Face Of Disruption Research Articles

Today’s domestic US food production is the result of an industry optimized for competitive, high yielding, and high-growth production for a globalized market. Yet, industry growth may weaken food system resilience to abrupt disruptions by reducing the diversity of food supply sources. In this paper, we first explore shifts in food consumption toward reliance upon complex and long-distance food distribution, food imports, and out-of-home eating. Second, we discuss how large-scale, rapid-onset hazards may affect food access for both food secure and insecure households. We then consider whether and how regional food production might support regional food resilience. To illustrate these issues, we examine the case of western Washington, a region not only rich in agricultural production but also threatened by a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and tsunami. Such an event is expected to disrupt transportation and energy systems on which the dominant food distribution system relies. Whether a regional food supply—for the purposes of this paper, defined as food production in one or adjacent watersheds—can support a broader goal of community food resilience during large-scale disruption is a key theme of our paper. The discussion that ensues is not meant to offer simplistic, localist solutions as the one answer to disaster food provision, but neither should regional food sources be dismissed in food planning processes. Our exploration of regional farm production, small in scale and flexible, suggests regional production can help support food security prior to the arrival of emergency relief and retail restocking. Yet in order to do so, we need to have in place a robust and regionally appropriate food resilience strategy. This strategy should address caloric need, storage, and distribution, and, in so doing, rebalance our dependence on food supplied through imports and complex, domestic supply chains. Clearly, diversity of food sourcing can add redundancy and flexibility, allowing more nimble food system adaptation in the face of disruption.

Organizational healing refers to the work of repairing practices, routines, and structures in the face of disruption and strengthening organizational functioning through social relationships. Healing, more than resilience, coping, or recovery, enables greater organizational strength than what previously existed. Its unique characteristics make it an important construct for further explaining what accounts for developing exceptional organizational systems. Based on the financial and economic challenges facing Prudential Real Estate after the housing market crash in 2008, and parallels from physiological healing processes, I provide an in-depth description of the process of organizational healing that is supported by four mechanisms: empathy, interventions, collective effort, and leadership. Together the process and mechanisms explain how organizational healing enables both resilience and strengthening. These mechanisms point to activities practitioners and leaders may consider when promoting virtuous human systems.

The role of the academic, both inside and beyond the university, is under scrutiny across global higher education. In part, this is tied to the neo-liberal agenda for universities, which is underpinned by a discourse of marketisation and commodification. In part, it is amplified by the production and use of digital technologies, and the contested nature of those technologies in reproducing or reinscribing existing practices. One emerging area of interest is the role of digital technology in academic futures, especially in a world of increasing complexity and disruption. In future scenarios that are disrupted by socio-environmental crises like peak oil and climate change, the development of individual and social resilience, or the ability to adapt to such disruption, becomes imperative. This article examines how digital technologies might impact the practices of the academic in the face of disruption. Three key areas of interplay between academics and technologies are identified: firstly, in developing open educational opportunities; secondly, in engaging with the preservation of data, relationships and narratives; and thirdly, in understanding the interconnections between technology and humanity, revealed as the ‘cybernetic hypothesis’. Thus, it is argued that digital technologies might enable academics to take an activist role in helping communities to engage with uncertainty.

The inherent and growing complexity characterizing today's infrastructure systems has considerably increased their vulnerability to external disruptions. Recent world events have demonstrated how damage to one or more infrastructure components can result in disastrous political, social, and economic effects. This, in turn, has fostered the development of sophisticated quantitative methods that identify cost-effective ways of strengthening supply systems in the face of disruption. Stochastic and robust optimization can be used to tackle these strategic problems when uncertainty is present. The uncertainty dealt with in this article is related to the extent to which supply systems can be disrupted. More specifically, we propose and analyze different protection optimization models for minimizing the damage to a system resulting from the disruption of an uncertain number of system components. We compare a cost-based model and two original regret models that, to the best of our knowledge, represent the state of the art in the field of protection in location analysis. Also, we discuss how to build an operational envelope for the models considered, which can be used to identify the range of possible impacts associated with different protection strategies. The models are tested on a benchmark data set and on a new data set that was built using the Census 2001 data of the United Kingdom. We analyze and compare the protection plans generated by the models and provide some useful insights related to the robustness of the different modeling approaches.

Providing video on demand (VoD) service over the Internet in a scalable way is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose P2Cast—an architecture that uses a peer-to-peer approach to cooperatively stream video using patching techniques, while only relying on unicast connections among peers. We address the following two key technical issues in P2Cast: (1) constructing an application overlay appropriate for streaming; and (2) providing continuous stream playback (without glitches) in the face of disruption from an early departing client. Our simulation experiments show that P2Cast can serve many more clients than traditional client-server unicast service, and that it generally out-performs multicast-based patching if clients can cache more than 10% of a stream’s initial portion. We handle disruptions by delaying the start of playback and applying the shifted forwarding technique. The threshold in P2Cast, i.e., the length of time during which arriving clients form a single session, can serve as a “knob” to adjust the balance between the scalability and the clients’ viewing quality.

Abstract Introduction. One way storytelling and narrative heal is by helping families, communities, and even whole cultures develop and maintain a sense of who they are in the face of disruption, conflict, and change. Without this anchoring sense of identity, it is difficult to remain healthy in a rapidly changing world. The building of the Alaska Highway in the early 1940s was just such a disruptive experience for many First Nations people in the Yukon, and its legacy persists today. A foreshortened sense of the future and its possibilities is a common aftermath of traumatic experiences—and rapid cultural change can be traumatic. This presentation points out ways that narrative forms can help people who are caught in the turmoil of such change to rebuild a sense of identity and develop a more positive view of the future and its directions. Carol Geddes, a filmmaker from Teslin, Yukon, paraphrases Hopi storyteller Terry Tafoya when she talks about storytelling for these purposes as “a sacred and necessary responsibility.” As technology has changed, so have some aspects of storytelling, but the healing possibilities remain. In her film, Picturing a People: George Johnston, Tlingit Photographer, Geddes shows how she has adapted some of the traditional healing benefits of storytelling to a modern medium. At the same time Geddes’ presentation also makes a strong case for another, more traditional form of storytelling. In talking about how she came to make this film, Geddes tells her own personal story of finding her identity as a Native filmmaker. WHA

Behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measurements were made in an auditory selective-attention paradigm, both before and after a series of inhibition or discrimination training sessions. The presence of distractors caused poor perceptual sensitivity, weak P3 responses, conservative responding, and slow reaction times relative to baseline. Distraction prompted a frontal enhancement of ERP components occurring 100-250 ms after the onset of attended signals (N1, P2, and N2). Training ameliorated behavioral interference from distraction. Participants receiving inhibition training acquired improved inhibitory processing of distractors, an effect that peaked 200 ms after distractor onset. In a proposed model, distinct excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms work interactively to maintain sensitivity to environmental change in the face of disruption from the contextual integration of irrelevant events.

Narratives of age and uprootedness among older Cambodian refugees