Equal Prominence Research Articles

EU’s sustainable finance disclosure regulation: does the hybrid reporting regime undermine the goal to reorient capital to climate action?

ABSTRACT Disclosure and reporting are cornerstones of the European Union’s sustainable finance agenda with the goals of reorienting capital flows towards climate and other sustainable investments and minimizing greenwashing. A key component of the regulatory framework is the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), which requires fund managers to calculate and disclose a ‘sustainable investment’ (SI) percentage, aggregating exposure to activities contributing to climate mitigation and adaptation and the other environmental and social sustainability objectives of the European Union. In turn, financial advisors must use SI percentages when advising customers under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II. Defining ‘sustainable investments’ in a robust and consistent way is crucial to the effectiveness of SFDR. Based on a review of the regulatory texts and financial sector participant observations this policy analysis article explores the overlapping guidelines framing how market participants are allowed to define sustainable investments, and the implications for achieving the goals of the sustainable finance agenda. The analysis suggests that the ‘unintentionally hybrid’ SFDR regime may perversely incentivize fund managers to forgo the use of the highly detailed EU Taxonomy rules-based approach that precisely defines climate-related ‘substantial contributions’ and apply the vague principles-based approach found in SFDR Article 2.17. This would allow each financial actor to define and determine independently what constitutes a sustainable investment, circumventing the robust, if imperfect, climate-related rules of the EU Taxonomy. The SFDR regime therefore risks undermining the European Commission’s stated goals of increasing capital allocation to sustainable activities and eliminating greenwashing. Key policy insights: A sustainability disclosure regime allowing the choice between robust rules and vague principles risks creating opportunities for greenwashing and reduced comparability. Fund managers are likely to select definitions that are least difficult to apply and maximize Sustainable Investment percentages. The current EU regime risks tacitly sanctioning the use of weak metrics, in turn slowing the reorientation of capital towards climate-related and other sustainable investments. The EU must at a minimum provide binding guidance on interpreting Article 2.17, require equal prominence for both SI percentages and EU Taxonomy-alignment scores, as well as address the usability issues of the existing Taxonomy.

Analisis Framing Model Entman pada Pemberitaan Kebocoran Data Aplikasi Pedulilindungi oleh Media Online

The news media assumes a strategic role in disseminating information. The news media harbors specific objectives when reporting on an event. Lately, the media has extensively covered instances of alleged data leaks from PeduliLindungi app users. This study endeavors to identify the framing employed by online media outlets such as Detik.com, CNNIndonesia.com, and Tribunnews.com in their coverage of the case. The analysis was conducted using Robert N. Entman's framing analysis model. According to the research, the media not only imparts information but also oversees the management of personal data by data controllers and enlightens the public, who are data owners, about personal data protection. The analysis results reveal similarities in the framing of the three online media outlets in terms of (a) problem definition and (b) problem cause. However, there is a distinction between elements (c) determining decisions or moral values and (d) problem-solving. Detik.com and CNNIndonesia.com frame their reporting to provide equal prominence to both data controllers and owners, whereas Tribunnews.com's reporting framework favors data controllers. Based on the research findings, it is plausible to conclude that the framing employed by the three online media outlets is factual.

Korean EFL Learner’s Suprasegmental Features

This study delves into some aspects of suprasegmental features such as syllable structure, stress, and rhythm and compares them between NS and NNS. It is investigated in spectrograms and sound waveforms that 1. On the aspect of syllable structure in English, the onset and the coda in English syllable structure are characterized to have a maximum of 3 and 4 consonant clusters, respectively. In contrast, Korean allows only 1 single consonant in onset and coda position. This cross-linguistic difference gives rise to the insertion of the neutral vowel /ɨ/ to break up the consonant clusters in English words, in which the inserted vowel forms an independent wave chunk. 2. Refer to stress in English, it is universally recognized as every single English word or sentence consist of its own stress. On the contrary, Korean lacks stress placed at the level of the word. It follows that Korean EFL learners tend to put an approximately equal prominence on every syllable in a word and to exhibit a tendency to put a strong prominence particularly on the first syllable of a word with more than 2 syllables, which is dubbed an ‘initial prominence phenomenon’in this paper. 3. In relation to English rhythm, English is certainly a stress-timed rhythm, but Korean is a syllable-timed rhythm. The core differences between the stress-timed rhythm and the syllable-timed are on the form of ‘foot’, which is established when stressed and unstressed syllables occur in relatively regular alternating patterns in sentences, led to a phenomenon of that the number of feet depends on the timing of articulation within a whole sentence. “This paper finds significance in exhibiting suprasegmental features in visualization between NS and NNS, given that these features play a more important role than segmental ones. It can also serve a milestone for future researchers in the EFL phonetic filed.”

