State-based Approaches Research Articles

Environmental Constitutionalism in China: A Constitution without Constitutionalism?

Abstract There is a long tradition of constitutionalising environmental protection in the People's Republic of China ('China'). This is illustrated, for example, by the constitutionalisation of the need to construct ‘ecological civilisation’ – a set of values and development concepts included in 2018 as part of constitutional amendments. Yet, the Constitution of China is often described as a constitution without constitutionalism. This article examines the constitutional environmental provisions in China, as well as the underpinning constitutional theories, to demonstrate how China enjoys environmental constitutionalism. This version of constitutionalism, however, is absent of rights and overwhelmingly enforced through state-based approaches, which means that it is distinct from the rights-based and courts-centred versions of liberal constitutionalism. This study thus exemplifies how constitutional practices may adopt different formulations and environmental constitutionalism exists without being committed to liberal principles.

An Event-Centric Knowledge Graph Approach for Public Administration as an Enabler for Data Analytics

In a continuously evolving environment, organizations, including public administrations, need to quickly adapt to change and make decisions in real-time. This requires having a real-time understanding of their context that can be achieved by adopting an event-native mindset in data management which focuses on the dynamics of change compared to the state-based traditional approaches. In this context, this paper proposes the adoption of an event-centric knowledge graph approach for the holistic data management of all data repositories in public administration. Towards this direction, the paper proposes an event-centric knowledge graph model for the domain of public administration that captures these dynamics considering events as first-class entities for knowledge representation. The development of the model is based on a state-of-the-art analysis of existing event-centric knowledge graph models that led to the identification of core concepts related to event representation, on a state-of-the-art analysis of existing public administration models that identified the core entities of the domain, and on a theoretical analysis of concepts related to events, public services, and effective public administration in order to outline the context and identify the domain-specific needs for event modeling. Further, the paper applies the model in the context of Greek public administration in order to validate it and showcase the possibilities that arise. The results show that the adoption of event-centric knowledge graph approaches for data management in public administration can facilitate data analytics, continuous integration, and the provision of a 360-degree-view of end-users. We anticipate that the proposed approach will also facilitate real-time decision-making, continuous intelligence, and ubiquitous AI.

State-switching and high-order spatiotemporal organization of dynamic functional connectivity are disrupted by Alzheimer's disease.

Spontaneous activity during the resting state, tracked by BOLD fMRI imaging, or shortly rsfMRI, gives rise to brain-wide dynamic patterns of interregional correlations, whose structured flexibility relates to cognitive performance. Here, we analyze resting-state dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) in a cohort of older adults, including amnesic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI, N = 34) and Alzheimer's disease (AD, N = 13) patients, as well as normal control (NC, N = 16) and cognitively "supernormal" controls (SNC, N = 10) subjects. Using complementary state-based and state-free approaches, we find that resting-state fluctuations of different functional links are not independent but are constrained by high-order correlations between triplets or quadruplets of functionally connected regions. When contrasting patients with healthy subjects, we find that dFC between cingulate and other limbic regions is increasingly bursty and intermittent when ranking the four groups from SNC to NC, aMCI and AD. Furthermore, regions affected at early stages of AD pathology are less involved in higher order interactions in patient than in control groups, while pairwise interactions are not significantly reduced. Our analyses thus suggest that the spatiotemporal complexity of dFC organization is precociously degraded in AD and provides a richer window into the underlying neurobiology than time-averaged FC connections.

An extended peridynamic model for analyzing interfacial failure of composite materials with non-uniform discretization

This work presents an extended ordinary state-based peridynamic model and approaches to analyze the fracture behavior of composite materials considering interfacial failure. An interface force term is introduced to characterize the interaction among different compositions in composite materials, which enables naturally the non-uniform discretization to be conveniently adopted, especially where sharp interfaces exist. The calculation of force states in different compositions is independent of each other, and the use of non-uniform discretization can improve computational efficiency significantly. Further, inspired by the cohesive zone model (CZM), the deformation coefficient and degradation behavior of interface bonds are derived by using the traction-separation law, and a mixed-mode fracture criterion for interface bonds based on the bond energy density is established as well. Validation of the proposed model and approach is established through a classical rectangular plate example, and then the proposed model is employed to analyze the failure of typical composites including laminated glass and concrete. The results show good agreement with corresponding experimental observations and it indicates that the proposed extended peridynamic model can accurately and efficiently capture and describe the fracture of composite materials with sharp interfaces.

