Procedural Constraints Research Articles

Improving environmental management legislation to facilitate post-disaster reconstruction

Purpose– The study aims to explore improvements to environmental management legislation that will enable the implementation of post-disaster reconstruction activities after the built environment has been affected by a natural disaster.Design/methodology/approach– The study programme collates opinions from building and development control officers and other disaster practitioners based in New Zealand. The objective was to determine the practical implication of implementing reconstruction arrangements under the Resource Management Act (RMA). The survey was administered online, and a data set of 80 responses was used for the analyses.Findings– The survey results show that the current reconstruction framework in New Zealand may cause procedural constraints and become burdensome to property owners who desire early recovery from a disaster event. Therefore, improvements are suggested to certain aspects of the RMA reconstruction provisions, so that it facilitates early recovery from natural disasters.Originality/value– The paper is one aspect of a doctoral study that reviewed the implications of implementing reconstruction under existing legislative framework. It highlights the need for improvements to environmental management legislation to enable effective reconstruction after natural disasters in New Zealand. These have wider implications to other countries to revise their legislation before any disaster, thus reducing the problems that may be experienced while implementing environmental and developmental legislation.

Business Ethics After Citizens United: A Contractualist Analysis

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the US Supreme Court sharply curtailed the ability of the state to limit political speech by for-profit corporations. This new legal situation elevates the question of corporate political involvement: in what manner and to what extent is it ethical for for-profit corporations to participate in the political process in a liberal democratic society? Using Scanlon’s version of contractualism, I argue for a number of substantive and procedural constraints on the political activities of businesses. Central to this contractualist analysis is (1) an identification of the self-governance-based interests of individuals that are affected by corporate political activity and (2) a method for judging the various assignments of social rights, duties and roles according to how they collectively meet those interests. Together, these two features make this contractualist approach distinctive and allow it to generate substantive ethical results.

Inductive Discovery of Criminal Group Structure Using Spectral Embedding

Social network analysis has often been applied to the communications within criminal groups to understand their internal structure and dynamics. While access to the content of communications may be restricted by constitutional and procedural constraints, this article applies advanced network analysis techniques based on spectral embedding to telephone communications data. Spectral embedding facilitates deeper analysis by embedding the graph representing a social network in a geometric space such that Euclidean distance reflects pairwise node dissimilarity. This enables drawing a network in ways that accurately reflect the structure of the underlying group, and computing properties directly from the embedding. We illustrate spectral approaches for two Ndrangheta drug-smuggling networks, and extend them to a) examine triad structure (through the identification of the Simmelian backbone), which elicits key members, and b) to display temporal properties, which illustrates changing group structure. The results show that the two groups, although having the same purpose and coming from the same criminal milieu, have substantially different internal structure which was not detectable using conventional social-network approaches. The techniques presented in this study may support law enforcement in the early stages of an investigation.

Reforming “The Blob”: Why California’s Latest Approach to Amending CEQA Is a Bad Idea

The story of Moe’s Stop, a small gas station in San Jose, demonstrates a major problem with the California Environmental Quality Act (“CEQA”). The owner of Moe’s wanted to add three new pumps to his existing station—an action without any obvious environmental effects—but the owner of a rival gas station across the street used CEQA to convince a judge to order an environmental review of the project, which halted construction for two years. After the completion of the environmental review, Moe added the new pumps, but the rival owner still went back to court to argue that the environmental review had been flawed. The mayor of San Jose, an environmental lawyer, stated that the lawsuit was “ridiculous” and described it as “obviously anticompetitive” in its intent. The cost to the owner of Moe’s of the litigation and associated delays was over $1 million. This story of CEQA abuse is not at all unique; it demonstrates just one facet of what legislators and business advocates claim are the myriad negative economic effects of CEQA. ... This Note argues that although CEQA does have inefficiency problems, bills creating procedural constraints are not an effective way to address them. Although the laws do reduce the length of judicial review, they add other sources of inefficiency, reduce the quality of judicial review, and fail to address vague standards in CEQA that increase the difficulty of EIR preparation and judicial review. California is contemplating further changes to CEQA in 2014. But although several different reform proposals have been made, more research is necessary before deciding on the best way to amend CEQA. Part I of this Note discusses the relevant provisions of CEQA and recent attempts to change the procedure for judicial review. Part II analyzes the efficiency problems with CEQA and argues that procedural changes are a poor solution to these problems. Part III presents reform proposals and argues that before reform is attempted, more research on CEQA must be done.

