted here as the emerging result of a dynamic process. Said process represents the dynamic interplay between the behaviors exercised by a system and those of the environment it is set to operate in. As a result of this interpretation, coherent definitions of several aspects of resilience can be derived and proposed, including elasticity, change tolerance, and antifragility. Definitions are also provided for measures of the risk of unresilience as well as for the optimal match of a given resilient design with respect to the current environmental conditions. Finally, a resilience strategy based on our model is exemplified through a simple scenario.

Identifying economic crises: insights from history

Economists have been blamed for their inability to forecast and address crises. This article attributes this inability to intertwined factors: the lack of a coherent definition of crises, the reference-class problem, the lack of imagination regarding the nature of future crises and sample-selection biases. Specifically, economists tend to adapt their views on crises to recent episodes, and omit averted and potential crises. Threshold-based definitions of crises run the risk of being ad hoc. Using historical examples, this article highlights some epistemological shortcomings of the current approach.

Cooking strongly coupled plasmas

We present the orbital-free method for dense plasmas which allows for efficient variable ionisation molecular dynamics. This approach is a literal application of density functional theory where the use of orbitals is bypassed by a semi-classical estimation of the electron kinetic energy through the Thomas–Fermi theory. Thanks to a coherent definition of ionisation, we evidence a particular regime in which the static structure no longer depends on the temperature: the Γ-plateau. With the help of the well-known Thomas–Fermi scaling laws, we derive the conditions required to obtain a plasma at a given value of the coupling parameter and deduce useful fits. Static and dynamical properties are predicted as well as a a simple equation of state valid on the Γ-plateau. We show that the one component plasma model can be helpful to describe the correlations in real systems.

Coherence in the aggregate: A betting method for belief functions on many-valued events

Betting methods, of which de Finetti's Dutch Book is by far the most well-known, are uncertainty modelling devices which accomplish a twofold aim. Whilst providing an (operational) interpretation of the relevant measure of uncertainty, they also provide a formal definition of coherence. The main purpose of this paper is to put forward a betting method for belief functions on MV-algebras of many-valued events which allows us to isolate the corresponding coherence criterion, which we term coherence in the aggregate. Our framework generalises the classical Dutch Book method.

The Disorganised Nature of European Disability: Rethinking Protection for HIV Positive Individuals

Despite the fact that there are approximately 80 million individuals with disabilities within the EU, there is no coherent definition of disability. There is also no clear consensus amongst Member States as to the question of whether People Living with HIV/AIDS (“PLHA”) should be defined as “disabled” and thus acquire the various legal protections associated with such a designation. This paper will argue that in order to adequately protect PLHA within the EU, the European Court of Justice (“CJEU”) need to ensure that a coherent EU wide definition of disability based upon the social model of disability is adopted. Such a definition is necessary in order to ensure adequate protection not only for PLHA but for all individuals from disability discrimination throughout the EU. In addition to this central argument, this paper will also argue that the lack of a coherent definition of disability grounded in the social model fragments protection for PLHA across the EU leading to a number of possible unintended consequences. PLHA may seem a strange choice of focus but, in some ways, PLHA represent the “front line” in the ideological battle concerning the definition of disability at an EU level and the question concerning the relationship between sickness and disability as will be seen by the Advocate General’s opinion in the recent HK Danmark (Ring and Skouboe Werge) case concerning unlawful discrimination within employment.

The Young and the Helpless: Re-Defining the Term 'Child Victim of Crime'

Children are the most highly victimized segments of our society. The victimization of children is estimated to be the most costly public health and public safety problem today. Despite the urgency of the problem, and the proliferation of literature and policy proposals pertinent to childhood victimization, thus far, no significant efforts have been made to design a coherent definition to the term ‘child victim of crime.’ Existing definitions fail to account for the distinct developmental needs of children, and the unique effect of crime on children. The result of this lacuna is a colossal failure of our legal system to protect the most vulnerable and impressionable group, our children. It also leads to wasteful and inefficient utilization of public funds, and compromises public safety. This article provides a comprehensive framework, that bridges theory and practice, to develop an innovative evidence-based definition to the term ‘child victim of crime’. Implementation of the proposed definition will enable the protection and treatment of millions of children crippled by crime, who currently fall beyond the boundaries of narrow policies designed for adults and unsuitable for children. It will also help improve public safely, and save invaluable public resources.

What does confidence mean to people who have had a stroke? – A qualitative interview study

Objective: To explore the meaning of confidence to stroke patients after stroke in order to inform the development of a measurement tool. Design: Qualitative interview study using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Methods: Ten stroke survivors were purposively selected from those participating in a multi-centre randomised trial of outdoor mobility rehabilitation. Interviews about confidence were conducted in participants’ homes, audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Results: Six themes emerged from the analysis. These were loss of identity, fear, social confidence, role confidence, mastering skill and attitudes and beliefs. Loss of identity was particularly evident in the early stages of stroke recovery. Fear was a barrier to regaining confidence and was associated with avoidance behaviours. Lack of social confidence was a common problem which appeared difficult to resolve. Life roles motivated participants to re-engage in daily life activities. Personal attitudes and beliefs, combined with the attitudes of significant others, contributed to personal feelings of competence. Conclusion: This study provides a coherent definition of the meaning of confidence through the experiences of stroke survivors. Being successful in gradually re-engaging in activities, including social activities and life roles helped to establish a positive self-belief. The influence of others, such as family and friends reinforce self-beliefs. Confidence and self-efficacy appear to be a similar construct. However, participants in this study also identified a relationship between confidence and self-esteem. The findings indicate that all six themes need to be included in a confidence measure to encompass the meaning of confidence as described by participants with stroke.