"Do They See Me as a Virus?": Imagining Asian American Environmental Games

"Do They See Me as a Virus?":Imagining Asian American Environmental Games Edmond Y. Chang Night Flyer. By Mike Ren Yi. 2020. Even The Ocean. By Melos Han-Tani and Marina Krittaka. 2016. Pandemic 2020. By Chanhee Choi. 2020. Given the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, the national racial reckoning and spike in anti-Asian hate, and the ever-present consequences of climate change and environmental precarity, three recent independent games—Night Flyer (2020) by Mike Ren Yi, Even the Ocean (2016) by Melos Han-Tani and Marina Krittaka, and Pandemic 2020 (2020) by Chanhee Choi—engage the interactions and intersections of game studies, environmental studies, and Asian American studies. All three games demonstrate the power and potential of video games as environmental worldbuilding, environmentalist interventions, and ecocritical play; they imagine and engage players' relationship to and even problematic exploitation of their environments, both natural and built, embodied and virtual, utopian and dystopian. As Alenda Y. Chang argues in Playing Nature, these games are "environmental texts," referencing Lawrence Buell's criteria in The Environmental Imagination, and therefore an environmental game: "the ideal environmental text [and game] produces involvement. It brings the nonhuman world into equal prominence with the human, exposes humanity's moral responsibility to and participation in the natural world, and portrays the environment as fluid process, not static representation" (32). Moreover, beyond the ecocritical values and ideals [End Page 145] that frame and underpin each, these three games raise additional questions and provocations concerning other norms, identities, structures, even feelings that interact or intersect with their obvious and thematic environmental concerns. These designers and games provide an opportunity to contingently conceive of a growing body of Asian American games to 1) highlight Asian American contributions to environmental studies and game studies, 2) make legible Asian American games as part of environmental literature and media writ large, and 3) creatively articulate what I am calling an Asianfuturist imagining of the environment that points to critical utopian possibilities. The close readings and close playings of the following games and responses from the game-makers themselves contribute to the growing body of Asian American game studies already underway such as the recent work by Tara Fickle, whose The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities addresses the "ludo-Orientalist" infrastructures of literature, games, citizenship, and nation. Fickle defines "ludo-Orientalism" as the "design, marketing, and rhetoric of games" that "shapes how Asians as well as East-West relations are imagined and where notions of foreignness and racial hierarchies get reinforced" (3). An extension of techno-Orientalism,1 ludic Orientalism not only engages the digital, computational, or mechanical aspects of video games but also foregrounds the ways that "gaming, both digital and analog, is used in everyday life to provide alternative logics and modes of sense making, particularly as a means of justifying racial fictions and other arbitrary human typologies" (9). In other words, Fickle and the work of others like Christopher Patterson and Dean Chan deploy games as theory in order to examine the ways that games not only render race as mere pixels and representation, but they also enact and are embedded with racialized norms, logics, and mechanics. Night Flyer, Even the Ocean, and Pandemic 2020 and their respective designers theorize their own work, their relationship to their identities and positionalities, and the potential for Asian American games. Moreover, the games and designers presented below bridge more traditional environmental studies, Asian American ecocriticism, and the recent environmental turn in video games studies. Robert T. Hayashi, in his essay "Beyond Walden Pond: Asian American Literature and the Limits of Ecocriticism," argues for understandings of nature that are not centered on or by whiteness, to expand the definitions of the environment that does not replicate the "historical assumption that nature is equivalent to environment," and most importantly, to consider "how ethnic/racial minorities have defined, experienced, apprehended, and represented" nature and the environment (61). Hayashi reimagines "how the study of Asian Americans relates to dominant notions of the natural world" (Hayashi "Environment" par. 7). He calls for a consideration of "a wider range of texts, disciplinary approaches, and epistemological assumptions" (Hayashi, 61) regarding the links between social and natural domains, particularly...