Planning and Simulation of Percutaneous Cryoablation

New technological methods to assist percutaneous cryoablation procedures are here presented, namely a planning software and a simulation algorithm. The first has the role to calculate a feasible displacement of the tools to ensure an effective ablation of the lesion, satisfying well-specified procedural constraints. Starting from intra-operative CT scans of the patient, a virtual model of the anatomical site is obtained and uploaded. The displacement of the cryoprobes is computed in order to cover the whole volume of the tumour with the developed iceball, but minimizing the damage to surrounding healthy renal tissue. On the other hand, the simulation algorithm is a graphical tool useful to assess the temperature distribution throughout the evolution of the procedure. A discrete iterative function calculates the heat transfer from the probes to the surrounding tissue within a specified three-dimensional grid: the isolation of significant isotherms can help to assess whether the whole tumour will be frozen or not. By using a real intra-operative dataset of a successful percutaneous cryoablation, the volume of the real iceball has been matched with that generated from the simulator, showing a good accuracy in terms of dimension and shape. Even though been designed to be integrated within a robotic system, this method is usable and extensible for different purposes and adapted to simulate other scenarios or procedures.

Transformational Leadership, Goal Setting, and Work Motivation

Many studies have recently been devoted to transformational leadership in public sector organizations. However, these seldom address the relationship between transformational leadership and work motivation. By combining separate findings in the public administration literature about transformational leadership style and goal setting and about the work motivation of public employees, we construct hypotheses on how transformational leadership style and work motivation are related in a public sector context. Building on this, our analysis, based on a survey in a Dutch municipality, shows several linkages between this leadership style and work motivation. In addition to a direct effect, we anticipated and indeed found two indirect ones. First, goal setting mediates this relationship, with transformational leaders able to set more challenging and more specific goals. Second, transformational leaders seem able to reduce perceptions of procedural constraints among their employees. This is especially important as such constraints can hamper the use of goal setting.

Red Tape, Resigned Satisfaction, Public Service Motivation, and Negative Employee Attitudes and Behaviors

We examine the effect of red tape on resigned satisfaction, Public Service Motivation (PSM), and negative employee attitudes and behaviors. Based on responses of 217 public servants, this study demonstrates the role of resigned satisfaction as a mediating mechanism for transferring the effect of red tape on negative employee outcomes. PSM was hypothesized as an individual difference variable that can either mitigate or exacerbate the indirect effect of red tape on employee attitudes and behaviors. Our study is among the first few that demonstrate the dark side of PSM. We found that PSM exacerbates the adverse effects of red tape on negative employee attitudes and behaviors and that these effects are transmitted through the mechanism of resigned satisfaction. These findings are at odds with the dominant conception that employees having higher levels of PSM tend to pursue their motivations of public service despite excessive formalization and procedural constraints.

Optimal Procedure Planning and Guidance System for Peripheral Bronchoscopy

With the development of multidetector computed-tomography (MDCT) scanners and ultrathin bronchoscopes, the use of bronchoscopy for diagnosing peripheral lung-cancer nodules is becoming a viable option. The work flow for assessing lung cancer consists of two phases: 1) 3-D MDCT analysis and 2) live bronchoscopy. Unfortunately, the yield rates for peripheral bronchoscopy have been reported to be as low as 14%, and bronchoscopy performance varies considerably between physicians. Recently, proposed image-guided systems have shown promise for assisting with peripheral bronchoscopy. Yet, MDCT-based route planning to target sites has relied on tedious error-prone techniques. In addition, route planning tends not to incorporate known anatomical, device, and procedural constraints that impact a feasible route. Finally, existing systems do not effectively integrate MDCT-derived route information into the live guidance process. We propose a system that incorporates an automatic optimal route-planning method, which integrates known route constraints. Furthermore, our system offers a natural translation of the MDCT-based route plan into the live guidance strategy via MDCT/video data fusion. An image-based study demonstrates the route-planning method's functionality. Next, we present a prospective lung-cancer patient study in which our system achieved a successful navigation rate of 91% to target sites. Furthermore, when compared to a competing commercial system, our system enabled bronchoscopy over two airways deeper into the airway-tree periphery with a sample time that was nearly 2 min shorter on average. Finally, our system's ability to almost perfectly predict the depth of a bronchoscope's navigable route in advance represents a substantial benefit of optimal route planning.

