Picture Look Research Articles

Holding up a mirror: researching symmetrically to explore exclusion, othering and whiteness in local environmental governance

ABSTRACT The positioning of minoritised and racialised groups such as Global South immigrants as deficient in knowledge, language or motivation is a form of othering prevalent in all spheres of Global North societies, and the environmental sector is no exception. In both academic literature and policy, there is an assumption that minoritised groups are “hard to reach” and less interested in sustainability than the usual white middle-class environmental subjects. But, what might the picture look like if it focused on those who have the power to make choices about whose interests matter and whose can be ignored? By holding up a mirror to the powerful and asking them to reflect on their own practices and assumptions, we centre the operation of structural inequality to show that the lack of inclusivity in sustainability policy is very often a product of structural whiteness rather than the deficiencies of racialised communities. This article draws on interviews with key informants involved in local environmental governance to explore how people in positions of power serve to obstruct, erase or facilitate the engagement of racialised communities in activities relevant for environmental change. We argue that a symmetrical approach to research and analysis is needed to avoid othering immigrants while surfacing whiteness as the context in which othering occurs. We call for greater attention to how white structural advantage shapes the design and implementation of local green agendas in order to develop just and transformative approaches to environmental policy-making.

Establishing Laboratory Benchmarks Beyond 2023

It would be fair to say, many of us with scientific minds have a love-hate relationship with Benchmarks and KPIs. Love the aspect that we have clear and measurable targets to aspire to, with formulas and graphs to demonstrate this. Hate the time, resources and rigor required to enter, analyse, present, and rationalise the outcomes - especially when there are so many confounding factors, coupled with the often misdirected scrutiny that can be associated with them. This presentation takes a big picture look at our current practices, some examples of how leading-edge tools can assist in troubleshooting, and a glimpse into the future where we can create more love and less hate, for benchmarks!

Traditional method of preparing accessories for Pahari miniatures

In Indian miniature painting the artists use the same techniques and materials. They usually draw on a piece of paper or on a special board. Sometimes they apply a layer of white chalk on the wall before drawing. Then they paint over that layer and start adding color. Every artist has their own way of doing it. Some artists finish one section before moving on to the next, while others add all the colors at once and correct any mistakes later. Before starting, they place the picture upside down on a smooth stone and tap it with a special conch shell or stone. This makes the colors smoother and the picture looks better. The whole process depends on the use of good material to make the picture look beautiful and last longer.
 
 

Impact of COVID-19 food supply chain: Comparing the use of IoT in three South African supermarkets

This study aims to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by comparing the performance of three major supermarkets in South Africa and addressing the following questions. 1) What is the impact of a supply chain disruption on the food system? 2) What interventions (short and long-term) are taken by the food supply chain to mitigate disruption? 3) What does the post-pandemic picture look like for the food retail sector? This study adopts a comparative research approach and investigates direct strategies adopted by various food supply chain actors to mitigate the impact of covid-19. This study compares how retailers Checkers, Woolworths, and Pick n Pay have adapted their business models to remain resilient during COVID-19 lockdown. The results show that the food supply chain remained resilient even with demand management challenges at the lockdown. Food supply chain issues came under a spotlight as borders and production plants were shut down or restricted to contain the spread of the virus. This study establishes that the food shortage is primarily caused by panic buying at the beginning of lockdown, causing shock in the supply chain cadence. The other aspect of food security issue is attributed to food availability and socioeconomic problems resulting from loss of income. On sustainability, there are fears that control measures such as packaging (increased use of plastic), cleaning chemicals, waste and sanitisation of space to maintain hygiene as required for covid-19 can undermine the gains towards preserving the environment.

Will Electric Vehicles Be Killed (again) or Are They the Next Mobility Killer App?

Electric vehicles (EVs) have been around for more than a hundred years. Nevertheless, their deployment has not been a sustainable success up until now. Many scientists, engineers and policymakers argue that EVs are a promising, maybe even indispensable option to achieve ambitious decarbonization goals, if powered by electricity from renewable energy sources. At the moment, the EVs market is gaining a lot of momentum and we may be near the point of no return for a sustained mass market deployment of electric vehicles. Many papers exist that describe future prospects of EVs. In our commentary we try to provide a bigger picture view and look at market and societal aspects. We analyze why previous generations of EVs were not successful and how current electric vehicles could become a sustainable success. We perform a semi-quantitative Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis and find that current electric vehicle designs are technologically on par with or better than conventional alternatives. Car buyers go electric when the economics make sense to them. We conclude that incentives are needed for electric vehicles until battery costs lower—as much as to allow EVs to become cheaper—from a total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective, than other alternatives. Other policy measures are needed to overcome remaining barriers, especially in supporting the setup and operation of publicly accessible recharging points to overcome range anxiety. EVs in isolation may not be the next mobility killer app. The real next mobility killer app may emerge as an autonomous shared EV in a world where the border between public and private transport will cease to exist. The findings of our commentary are relevant for scientists, policymakers and industry.