Art, design and modernity: the Bauhaus and beyond

This essay explores the relationship between art and design in the twentieth century through the Bauhaus, the school which established a revolutionary model for modern art and design education between 1919 and 1933. The Bauhaus vision of design is closely identified with a ‘machine aesthetic’, where the form of an object is governed by its function and adapted to the demands of mass production. The pedagogy of the school, which involved a distinctive and unstable synthesis of art, craft, and design, was inspired by the Gesamtkunstwerk, an idea that was influential among avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, which is usually translated as a synthesis of the arts. This essay explores the utopianism of the Bauhaus, and its relationship to the Gesamtkunstwerk, through a comparison between the ideas of two artist-designers associated with the school: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) and Anni Albers (1899-1994). Although the ‘machine aesthetic’ of industrial design shaped the reception of the Bauhaus, Albers’s work as a weaver, textile artist and textile designer ought to be given equal prominence in evaluation of the school’s design ethos. Once it is, established criticisms of the utopianism of the Bauhaus are called into question, because they take their cue from a narrow and selective account of the activities of the school. This essay concludes by sketching some implications of this shift of perspective for contemporary design.

Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles by Luke Habberstad

Reviewed by: Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles by Luke Habberstad Charles Sanft Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles by Luke Habberstad. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 240. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper, $30.00 e-book. Luke Habberstad's Forming the Early Chinese Court is an original, lucid, and insightful consideration of developments in Western Han governance. Habberstad examines the development of bureaucratic offices in the period, portraying a process of increasing differentiation among roles. The center of politics at the time was the imperial court, and Habberstad examines changes that the emperors, their associates, and their competitors made in the interests of power and improved administration. Although Habberstad incorporates some archaeologically excavated texts, most sources for his study are texts from the received tradition. [End Page 228] Many generations of scholars, premodern and modern, have studied those materials, and it can be difficult to say something new about them. Habberstad does it, though. One of the things that set Habberstad's work apart from most studies in this vein is his approach to his sources. He treats his sources as subjects for close reading and not mere collections of information. The result is a multifaceted and agile book that will be of interest to scholars who study the Han dynasty and to those who study bureaucracy as a broader phenomenon. Much of Habberstad's analysis emerges from comparisons between Shiji 史記 and Hanshu 漢書, which is itself not new. According to Hou Hanshu 後漢書, Ban Biao 班彪 (3–54) took inspiration for his historiography from Sima Qian 司馬遷 (d. ca. 80 BCE), creator of Shiji, and his work became the kernel that his son built upon when writing Hanshu.1 Medieval metahistorical works such as Shitong 史通, by Liu Zhiji 劉知幾 (661–721), contrast Shiji and Hanshu, and Ni Si's 倪思 (1147–1220) Ban Ma yitong 班馬異同 is an extended consideration of their differences and similarities. Many modern scholars, such as Wang Liqi 王利器, have also made comparisons that at first glance might seem to be similar to Habberstad's.2 Habberstad distinguishes his approach from those of preceding scholars by giving his source materials the kind of close examination most often reserved for the study of literature. Doing so leads him in a different direction than most treatments of early bureaucracy, which often fall under the rubric of institutional history. Habberstad both acknowledges the value of institutional studies, which is immense, and differentiates his own work (pp. 11–13). This is not to say that historiographical aspects are absent from Forming the Early Chinese Court; just the opposite. Habberstad's comparisons put his subjects into historical contexts, which combine with his detailed examinations to depict shifting practices and shifting conceptions of bureaucracy. The result is a work that does not fit into the usual categories of early China studies, which makes its approach all the more penetrating. [End Page 229] The ways that Forming the Early Chinese Court goes beyond common divisions of sources are perhaps most evident in chapter 5, "The Literary Invention of Bureaucracy" (pp. 139–67). While the title might seem to promise a consideration of literature, and literature is indeed a large part of the discussion, Habberstad gives equal prominence to charts in which Shiji and Hanshu depict institutional change over time. Under Habberstad's analysis, the tables, no less than literary considerations of what an official should be like, demonstrate developments toward an understanding of bureaucracy in which distinctions among official positions become more important and indeed clearer. The means for making those distinctions and their implications are important throughout the book. Habberstad devotes a chapter (pp. 33–60), for instance, to considering salaries and sumptuary privileges that Western Han practice gave persons of particular status and how they related to those of other statuses. He addresses one of the most interesting questions about those rules, which is the frequency of their violation. Habberstad presents these systems "not as clearly defined tools for asserting power but as a collection of processes" (p. 58). Such privileges were not only part of Han officials' lives. Habberstad centers a chapter (pp. 61–84) on discussions about how the leader of Xiongnu 匈奴 would participate in an imperial...