Enlightened Regulatory Capture

Regulatory capture generally evokes negative images of private interests exerting excessive influence on government action to advance their own agendas at the expense of the public interest. There are some cases, however, where this conventional wisdom is exactly backwards. This Article explores the first verifiable case, taken from healthcare cybersecurity, where regulatory capture enabled regulators to harness private expertise to advance exclusively public goals. Comparing this example to other attempts at harnessing industry expertise reveals a set of characteristics under which regulatory capture can be used in the public interest. These include: 1) legislatively-mandated adoption of recommendations by an advisory committee comprising private interests and reduced-bias subject matter experts; 2) relaxed procedural constraints for committee action to prevent internal committee capture; 3) and opportunities for committee participation to be worthwhile for representatives of private parties beyond the mere opportunity to advance their own interests. This Article presents recommendations based on those characteristics as to how and when legislatures may endeavor to replicate this success in other industries to improve both the legitimacy and efficacy of the regulatory process.

A Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm for Build Order Optimization in StarCraft II

This article presents a modified version of the multi-objective genetic algorithm NSGA II in order to find optimal opening strategies in the real-time strategy game StarCraft II. Based on an event-driven simulator capable of performing an accurate estimate of in-game build-times the quality of different build lists can be judged. These build lists are used as chromosomes within the genetic algorithm. Procedural constraints e.g. given by the Tech-Tree or other game mechanisms, are implicitly encoded into them. Typical goals are to find the build list producing most units of one or more certain types up to a certain time (Rush) or to produce one unit as early as possible (Tech-Push). Here, the number of entries in a build list varies and the objective values have in contrast to the search space a very small diversity. We introduce our game simulator including its graphical user interface, the modifications necessary to fit the genetic algorithm to our problem, test our algorithm on different Tech-Pushes and Rushes for all three races, and validate it with empirical data of expert StarCraft II players.

The Ending of Unauthorized Strikes in the West: Some Policy Implications for China

Unauthorized strikes were a common feature of the private sectors of many Western economies in the third quarter of the twentieth century. They largely disappeared during the fourth quarter. At a time when such strikes are an increasing issue in China, the article considers why they ceased to be such in the West, using evidence from Britain. It discusses the nature of unauthorized or 'wildcat' strikes and argues that several factors caused them to fade away. Pressures of increased product market competition forced management to gain closer control over the conduct of work and payment systems. Trade unions restructured themselves to cope better with workplace bargaining, before declining in influence. Government increased the procedural constraints on workplace strikes and created an independent third-party intervention service. The article concludes with policy implications.

A Spatially Intelligent Public Participation System for the Environmental Impact Assessment Process

An environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a decision-making process that evaluates the possible significant effects that a proposed project may exert on the environment. The EIA scoping and reviewing stages often involve public participation. Although its importance has long been recognized, public participation in the EIA process is often regarded as ineffective, due to time, budget, resource, technical and procedural constraints, as well as the complexity of environmental information. Geographic Information System (GIS) and Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI) have the potential to contribute to data collection, sharing and presentation, utilize local user-generated content to benefit decision-making and increase public outreach. This research integrated GIS, VGI, social media tools, data mining and mobile technology to design a spatially intelligent framework that presented and shared EIA information effectively to the public. A spatially intelligent public participative system (SIPPS) was also developed as a proof-of-concept of the framework. The research selected the Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project (TRTP) as the pilot study area. Survey questionnaires were designed to collect feedback and conduct evaluation. Results show that SIPPS was able to improve the effectiveness of public participation, promote environmental awareness and achieve good system usability.