What has been done and what has not – the government of Canada’s economic policy response to the coronavirus pandemic

PurposeThis paper aims to examine Canadian government measures to support country’s economic recovery and sustainable development. The goal is to examine whether all orders of government are working well to deliver the required help to Canadians.Design/methodology/approachThe theoretical foundations for this article are drawn from liberal and institutionalist approaches to comparative politics. Specifically, the proposed study draws on political tensions that occur because of actions of self-centered regional (provincial) governments who legitimize individual policies based on their self-centered economic and political objectives.FindingsNowadays, we can observe the primary role of the state in supporting and regulating the health governance systems, the economy and social life. Many informal groups have unstructured approach, which does not require them to follow existing strategies. The challenges caused by COVID-19 have led to the resurgence of collective, state-based approaches to the recovery. The key findings illuminate the importance of crisis communication activities which should be implemented properly. This implies that all disclosures must be timely and truthful.Practical implicationsThe study helps to better understand the events that disrupt parts of the Canadian economy during pandemic. It reviews the essential functions that are critical for reliable operation of infrastructure services to ensure safety and well-being of the population. During the COVID-19, federal–provincial–territorial collaboration runs into resistance because of competing interests, resource constraints, legacies from past conflicts and lack of coordination. In contrast to managers, who often focus on tangible short-term results, today’s leadership more often seeks intangible long-term results. This means that the central–local government relations tend to be more informal.Originality/valueIn the face of external shock, such as COVID-19, it did not take much time for Canadian provincial governments to realize that they cannot cope with a wide range of challenges alone. In these circumstances, the narratives of how governments work together during the challenging time to impact their desired outcomes are of crucial importance.

Business and Human Rights: Alternative Approaches to Transnational Regulation

In recent years, various approaches to transnational regulation of business conduct have evolved as an alternative to the command-and-control model focusing on conduct of domestic businesses and the soft law approach of international human rights law to regulate corporations. On reviewing the potential of five such approaches (i.e., polycentric governance, extraterritorial regulation, proposed international treaty, reform of corporate laws, and rebalancing of trade-investment agreements), this article makes two arguments. First, although polycentric governance is critical to fill regulatory deficits of state-based regulation, this approach should not ignore or weaken further the role and relevance of states in regulating businesses, given the dynamic relation between state-based and other regulatory approaches. Second, greater attention should be paid to nonhuman rights regulatory regimes to change the corporate culture, which tends to externalize human rights issues. The increasing focus on the role of corporate laws and trade-investment agreements should be seen in this context.

Policy Blending and Recombination for Multimodal Contact-Rich Tasks

Multimodal information such as tactile, proximity and force sensing is essential for performing stable contact-rich manipulations. However, coupling multimodal information and motion control still remains a challenging topic. Rather than learning a monolithic skill policy that takes in all feedback signals at all times, skills should be divided into phases and learn to only use the sensor signals applicable to that phase. This makes learning the primitive policies for each phase easier, and allows the primitive policies to be more easily reused among different skills. However, stopping and abruptly switching between each primitive policy results in longer execution times and less robust behaviours. We therefore propose a blending approach to seamlessly combining the primitive policies into a reliable combined control policy. We evaluate both time-based and state-based blending approaches. The resulting approach was successfully evaluated in simulation and on a real robot, with an augmented finger vision sensor, on: opening a cap, turning a dial and flipping a breaker tasks. The evaluations show that the blended policies with multimodal feedback can be easily learned and reliably executed.

South Australian Medicines Evaluation Panel in review: providing evidence-based guidance on the use of high-cost medicines in the South Australian public health system.