Making direction a first‐class citizen of Tobler's first law of geography

AbstractWaldo Tobler frequently reminded us that the law named after him was nothing more than calling for exceptions. This article discusses one of these exceptions. Spatial relations between points are frequently modeled as vectors in which both distance and direction are of equal prominence. However, in Tobler's first law of geography, such a relation is described only from the perspective of distance by relating the decreasing similarity of observations in some attribute space to their increasing distance in geographic space. Although anisotropic versions of many geographic analysis techniques, such as directional semivariograms, anisotropy clustering, and anisotropic point pattern analysis, have been developed over the years, direction remains on the level of an afterthought. We argue that, compared to distance, directional information is still under‐explored and anisotropic techniques are substantially less frequently applied in everyday GIS analysis. Commonly, when classical spatial autocorrelation indicators, such as Moran's I, are used to understand a spatial pattern, the weight matrix is only built from distance, without direction being considered. Similarly, GIS operations, such as buffering, do not take direction into account either, with distance in all directions being treated equally. In reality, meanwhile, particularly in urban structures and when processes are driven by the underlying physical geography, direction plays an essential role. In this article we ask whether the development of early GIS, data (sample) sparsity, and Tobler's law lead to a theory‐induced blindness for the role of direction. If so, is it possible to envision direction becoming a first‐class citizen of equal importance to distance instead of being an afterthought only considered when the deviation from a perfect circle becomes too obvious to be ignored?

ANAPHORA RESOLUTION IN L2 ENGLISH

AbstractWe test the interpretation of pronominal forms in L2 speakers of English whose L1 is Spanish. Previous research on learners of nonnull subject languages has shown conflicting results. The aim of the present study is to reconcile previous evidence and shed light on the factors that determine learners’ difficulty to interpret pronominal forms in the L2. In six comprehension experiments, we found that intermediate L2 speakers did not show increased difficulty compared to native speakers in integrating multiple sources of information (syntactic, discourse, pragmatic) to resolve ambiguous pronouns in intrasentential anaphora and cataphora conditions. However, we also found that when two referents with equal prominence are introduced using a conjoined noun phrase in the preceding context, the learner’s performance is significantly different than the performance of the native speakers, both in intrasentential and intersentential anaphora. We suggest that L2 speakers may encounter difficulties evaluating the salience of the antecedents during pronoun resolution.

A review of global surveillance on the muscle strengthening and balance elements of physical activity recommendations.

Introduction:Despite the importance of muscle strengthening and balance activities for health, these elements of the physical activity recommendations are often omitted from communication campaigns and national surveillance systems. This paper reviews national physical activity surveillance systems to determine which tools assess muscle strengthening and balance activities.Methods:We reviewed each tool that was used to inform the Global Observatory for Physical Activity (GoPA) country card prevalence estimates.Results:Of the 139 countries with GoPA country cards, 21 countries reported having no physical activity prevalence data. The prevalence estimates for 74 countries came from the World Health Organization 2014 Global Status Report on Non-Communicable Diseases. For the remaining 44 countries, a range of national and international surveys were used. A limited number of tools sought to assess muscle strengthening activities, and even fewer assessed balance and coordination activities.Discussion:Several issues arise from this review, including the need to: verify the strength of the evidence to inform whether muscle strength and balance should be given equal prominence to the aerobic recommendation; establish which activities count towards different aspects of the guidelines; and confirm whether the muscle strengthening and balance components of the guidelines are ‘in addition’ to the aerobic component.