La trasversalità dell'approccio di genere per la salute e la sicurezza del lavoro. Dalla teoria alla prassi un'interazione possibile

With the Occupational Health and Safety Act (Legislative Decree 81/2008) Italy recognizes the gender as a relevant difference to ensure the equal protection for men and women at work. In the four years of the operation of this decree, we can detect a self-evident difficulty to translate this instruction into practice. Due to this delay, the Regional Directorate INAIL of Tuscany, to prevent that this part of the rule, related with the gender prevision, remain a dead letter, has promoted a research path on this subject. Within this framework, the paper aims, through the comparison with the literature and a coherent definition of the key concepts of the Legislative Decree, to provide a useful recommendation for a research design that should be both, theoretically aware and empirically oriented, in view of the translation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act into consistent guidelines.

From a literature review of product configuration definitions to a reference framework

AbstractThis paper presents a reference framework for the configuration process. The reference framework is established through an extensive review of existing literature, and as such consolidates an extensive theoretical base. The review of literature shows a broadening of the understanding of the configuration task. The definition of the configuration task is somewhat ambiguous because different research groups define configuration tasks differently. This paper proposes a reference framework for configuration that permits a more precise understanding of a configuration task, a definition of the basic concepts in product configuration, and a total configuration system view that describes how operators come together to perform the configuration task in the configuration process. We will define the product, the product model, the configuration task, and the configuration system, and put the whole thing into perspective with the theory of technical systems, where we describe the configuration process and the different abstraction level of configurations. We will also use our resulting framework to describe sales configuration, technical configuration, and reconfiguration. We do this to synthesize previous work, to clarify and make coherent definitions of relevant terms, to extent the definition of product configuration to include “softer” products like information and service, and finally, to give a comparative framework to analyze work done in the field of product configuration. The total configuration system, together with the definition of key concepts, comprises a strong reference framework when working with, developing, and analyzing configuration systems.

Women in Family Enterprises in Estonia

This article objective is to give an overview of the women in family enterprises on the basis of theoretical sources and approaches. In order to achieve this goal, an overview of the research findings have been provided, which have analyzed a woman's role in the family business. Family firms and family entrepreneurs have been defined differently by different authors, but what all definitions have in common is the family is involvement in business activities. A family entrepreneur can be both an individual whose entrepreneurial activities involve family members and a company, which was founded by family members. In family enterprises, the members have trust towards each other and they communicate frequently, which will help them to achieve a common goal. The studies reflect predominantly men as family entrepreneurs in whose business activity the family members, including wife and children participate. The European Union has not yet provided a coherent definition of the family business, while increasing the role of women in family businesses in ensuring gender equality and giving importance to the role of the woman as the family entrepreneur.

Edges, transitions and criticality

In this article, various notions of edges encountered in digital image processing are reviewed in terms of compact representation (or completion). We show that critical exponents defined in Statistical Physics lead to a much more coherent definition of edges, consistent across the scales in acquisitions of natural phenomena, such as high resolution natural images or turbulent acquisitions. Edges belong to the multiscale hierarchy of an underlying dynamics, they are understood from a statistical perspective well adapted to fit the case of natural images. Numerical computation methods for the evaluation of critical exponents in the non-ergodic case are recalled, which apply for the vast majority of natural images. We study the framework of reconstructible systems in a microcanonical formulation, show how it redefines edge completion, and how it can be used to evaluate and assess quantitatively the adequation of edges as candidates for compact representations. We study with particular attention the case of turbulent data, in which edges in the classical sense are particularly challenged. Tests are conducted and evaluated on a standard database for natural images. We test the newly introduced compact representation as an ideal candidate for evaluating turbulent cascading properties of complex images, and we show better reconstruction performance than the classical tested methods.

What is unconventional oil and how does it impact oil resources evaluation and ultimately oil prices?

Unconventional oil resources have become a real game changer over the last few years. As a result, the overall oil industry here in the USA and elsewhere has been completely rejuvenated. This paper presents a coherent definition of unconventional oil resources and their relation to conventional oil. Unconventional oil production costs are much higher than the corresponding costs for similar grade conventional oil. However, this difference in production costs is not reflected in the price of oil, which is unsustainable. Standards for linking unconventional oil resources to oil prices are discussed in this paper, and outlined the rational distinction between conventional and unconventional oil.

A generalized model for heterogeneous and anisotropic beams including section distortions

A linear model for beams with compact or thin-walled sections and heterogeneous anisotropic materials is presented. It is obtained by means of a Ritz–Galerkin approximation using independent descriptions of the stress and displacement fields. These are evaluated by a preliminary semi-analytic solution based on a finite element description of the cross section. A coherent definition of the deformations and stresses is obtained which includes both the generalized Saint Venànt solution for generic materials and some significant additional effects, due to out-of-plane warping and section distortions. The so-built 1-D model maintains the richness of the 3-D solution using a small number of variables.