Objective The South Australian Medicines Evaluation Panel (SAMEP) was established in 2011 to make evidence-based recommendations on the funding of high-cost medicines in South Australian public hospitals via a high-cost medicines formulary. SAMEP represents one component of South Australia's process for state-based health technology assessment (HTA). The aim of this study was to describe the experience of SAMEP in the context of Australia's complex governance model for hospital-based care. Methods A retrospective review was conducted of the SAMEP process and outcomes of medicine evaluations. Decision summaries and meeting minutes were reviewed and reflected upon by the authors to explore the views of the SAMEP membership regarding the function of the committee and state-based HTA more broadly. Results SAMEP has reviewed 29 applications, with 14 (48%) listed on the high-cost medicines formulary. Three applications have been the subject of outcome review and confirm expectations of patient benefit. Conclusion Retrospective review of the committee experience suggests that state-based HTA as operationalised by SAMEP is feasible, provides greater equity of access to high-cost medicines in the South Australian public hospital system and allows for access with evidence development. What is known about the topic? State-based hospital funders often need to make decisions on the provision of high-cost medicines for which there is no national guidance or subsidy. Little published information exists about state-based approaches to medicines evaluation and reimbursement within public hospitals in Australia. What does this paper add? The South Australian experience demonstrates a method for states and territories to tackle the challenges of providing evidence-based access to high-cost medicines in Australian public hospitals. What are the implications for practitioners? This paper provides information for other jurisdictions considering state-based approaches to medicines evaluation and contributes to the broader literature about state-based HTA in Australia.

Effects of congruence between individuals’ and hotel commercials’ construal levels on purchase intentions

ABSTRACT This paper proposes to examine the effects of consumers’ construal levels on their purchase decisions based on Construal Level Theory. Accordingly, the construal level of individuals was operationalized through trait-based and state-based approaches. Across two 2 (high construal level high vs. low construal level) X 2 (abstract ad content vs. concrete ad content) between-subjects experiments, we demonstrated that participants who were assigned to a condition in which the construal level of the participant and the hotel ad was consistent (high congruence) had a greater purchase intention for hotel services than participants who were assigned to a condition in which the construal level of the participant and the hotel ad were inconsistent (low congruence). Implications of the findings are discussed for both researchers and practitioners in the field of hospitality marketing.

Embracing Complexity: Diaspora Politics as a Co-Construction

Building on cases of conflict-generated diaspora groups, the article proposes to understand diaspora politics as a co-construction between a series of actors that is not limited to home and host states. It argues that repeated attempts to understand diaspora politics as mostly produced by home or host countries is the result of an unwillingness to embrace the fundamentally disruptive nature of diasporas in interstate politics. Diasporas are hybrid political actors that have connections, not only with their countries of origin and of residence, but also with other diaspora groups located in the same country or elsewhere as well as with other actors at the transnational level. Taking stock of state-based approaches to diaspora politics, as well as of analyses focusing on internal diaspora matters, the article shifts the focus towards the interstate and transnational dimensions of diaspora politics and emphasises their potential to move across levels and spheres of engagement

Learning Analytics: A Comprehensive Analysis of Methods for Student Performance Prediction

Data Mining plays an important role in the Business world and it helps the educational institution to predict and make decisions related to the students’ academic status. From a large volume of data in educational databases it is difficult to predict student performance. In India currently the existing systems lack in monitoring and analyzing the students’ performance. The main reason is that the existing system has insufficient capabilities for identification of performance of the student and it also not considered all factors that affect the achievements of a student’s in the context of India. Therefore, a systematical literature review on predicting student performance by the proposed system is a web-based which makes use of the mining techniques for the extraction of useful information. This work is digging insight into the state-based and event-based approaches for predicting student performance. A Comparative analysis is conducted to suggest regression-based algorithms of state-based framework lack accuracy and correlation-based algorithms under the event-driven approach outperform classical regression algorithms. It is also concluded from pedagogical a point of view, higher engagement with social media leads to higher final grades.