Acoustic Manifestation of English Lexical Stress Pattern by Native Erei Speakers

Lexical stress is the combination of intensity, fundamental frequency and vowel quality acoustically. Like many other non-segmental features of English, it is very vital for intelligibility, foreign accentedness and comprehensibility since wrong placement of primary and/or secondary stress in English words might lead to different interpretations. The feature is not observable in Erei, which is a tonal language, where all the syllables or vowels in a word are given strong form. Erei language is different from free variable stress system of English, and the difference between the two languages may likely result in the transfer of Erei tonal system in the articulation of English lexical stress by native Erei speakers. The study examined the deployment of English lexical stress in the speech outputs of Erei-English bilingual speakers in Biase Local Government Area of Cross River State Nigeria. Eight subjects were selected from four secondary schools. Eight words, selected from Cruttenden’s Gimson’s pronunciation of English, were used for the analysis. The metrical theory, developed by Lieberman (1975), was adopted as the framework for the analysis. Findings indicated that Erei-English bilinguals place stress on the wrong syllables as shown in the native British speaker’s output, and therefore, do not observe English rhythmic alternation rules. All the syllables in a word are almost given equal prominence, a rehash of the tonal nature of Erei, affecting the intelligibility of their spoken English. Based on the findings, the study suggested the availability of well-equipped language laboratories, provision of sophisticated audio-visual aids and computerised speech equipment in Nigeria as well as language teachers in L2 situations should focus instruction on non-segmental features before the individual segments to promote international intelligibility in the speech outputs of L2 users.

Reading Communities: A Dialogical Approach to French and Francophone Literature = Communautés de lecture: pour une approche dialogique des œuvres classiques et contemporaines. Edited by Oana Panaïté

These essays, three of which are in English and the remainder in French, derive from a collaborative project involving scholars from the USA and France. As the subtitles indicate between them, the authors are concerned to compare works across periods, cultures, and genres. The partial exception is David Spieser-Landes’s nonetheless informative presentation of the politics of dialogism in the contemporary regional literature of Alsace. The ‘classical’ texts (in one case a film) span a period from 1559 to 1959. The earliest of the contemporary texts is Abdoulaye Sadji’s novel Nini (1954). Six of the essays are each the work of two scholars in collaboration, though speaking with one voice rather than embodying a secondary exploitation of dialogism. In her short Introduction, Oana Panaïté helpfully differentiates the contributors’ underlying approach from that of Bakhtin. The collective enterprise raises many questions in relation to methodology, but discussion of method is not allowed to overwhelm the readings themselves. The contributors’ background in francophone literature is evident throughout. It is in especially sharp focus in Lynn Palermo and Gladys Francis’s positing of a dialogue between André Breton’s Martinique, charmeuse de serpents and Gerty Dambury’s novel set in Guadeloupe, Les Rétifs. Alison Rice and Olivier Morel’s essay, notwithstanding their recourse to Michel de Certeau’s notion of déplacement, is less revelatory regarding Zola’s ‘J’accuse!’ than on Alain Mabanckou’s rewriting of it in his novel Verre cassé. Vera Klekovkina reads back into Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ a foreshadowing of the warning in Amélie Nothomb’s Le Voyage d’hiver about fantasies of domination, but it is the contemporary work that is her main focus. The same may be said of the comparison by Margaret Gray and Jason Herbeck of passages from Proust’s Combray and Édouard Glissant’s novel La Lézarde. Vlad Dima’s consideration of Les 400 Coups and Ousmane Sembène’s film Xala as examples of meta-cinema is particularly revealing on Sembène, but his authoritative presentation of Truffaut’s theory and practice has its own value. Anne-Marie Petitjean keeps L’Heptaméron and Anne Hébert’s L’Île de la demoiselle continually in play and is perceptive about Marguerite’s sixty-seventh story. Laurent Loty and Véronique Tacquin give equal prominence to both their questions: ‘Kourouma, un Voltaire africain?’ and ‘Voltaire, un Kourouma européen?’, and argue convincingly that Candide has been widely misinterpreted. Flavien Falantin’s elegant discussion of bêtise in Madame Bovary and Sadji’s Nini gives a new complexion to Flaubert’s presentation of Emma. Dominique Licops and Paul Breslin’s lively comparison of The Tempest and Césaire’s Une tempête should commend itself to students of both writers. The complementary expertise of Hall Bjørnstad and Oana Panaïté leads to a powerful consideration of Marie NDiaye and Pascal that is an exemplary justification of the project as a whole and casts fresh light on the celebrated evocation of man as ‘un roseau (pensant)’. Any initial worry that this volume might be a factitious enterprise is quickly dispelled by these innovative essays, all of which have the potential to stimulate considerable further dialogue.