NYPL Labs: Hacking the Library

ABSTRACT Over the past couple of years, The New York Public Library has made significant strides in jumpstarting a digital humanities research program through the establishment of a curator-focused, R&D technology unit called NYPL Labs. This article will examine the first three projects produced by NYPL Labs, a trilogy of online experiments exploring methods of mining new humanities data sets from special collections material, and of translating the Library's public mission to the Web via user collaboration and crowdsourcing. In just two years, NYPL Labs has demonstrated how much can be accomplished when technical resources are focused and procedural constraints loosened, though the challenges of sustaining this work are already becoming apparent as the team must continue to innovate while maintaining a growing portfolio of projects.

Using UML and OCL for representing multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems

This paper describes the results of a preliminary feasibility study of an approach to representing multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems in UML (structural constraints) and OCL (procedural constraints) and then automatically translating the representations to a constraint satisfaction solving language (Oz) for execution. The paper presents two examples of the application of the approach--a job scheduling problem and a (fixture) design problem. The main goal of this paper is to investigate directions towards a standard, graphical language for representing combinatorial optimization problems. The paper shows that for the two selected problems it is easy to represent structural constraints in UML and that procedural constraints are representable in OCL. The results also show that a developed translator automatically converts the UML/OCL representations to Oz and that the resulting Oz program performs very reasonably, in some cases outperforming the hand-written benchmark programs.

Le chemin professionnel du magistrat et la vérité psychologique. « Toute la vérité sur la vérité judiciaire »

The judge's psychology can definitely have an impact on his perception of truth but there are, however, no serious methods to evaluate this impact. All tests currently made during the recruitment step are ineffective and can be irritating for the applicant. Furthermore there are other factors in the judge's professional environment, which might influence him. The loyalty he could have for public prosecutors and police investigators or the way he chooses legal experts for example. Materials and procedural constraints play a central role as well: All actions to elucidate the truth are strictly delimited and saving up justice budget is often more important than truth. The justice system establishes their rulings as the only truth, but this undeniable truth actually relates to fiction, because justice is not flawless, it states the truth only in theory. Even if it is tough to conclude a “truth” based on past events, the tendency is to ask judges to keep in mind the risk and the dangerousness of a possible future recidivism to set up penal plan. This current evolution is really disturbing when everyone knows how judging past events is hard enough. Making judgements about crimes that could be committed in the future exposes us to a terrifying world, as described in The Minority Report short fiction.

Supranational Governance and Networked Accountability Structures: Member State Oversight of EU Agencies

The most remarkable recent development in EU administrative law is the widespread establishment of European agencies. Beginning in the early 1990s, EU agencies emerged as significant actors in a number of areas, including trademark law, pharmaceutical licensing and aviation safety. EU agencies are best understood, however, not as autonomous regulators at the federal level, but as the most recent expression of European governance through administrative networks. The regulatory intertwining of supranational and national authorities in the EU is significantly different from the division of authority between federal and state bureaucracies in the United States federal system Hence, the accountability of European agencies to the EU and to Member States has unique features that can be traced to the dynamics of European integration. Accountability is largely a function of networked institutional relations that link European administrative entities to both supranational and national forums of accountability This article concentrates on the second form of accountability through an in-depth exploration of the way Member States oversee EU agencies. Oversight, here, covers monitoring, hearings, budgetary reviews or judicial actions, as well as procedural constraints.

The Remainder: Social Collage and the Four Discourses in (some of) the Kootenay School of Writing: Part II

Note: This essay is from a larger work on the poetics and poetry of the Kootenay School of Writing, the body of work primarily being that published in the 1980s, the approach being a Lacanian one. I divide the poetry into three camps or tendencies: the Red Tory neopastoralism of Lisa Robertson, Christine Stewart, Peter Culley, and Catriona Strang, the concerns of procedural constraints and Blanchotesque absence in Susan Clark, Kathryn MacLeod, Dan Farrell, and Melissa Wolsak, and, here, the social collage/disjunctive form to be found in the work of Colin Smith/Dorothy Lusk (discussed in the first half of this essay) and Deanna Ferguson/Jeff Derksen/Gerald Creede (discussed in this, the second half). Thanks to Donato Mancini, whose research in 2008 greatly helped to kick-start this writing.

Westphalian Procedure, Post-Westphalian Substance: Alien Torts in Bolivia

This paper argues that the Post-Westphalian International Legal System protects substantive rights, subject to procedural constraints of the Westphalian state system - using the example of Alien Tort Statute litigation with respect to the former head of state of Bolivia.