Characterization of Highly Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria found in an Urban Waterway

Pseudomonas are a group Gram‐negative Gammaproteobacteria with numerous different species that are a risk of causing bacterial infections. The goal is to measure how many Pseudomonas are present in different urban waterways, to evaluate if they are resistant to antibiotics and the degree of resistance they show, and to determine the mechanisms of resistance that they utilize. The research was conducted on urban waterways in the suburban Chicago region. Pseudomonas Isolation Agar (PIA) is a selective media that enriches for Pseudomonas. Water from the urban waterways was grown on PIA plates containing antibiotics, which allowed the level of resistance to be measured and evaluated based on qualitative growth. An antibiotic panel was chosen that provides a broad set of antibiotics which will each interact with the bacteria differently. Growth assays at varying concentrations of antibiotic allow for the degree of resistance to be evaluated. Whole genome sequencing of highly antibiotic resistant Pseudomonas allows for a bigger picture look at which genes make the bacteria resistant. We have found massive resistance in the waterways in several of the antibiotics. The hope of this work is to characterize potentially dangerous microbes that live in urban waterways.

Household Cash Balances during COVID-19: A Distributional Perspective

Months after the declaration of national emergency on March 13, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact the economy and household finances in dramatic and unprecedented ways. Household spending, which initially fell sharply during the shutdowns in March and April (Cox et al, 2020), has slowly recovered. The most financially vulnerable families have been impacted the most, with lower-income earners and Black and Latinx workers facing the highest job losses. The government responded with the massive CARES Act to bolster income and economic activity through stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, and the Payroll Protection Program. Prior research has demonstrated the importance of liquid savings for maintaining financial resilience during times of uncertainty (Farrell et al, 2019; Farrell et al, 2020). What has been the net effect of these various forces on families’ liquid savings? Aggregate statistics suggest an increase in the deposits of households and nonprofits as well as commercial banks since March, 2020, but what does the picture look like for the median household and, in particular, low-income households? We analyze trends in checking account balances between 2019 and October 2020 to understand how the pandemic and these government interventions have affected household financial outcomes across the income spectrum. As a highly liquid asset, checking accounts often serve as a family’s first line of defense to shield against financial shocks. It is also important to provide a distributional, household-centric view of account balance trends, which might be masked by aggregate public statistics on deposit levels. We address these questions via a unique data asset based on the daily balances of Chase personal checking accounts. The data asset follows the account balances of 1.8 million families across the U.S. who have been active checking account users since December 2018.

Locked-in or Locked-out: Can a Public Services Market Really Change?

AbstractAustralia’s welfare-to-work system has been subject to ongoing political contestation and policy reform since the 1990s. In this paper we take a big picture look at the Australian system over time, re-visiting our earlier analysis of the impact of marketisation on flexibility at the frontline over the first ten years of the Australian market in employment services. That analysis demonstrated that marketisation had failed to deliver the service flexibility intended through contracting-out, and had instead produced market herding around a common set of standardised frontline practices. In the interim, there have been two further major redesigns of the Australian system at considerable expense to taxpayers. Re-introducing greater flexibility and service tailoring into the market has been a key aim of these reforms. Calling on evidence from an original, longitudinal survey of frontline employment service staff run in 2008, 2012 and 2016, this paper considers how the Australian market has evolved over its second decade. We find remarkable consistency over time and, indeed, evidence of deepening organisational convergence. We conclude that, once in motion, isomorphic pressures towards standardisation quickly get locked into quasi-market regimes; at least when these pressures occur in low-trust contracting environments.