Analysis and Classification of Barriers and Critical Success Factors for Implementing a Cloud Data Governance Strategy

The general consensus in literature seems to suggest that data governance refers to the entirety of decision rights and responsibilities concerning the management of data assets in organisations. These definitions do not however provide equal prominence for the data governance within the cloud computing technology context. As such, this deficit calls for in-depth understanding of data governance and cloud Computing. This trend contributes to changes in data governance strategy in the organisation, such as the organisation’s structure and regulations, people, technology, process, roles and responsibilities. This is one of the great challenges facing organizations today when they move their data to Cloud Computing environments, particularly how Cloud technology affects data governance. The authors’ general observation reveals that the area of data governance in general is under researched and not widely practiced by organisations, let alone when it is concerned with cloud computing, where research is really in its infancy and far from reaching maturity. This paper attempts to identify the possible common barriers and critical success factors for implementing cloud data governance in the hope that it helps the reader to be aware of these barriers and consider them in future developments in the field.

Reviewing the status of national spatial data infrastructures in Africa

The paper reviews the status of National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) in Africa, based on a survey conducted between April and October 2014. Web searches and data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs E-Government survey of year 2014 were used to supplement the survey data. Using the SDI-Readiness methodology, the SDI-Readiness index is computed. Of the twelve countries reviewed, Senegal (0.69), Rwanda (0.65), South Africa (0.64) and Ghana (0.61) have higher indices; while Tanzania (0.33), Zimbabwe (0.33), Botswana (0.35) and Malawi (0.38) have lower indices. Countries with higher SDI-Readiness indices, which is a proxy for the capacity and willingness to develop an SDI, have a better chance of success in developing their NSDI. Lower indices implies that a lot more effort is required by the respective countries. Although all SDI components should be given equal prominence, the study suggests that more emphasis should be placed on improving the human and financial resources if Africa is to succeed in NSDI development.

Autonomy of the child in the South African context: is a 12year old of sufficient maturity to consent to medical treatment?

BackgroundA child is a developing person with evolving capacities that include autonomy, mental (decisional) capacity and capacity to assume responsibility. Hence, children are entitled to participatory (autonomy) rights in South Africa as observed in the Children’s Act 38 of 2005. According to section 129 of the Act a child may consent to his or her own medical treatment provided that he or she is over the age of 12 years and is of sufficient maturity and decisional capacity to understand the various implications of the treatment including the risks and benefits thereof. However, the Act does not provide a definition for what qualifies as ‘sufficient maturity’ nor does it stipulate how health professionals ought to assess the decisional capacity of a child. In addition, South Africa is a culturally diverse country. The Western liberal notion of autonomy may not necessarily find equal prominence in the mores of people with a different worldview. Hence we demonstrate a few salient comparisons between legal liberal moral theory and African communitarianism as pertinent to the autonomy of the child.DiscussionChildren are rights-holders by virtue of their humanity. Their dignity as individual human persons affords them the entitlement to human rights as contemplated under the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. However, contrary to the traditional Western notion of individual autonomous persons African societies hold a communalistic notion of person hence there is less regard for individual autonomy and rights with more emphasis on the communal good and maintaining the continuity of relationships and interdependencies shared within a community. A child considered in this view is not regarded as a full person. This implies that decisions concerning the child, including consent to medical treatment are discussed and determined by the community to which the child belongs. Lastly, in this article, we draw on the notion of capacity for responsibility to produce a pragmatic definition of sufficient maturity.ConclusionIt seems reasonable to suggest a move away from a general legal age of consent for medical treatment toward more individualised, context-specific approaches in determining the maturity of a child patient to consent to medical treatment. Perhaps, decision-making with respect to consent to the medical treatment of a child belonging to a traditional African community where the notion of a person is embedded in communitarianism ought to involve the child’s parents/guardians/caregivers where possible provided that the best interests of the child are awarded priority.

Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia Catherine Allerton Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013, xi+221p.Potent Landscapes, by Catherine Allerton, is engagingly written anthropological study of place and culture in Southeast Asia. Its ethnographic focus is a two-placed, partly resettled village (p. 5) in Manggarai region of eastern Indonesia, with settlement Wae-Rebo in highlands, and its lowland offshoot Kombo developed in 1960s as part of a wider governmental resettle- ment drive. To differentiate itself from structuralist Leiden School that identifies eastern Indonesia as a field of study and pursues a cosmological coherence within field, this book takes a phenomenological (p. 4) approach that puts bodily experience at center of analysis, including those messy and contradictory aspects of people's life. Allerton presents a multisensory (p. 15) picture of how landscapes gain potency through place- and path-making out of entanglement between people and place. Meanwhile, by examining influence of Catholic conversion, state development, resettlement, and migration on this eastern Indonesian village, Allerton also ties work to contemporary issues.Three recurring themes are key to master core of book. First, equal prominence is given both to taken-for-granted, often unspoken aspects of everyday life and the extraordinary, ritual or ancestral (p. 9) aspects of life. Allerton argues that place- and path-making happens both through explicit creation of presence in ritual performances and through everyday practices that do not consciously aim to create values. Readers can easily see close entwinement of mundane and ritual life is repeatedly brought out throughout chapters.Second, landscapes, a rather encompassing concept in book, include not only mountains or fields, but also-rooms, houses, and paths-and combine both material and immaterial aspects. Human activities take place in concrete materiality of landscapes whose characteristics also shape people's social life. Beyond this, Allerton places more emphases on immateriality of landscapes, which refers that landscapes have agency, evoke human memories and emotions, and have their own concerns and desires.Last but not least, Manggarai landscape is defined by mobility along several dimensions. As chapters expand outwards in ever-widening concentric circles (p. 15), different kinds of places, from smallest and most intimate household rooms to larger scales of landscapes, are connected through daily movements between houses, to fields, up and down mountains, and more poignant journeys along marriage paths or to outside realms. Closely related to Allerton's strategy of personifying landscapes, is her attempt to illustrate temporal dimension of mobile landscapes. Rooms, houses, and villages have their own course of social lives and need to undergo rites of passage as humans do so through life to realize identity transformation and reproduction.The main contents of book are organized in six chapters. Chapter one examines household rooms, which have not featured prominently in many writings on Southeast Asian houses. Allerton asserts rooms can be agents to connect with ancestors, gather up souls, and transmit mysterious blood spirits. By showing entanglement of rooms with their occupants' bodies and souls during key phrases in human life cycle, Allerton argues that rooms emerge as different kinds of entities in context of different practices and how particular rituals create presence of room as agents. In this way, important social relationship among Manggarai people can be learnt from narrative of social life of a Manggarai room. However, when doing so, Allerton emphasizes that we should not objectify rooms but understand it as an ongoing dynamics in a room-household's developmental cycle (p. …

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OF ACADEMIC STAFF AND ITS EFFECTIVENESS TO TEACHING AND RESEARCH – BASED ON THE EXAMPLE OF ESTONIAN UNIVERSITIES

1. Introduction and method The aim of the research is to identify options for developing performance management (hereinafter PM) of the academic staff (hereinafter AS) based on the example of Estonian universities. For the purposes of this research, the scope of PM is limited to the performance appraisal (hereinafter PA) and remuneration systems of AS, enabling more analyses of interplay between those two components. The transition from the traditional university to the modern university after the economic crisis has brought several changes in the management of universities in the last decade. There have been significant decreases in student numbers and the end of private funding for studying in Estonia too. The objects of the research are the PM systems for AS in the three leading universities and their subunits in Estonia: the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Tartu (hereinafter U1); the School of Economics and Business Administration at the Tallinn University of Technology (hereinafter U2); and the private Estonian Business School (hereinafter U3). The main focus is the PM of the AS in the Economics and Business Administration faculties, where there were the biggest changes in teaching and research. The research question is to identify the effectiveness of PA and remuneration systems and to investigate the options for developing PM in the universities. The management of university faculties has been changing and has increasingly used management instruments of the private sector, which need professional managers. The research methodology was developed incorporating exploratory methods, including questionnaire-based surveys and interviews. Exploratory analyses and qualitative methods were conducted involving the analyses of documentation universities had on their PA and remuneration systems (Remuneration and benefits, Salary Rules, Staff recruitment etc.), focus group and semi-structured interviews with academic leaders, and participatory observations within a case study in U1. The case study holistically analyses PM policies in U1 by using several methods and includes quantitative and qualitative evidence. Quantitative methods included a questionnaire-based survey of AS in three university subunits--13 questions and open questions (see Table 4). The author used the Kruskal-Wallis test for finding the differences in opinions of AS at different universities. The data from U1 was gathered over a period of 10 years, similar surveys were carried out in 2004, 2007 and 2013. The same survey was gathered at U2 and U3 in 2013. To determine the particularities of the aforementioned systems, a total of 108 AS were surveyed in 2013 and nine academic leaders were interviewed at their universities (subunits). Seven focus group interviews (the type of Delphi method discussions) were also conducted at U1. Descriptive statistics and correlation analysis were used to analyse the results obtained. 2. Literature review 2.1. PM in general There are many definitions of PM. However, in principle it is defined as a process of measuring and developing the individual and the team performance; a set of PM practices with goal setting and planning, monitoring and feedback, appraising and remunerating of employees (Aguinis and Pierce 2007, De Andres et al. 2010). Some scientists have taken an even broader approach, incorporating topics like managing by values, empowerment and participative management (Mone et al. 2011, Biron et al. 2011), or organisational performance and leadership (Kivipold and Vadi 2013), or have associated it with creating a shared vision of the aims of the organisation (Decramer 2013), or emphasise the need to give equal prominence to leadership and management to achieve their objectives in schools and colleges (Bush and Middlewood 2013). PM is also an integral part of the managerial control system aimed at employee work activities and work results. …