What “Is” Territorial Cohesion? What Does It “Do”?: Essentialist Versus Pragmatic Approaches to Using Concepts

The question, “what is territorial cohesion” has reverberated through European spatial policy since the publication of the European Spatial Development Perspective in 1999. Over the last 10 years, the European Spatial Policy Observation Network (ESPON) has made many efforts to define and measure the concept of “territorial cohesion”. Many such attempts assume that a policy concept must be defined in order to be “operationalized”. Or, in other words, that we must determine what the concept is before we can determine what it can or should do. This paper challenges this assumption in two parts. In the first, I review a number of ESPON projects to show how complex and uncertain these essentialist definitions have become. In the second, I analyse a number of national, regional and local government responses to the 2008 Green paper. I show that, whilst a clear and coherent definition has not been established, this concept is already operationalized in different policy frameworks. Bringing this together, I argue that users of such concepts ought to approach the issue differently, through a pragmatic line of enquiry: one that asks what territorial cohesion does, what it might do and how it might affect what other concepts, practices and materials do.

Family business and business history: An example of comparative research

This paper deals with one of the pillars of contemporary business history – the use of cross-national comparisons. Besides the longitudinal, the comparative perspective is a crucial dimension of business and economic history research. During the last decades several attempts have been made to illustrate the process of development and structuring of national markets and corporations both currently and in a historical perspective, through the use of a comparative method. This paper aims to point out the possibilities and problems with this approach. It especially highlights the role of institutional factors and changes as important determinants for national development and as obstacles for good comparative exercises. It also discusses the role of functional and coherent definitions in comparative research and the problems connected with data collection and analysis. The main research question is how cross-national comparisons can help us develop business history research further. A comparison between family firms in Italy and Sweden shows that the development of family business in these two countries exhibited extensive similarities during the early decades of the twentieth century. However after World War II the two countries became more diversified in terms of their industrial structure. While Swedish family firms became an important part of national big business, Italian family businesses developed into smaller and more flexible organisations. Thus, today in Sweden several family-owned and controlled firms are among the largest in the country, particularly in capital- and technology-intensive industries. Italian family firms, even if present among the largest in the country, are largely in industries other than high tech, and show a degree of organisational sophistication inferior to their Swedish counterparts. This paper discusses the driving forces behind this development, showing how the explicit use of the comparative, longitudinal approach can highlight the patterns of convergence and divergence across national business models.

Антропологія літератури в польському літературознавстві

The subject of the article is a problem of anthropological theory of literature in Polish, modern literature studies. Today in the Polish literary studies there is a large number of publications based on the concept of “anthropology of literature”. Popularity, of the anthropological context of literary studies encourages some researchers to observe phenomena of “anthropological revolution in literary criticism”. Polish literary studies haven’t still created a single, coherent definition of “anthropology of literature”. Most researchers emphasize interdisciplinary and open nature “of the anthropological project of literature”. The authors note that the literary text, included in a broad cultural context can be interpreted in terms beyond the literary, as one of the cultural practices.The benefits of this study is a presentation of the most modern and current trends in the Polish literary theory. Literary increasingly turning to interdisciplinary research, as a result there is a union of the areas of cultural studies, cultural anthropology and literary theory.The article presents the concepts of the following researchers: Edward Kasperski, Grzegorz Godlewski, Ryszard Nycz, Malgorzata Czerminska, Ewa Kosowska, and others.It was tested in this study, that the term “anthropology of literature” is interpreted variously, and is not subject to a single definition. Literary researcher, Michal Pawel Markowski, says, that the phrases: “literary anthropology”, and “anthropology of literature” could mean the phenomenon quite different from each other – the differences was shown in this text. According to some researchers, the notion of “anthropology of literature” is still not the clear concept of literary analysis, but a kind of an interdisciplinary project with undefined boundaries.

Prognosis Critical: Resilience and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Australia

Prognosis Critical: Resilience and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Australia

A NEW MEASURE FOR PARTY COHERENCE: APPLYING A PHYSICS-BASED CONCEPT TO THE SWISS PARTY SYSTEM

The paper revives a theoretical definition of party coherence as being composed of two basic elements, cohesion and factionalism, to propose and apply a novel empirical measure based on spin physics. The simultaneous analysis of both components using a single measurement concept is applied to data representing the political beliefs of candidates in the Swiss general elections of 2003 and 2007, proposing a connection between the coherence of the beliefs party members hold and the assessment of parties being at risk of splitting. We also compare our measure with established polarization measures and demonstrate its advantage with respect to multi-dimensional data that lack clear structure. Furthermore, we outline how our analysis supports the distinction between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms of party splitting. In this way, we are able to turn the intuition of coherence into a defined quantitative concept that, additionally, offers a methodological basis for comparative research of party coherence. Our work serves as an example of how a complex systems approach allows to get a new perspective on a long-standing issue in political science.