‘Seeing with poet’s eyes’: dialogic valuing of the local, the everyday and the personal

This paper defines the notion of dialogic local space and highlights its importance to teaching and learning. A dialogic local space values multiple local realities as it invites us to listen to, take up, and have confidence in our own local everyday and personal realities, and to listen to, consider, and respond to other local realities. This openness can deepen and widen how we know and see our own realities. We show what a dialogic local space can look like in a second grade classroom community. We employ sociocultural discourse analysis to illuminate one teacher’s pedagogical choices in a month-long poetry Writing Workshop unit for seven-and-eight year olds. We present a big picture look at the unit and then take a close look at five minilessons. Findings detail ways this teacher’s minilesson design, flow, and content cultivate dialogic local spaces, and how a dialogic stance, manifest in classroom talk practices, encourages students to participate in these spaces.

Revisiting the Arcade Learning Environment: Evaluation Protocols and Open Problems for General Agents

The Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) is an evaluation platform that poses the challenge of building AI agents with general competency across dozens of Atari 2600 games. It supports a variety of different problem settings and it has been receiving increasing attention from the scientific community, leading to some high-profile success stories such as the much publicized Deep Q-Networks (DQN). In this article we take a big picture look at how the ALE is being used by the research community. We show how diverse the evaluation methodologies in the ALE have become with time, and highlight some key concerns when evaluating agents in the ALE. We use this discussion to present some methodological best practices and provide new benchmark results using these best practices. To further the progress in the field, we introduce a new version of the ALE that supports multiple game modes and provides a form of stochasticity we call sticky actions. We conclude this big picture look by revisiting challenges posed when the ALE was introduced, summarizing the state-of-the-art in various problems and highlighting problems that remain open.

Forthcoming changes in world population distribution and global connectivity: implications for global foresight

For the first-world citizens, globalisation seems to be an all-pervasive phenomenon. Our research reveals that global connectivity rates differ dramatically for various countries and correspondingly, their populations. What will this picture look like in, say, 50 years? We combine demographic projections with our knowledge on the recent dynamics of national rates of global connectivity to estimate the proportion of world population which is expected to live in countries with varying rates of global connectivity. We show that the distribution of world population among the states with various rates of global connectivity is bound to experience significant changes in the coming decades, which should be taken into account at various attempts of providing global foresight.

“Through the looking glass: envisioning new library technologies” educational trends that will impact library technology

PurposeThis column takes a big picture look at some of the technology-related trends in education to identify potential opportunities for libraries.Design/methodology/approachIn particular, it is inspired by the 2016 NMC Horizon Report, which attempts to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching and creative inquiry in education.FindingsAlthough this report was created in the context of higher education, it impacts all libraries that support lifelong learning. In fact, some of the concepts considered in the report, such as digital literacy and makerspaces, are already well integrated into the operations of many libraries.Originality/valueThis column’s focus will be on the concepts of personalized learning, competing models of education and the blending of informal and formal learning, and it will examine how libraries can use related technologies to position themselves to best assist their patrons in the future.

A Journey to Armenia: Visual Reminders of Genocide and Oppression

A Journey to Armenia: Visual Reminders of Genocide and Oppression

Enhancement of Underwater Images UsingWavelength Compensation Method

Most important source of distortion in underwater environs are Haze and Hue alteration. Haze is produced because of the effect of light scattering by particle present in the underwater environment. Hue alterations occur when light enter deeper in underwater. These two issues make the picture look darker and low luminosity.Haze removal and Hue altered enhancement is important for this kind of low visibility and low contrast underwater images. The existing Dark Channel Prior method effectively removes Haze but color change is not processed. In this paper underwater image enhancement is carried out in two steps. In the first step Haze in the underwater image is removed using dark channel prior. In the second step Hue alterations handled by wavelength compensation. Once depth map is derived, luminance of foreground and background inside the image can be separated and compared. To regulate the Hue alteration wavelength can be compensated using average RGB channels in the image. After computing the scale value of each RGB component, wavelength is compensated together with the average RGB and scale value of each channel in the image. Performance of the proposed method of wavelength compensated image is evaluated using the PSNR, Focus Measurement, Contrast Improvement Index, and Feature Similarity Index. Performance measurement of the wavelength compensation produces better enhancement results than existing method.

Time Correlations for the Parabolic Anderson Model

We derive exact asymptotics of time correlation functions for the parabolic Anderson model with homogeneous initial condition and time-independent tails that decay more slowly than those of a double exponential distribution and have a finite cumulant generating function. We use these results to give precise asymptotics for statistical moments of positive order. Furthermore, we show what the potential peaks that contribute to the intermittency picture look like and how they are distributed in space. We also investigate for how long intermittency peaks remain relevant in terms of ageing properties of the model.