Social Collage and the Four Discourses in (some of) the Kootenay School of Writing: Part I

Social Collage and the Four Discourses in (some of) the Kootenay School of Writing: Part I Clint Burnham (bio) Note: This essay is from a larger work on the poetics and poetry of the Kootenay School of Writing, the body of work primarily being that published in the 1980s, the approach being a Lacanian one. I divide the poetry into three camps or tendencies: the Red Tory neopastoralism of Lisa Robertson, Christine Stewart, Peter Culley, and Catriona Strang, the concerns of procedural constraints and Blanchotesque absence in Susan Clark, Kathryn MacLeod, Dan Farrell, and Melissa Wolsak, and, here, the social collage/disjunctive form to be found in the work of Colin Smith/Dorothy Lusk (discussed in this, the first half of the essay) and Deanna Ferguson/Jeff Derksen/Gerald Creede (discussed in the second half). Thanks to Donato Mancini, whose research in 2008 greatly helped to kick-start this writing. Since this essay is torn from a larger work, it may be useful to sketch out quickly why I have turned to Lacanian psychoanalysis as a way of reading the work of the Kootenay School of Writing and, in that regard, perhaps address the question of historical or ahistorical readings. I think first of all that my turn to psychoanalysis is in response to a double lack: on the one hand, in the readings of contemporary poetry there is very little to be found that engages with Lacan to any great extent; on the other hand, the great resurgence of Lacanian theory and criticism since the 1990s (owing on the one hand to Slavoj Žižek’s output and on the [End Page 91] other to the “clinical turn” that saw a new translation of Écrits as well as many of the Seminars) has tended to look at popular culture (especially film) or politics but not poetry. This double absence is curious, not least because of the importance especially of Lacanian and Lacanian-feminist readings to such important avant-garde forbears as Gertrude Stein (Marianne DeKoven’s groundbreaking A Different Language especially, but see also, for example, Cynthia Merrill’s use of Lacan’s mirror stage to read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas); nonetheless, the strength of both these discourses—Lacanian theory on the one hand, and ksw and other l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e-based schools on the other—suggested that an intervention into both could be a useful new critical practice. Evidently my designation of this absence as “curious” is not adequate as a scholarly inquiry into critical fashions,1 and there may be another reason: the misconception that Lacanian or psychoanalytic readings are ahistorical and, therefore, apolitical. I think that this is a misreading of Freud and Lacan (not to mention such obviously more political and left commentators as Žižek and Jodi Dean) for a number of reasons: both Freud and Lacan have made important statements on the political and historical nature of psychoanalysis; their bodies of work and writings can and have themselves been historicized, especially in terms of “early” or “late” Freud or Lacan, and, especially with respect to Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, which arose in the late 1960s in the context of the student protests of May 1968 in Paris, these are obviously discourses that are very much based on a political intervention into late capitalist society. So I [End Page 92] would like here just to expand quickly on these three qualifying statements, before turning to the interpretive work of this essay. Freud’s statements on politics or history can be thought of in two ways: first of all, he was very much interested, even as early as The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), in how political events made their way into the subject’s dreams—even if such matter was merely content for the dreamwork (for its condensation and displacement, its translation and revision), he never saw the everyday, be it political or more mundane, as unimportant—this was the raw material with which the analyst, as much as the patient, with which he had to work. Obviously the “Rat Man” case study would be a very different piece of work if not for the...

Truth in the Telling: Procedure, Testimony, and the Work of Improvisation in Legal Narrative

This article considers how legal trials participate in the production of culturally valourised narratives of truth. Trial procedures legitimate certain narratives, and certain ways of producing narrative, through procedural constraints that promulgate legal aesthetics and legal rights that articulate these procedures as norms for human behaviour. Law’s forms, then, determine law’s content, with significant connotations for the broader culture. Notable amongst these narrative forms is legal testimony, whose apparently improvised, interrogative creation imbues it with especial qualities as a representation of truth. Spontaneously performed in and effected by the valorised space of the courtroom, testimony reflects the cultural pervasiveness of law’s aesthetics, and underscores how narratives of truth are constituted by, and dependent upon, the privileged forms of their production.