Evaluation of Graph Databases Performance through Indexing Techniques

The aim of this paper is to evaluate , through indexing techniques, the performance of Neo4j and OrientDB, both graph databases technologies and to come up with strength and weaknesses os each technology as a candidate for a storage mechanism of a graph structure. An index is a data structure that makes the searching faster for a specific node in concern of graph databases. The referred data structure is habitually a B-tree, however, can be a hash table or some other logic structure as well. The pivotal point of having an index is to speed up search queries, primarily by reducing the number of nodes in a graph or table to be examined. Graphs and graph databases are more commonly associated with social networking or “graph search” style recommendations. Thus, these technologies remarkably are a core technology platform for some Internet giants like Hi5, Facebook, Google, Badoo, Twitter and LinkedIn. The key to understanding graph database systems, in the social networking context, is they give equal prominence to storing both the data (users, favorites) and the relationships between them (who liked what, who ‘follows’ whom, which post was liked the most, what is the shortest path to ‘reach’ who). By a suitable application case study, in case a Twitter social networking of almost 5,000 nodes imported in local servers (Neo4j and Orient-DB), one queried to retrieval the node with the searched data, first without index (full scan), and second with index, aiming at comparing the response time (statement query time) of the aforementioned graph databases and find out which of them has a better performance (the speed of data or information retrieval) and in which case. Thereof, the main results are presented in the section 6.

Effects of firm size and geographical proximity on different models of interaction between university and firm: A case study

This paper analyzes a total of 1930 collaboration projects, including contract research, joint research, technology transfer, and incubation models, between National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) and firms during the period between 2001 and 2009. Effects of both firm size and geographical proximity on the frequency of different models of collaboration are addressed. Results show that large-sized enterprises prefer adopting the contract research model and implementing it in a more comprehensive cooperation mechanism or with long-term cooperation relationships. By contrast, small and medium-sized enterprises prefer to give equal prominence to both contract research for research subject dominance and joint research due to low investment requirements. Results also show that geographical proximity is an important factor during the interaction between enterprises and NCKU. However, the influence is quite different when the cooperation models are compared individually.

In Search of Nirvana: Why Nirvana: The True Story Could Never Be “True”

In my book Nirvana: The True Story (2006), I undertake an autoethnographical approach to biography, attempting to impart an understanding of my chosen subject—the rock band Nirvana—via discussion of my own experiences. On numerous occasions, I veer off into tangential asides, frequently using extensive footnotes to explain obscure musical references. Personal anecdotes are juxtaposed with “insider” information; at crucial points in the story (notable concerts, the first meeting of singer Kurt Cobain with his future wife Courtney Love, the news of Cobain's suicide), the linear thread of the narrative spills over into a multi-faceted approach, with several different (and sometimes opposing) voices given equal prominence. Despite my firsthand experience of the band, however, Nirvana: The True Story is not considered authoritative, even within its own field. This article considers the reasons why this may be the case.

Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897–1959

Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897–1959