The pebble and the avalanche: how taking things apart creates revolutions

- Offers a completely new, big picture look at what causes whole industries to change - Shows how this concept can be applied in any industry to unleash creativity and create dramatic improvements - Demonstrates that many of the most important breakthroughs of the past 200 years resulted from applying this concept The Pebble and the Avalanche shows how the Internet, the auto industry, music downloading, and other rapidly evolving industries are all connected by the same dynamic -- disaggregation. Moshe Yudkowsky shows why this dynamic is crucial to survival in the 21st century marketplace, and how you can use it to bring about change in your industry. Disaggregation means taking things apart -- for example, the break-up of ATT digital photographs don't require paper; and digital movies don't need film -- has enabled millions of people to create and share their work (and others') far more easily than ever before, with enormous implications. Think of this process as an avalanche: at the top of a mountain, rocks are jammed together in a solid mass. Pry some of these rocks loose and you will unleash a tremendous outpouring of energy that sweeps everything from its path. The same thing happens in technology: with the right innovation, you can pry the pieces of technology apart and unleash an outpouring of powerful ideas that shake apart whole industries. Yudkowsky details exactly how disaggregation works, describing five different ways of taking things apart, and the many ways it can be used to generate new innovations. The Pebble and the Avalanche provides strategies for successfully adapting to a disaggregation revolution, and points towards the future, identifying several industries that are about to be completely transformed by disaggregation.

Antiretrovirals Effective in Resource-Poor Settings

Many small reports have described successful treatment programs in resource-poor areas, but how does the bigger picture look? Researchers performed a meta-analysis of 10 published studies with well-defined virologic endpoints. The number of participants in each study ranged from 34 to 743, and all studies but one …

MAKING THE MOST OF COMMUNITY COLLEGES ON THE ROAD AHEAD

In this article the authors explore the educational, economic, and social dynamics that position the community college as a key player on the national and international scene. Making the most of community colleges in the face of these dynamics, however, will mean grappling with and planning for key trends. To take a big picture look at these trends, the authors detail the results of the third study in a series of League for Innovation in the Community College road-ahead studies. The 2003 study included reviews of research, a national survey of CEOs, and a series of focus groups. The results point to seven key cluster areas surrounding issues of (1) learning swirl, (2) partnership programs, (3) funding agony and opportunity, (4) teaching, reaching, and leadership transitions, (5) learning dialogues and documentation, (6) high tech and high touch creativity and connection, and (7) courageous catalysts.

Editor's Observations: Crime and Sentencing in Canada: Parallels and Differences

Research Article| March 01 1997 Editor's Observations: Crime and Sentencing in Canada: Parallels and Differences Nora V. Demleitner Nora V. Demleitner Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Federal Sentencing Reporter (1997) 9 (5): 232–234. https://doi.org/10.2307/20639994 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nora V. Demleitner; Editor's Observations: Crime and Sentencing in Canada: Parallels and Differences. Federal Sentencing Reporter 1 March 1997; 9 (5): 232–234. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20639994 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentFederal Sentencing Reporter Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997 Vera Institute of Justice, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Oil resources for the next century: What's ahead?

Proven reserves of liquid hydrocarbons are now assessed at between 950 and 1,000 billion barrels, depending on the source. Their life expectancy at the current rate of world production is about 41 to 45 years. This lifetime is much longer than what was predicted in both 1970 and 1980. However, this wealth of resources does not necessarily mean that the security of oil supplies is guaranteed for all countries. Oil reserves are unequally distributed from a geopolitical standpoint. Reserves and output are mainly due to big fields (with more than 500 million barrels of initial reserves). Though oil supplies seem to be ensured for the coming 30 to 40 years, what does the picture look like beyond 2020–20307 The increased lifetime of proven oil reserves has been apparent only in the last 10 to 20 years. The considerable increase in proven oil reserves reported after 1986 is, in fact, mainly due to revisions and extensions, rather than to new sources of oil: conventional oil (with the price per barrel of oil on the order of $20 and recovery rate around 30 percent) remaining to be discovered today; oil resources stemming from an improvement in recovery rate; oil resources resulting from exploitation of new zones, such as deep sea zones; and unconventional types of oil, such as extra-heavy crudes, tar sands, shale oils, and liquid hydrocarbons from chemical-enhanced oil recovery methods.