From Strangers to Neighbors: Post-Disaster Resettlement and Community Building in Honduras

With his book, From Strangers to Neighbors: Post-Disaster Resettlement and Community Building in Honduras, Ryan Alaniz provides a valuable contribution to disaster and development theory and practice. He analyzes disaster-induced resettlement implemented in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. In addition to infrastructure and economic livelihoods, he asks which mechanisms and characteristics are necessary to support the development of resettlement into a “healthy community”. This article is a review of Alaniz’s book that also aims to suggest few questions which remain unanswered and can be of inspiration for future research. Why “from strangers to neighbors” rather than “from affected neighbors to resilient neighbors”? What happened to previous neighborly relationships, and should these be recovered as soon as possible, or does “building back better communities” mean building new communities elsewhere? And, finally, who should implement empowerment strategies for more resilient neighbors, and how should these strategies be designed and implemented before and after disasters? While structural failures of both top-down, state-based and NGO approaches keep being reported in post-disaster interventions and resettlement, there is an urgent need for new institutional arrangements and deliberative spaces that would help better understand, recognize, engage and empower the role local communities play in the context of a global risk landscape, before and after disasters.

On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair & Care

The reimagination and revaluation of discarded goods, through repair and reuse is, for many, a quotidian and mundane element of everyday life. These practices are the historical precedent and continue to be the stuff of common sense for a significant portion of human society. And yet, reuse, repair and other elements of a ‘circular economy’ have recently emerged as a significant focus in environmental and economic policy. Proponents claim that reuse practices represent a potentially radical alternative to mainstream consumer culture and a form of carework that generates new social possibilities and personal affects. This essay explores the myriad dimensions of reuse as care, relational practice and as consumer alternative by examining these practices in their social context, lived experience and as embedded within larger political and economic structures of capitalist accumulation and abandonment. We argue that the study of reuse, in old and new forms, takes on added political significance in an era of environmental and economic crises, especially as a critical part of state-based approaches toward the circular economy that attempt to appropriate carework in new forms of value generation.

Hyperintensional logics for everyone

We introduce a general representation of unary hyperintensional modalities and study various hyperintensional modal logics based on the representation. It is shown that the major approaches to hyperintensionality known from the literature, that is state-based, syntactic and structuralist approaches, all correspond to special cases of the general framework. Completeness results pertaining to our hyperintensional modal logics are established.

The liberal peace fallacy: violent neoliberalism and the temporal and spatial traps of state-based approaches to peace

ABSTRACTThe liberal worldview is founded on two interlinked promises: the inherent capacity of markets to deliver prosperity and development globally; and the increased prospects for peace in contexts of inter-state integration along liberal institutional and market lines. This paper takes issue with the latter, now often prescribed as a remedy against the geopolitical instability brought about by unpredictable ‘populist’ leaders. While decades of neoliberal integration have brought nation-states closer together and engendered degrees and forms of inter-state equality within world market capitalism, populations across the world have fallen prey to the violence of markets and growing intra-state inequalities. In such a context, the contemporary rise of nationalism and populisms across the world is not some liberal order antithesis emerging from a vacuum, but rather a logical consequence of this liberal order, constituting an often reactionary ‘counter movement’ that cannot be tackled with prescriptions for increased market globalization. A focus on the everyday forms of violence fomented beyond the inter-state level by processes of marketization demonstrates that neoliberalism’s rescaling of violence and risk from the international stage down to the individual has resulted in the contemporary rise of illiberal politics and, indeed, new prospects for global peace.

Introduction: Non-state Actors in Mediterranean Politics

Introduction: Non-state Actors in Mediterranean Politics

Event-Based Proof of the Mutual Exclusion Property of Peterson’s Algorithm

Summary Proving properties of distributed algorithms is still a highly challenging problem and various approaches that have been proposed to tackle it [1] can be roughly divided into state-based and event-based proofs. Informally speaking, state-based approaches define the behavior of a distributed algorithm as a set of sequences of memory states during its executions, while event-based approaches treat the behaviors by means of events which are produced by the executions of an algorithm. Of course, combined approaches are also possible. Analysis of the literature [1], [7], [12], [9], [13], [14], [15] shows that state-based approaches are more widely used than event-based approaches for proving properties of algorithms, and the difficulties in the event-based approach are often emphasized. We believe, however, that there is a certain naturalness and intuitive content in event-based proofs of correctness of distributed algorithms that makes this approach worthwhile. Besides, state-based proofs of correctness of distributed algorithms are usually applicable only to discrete-time models of distributed systems and cannot be easily adapted to the continuous time case which is important in the domain of cyber-physical systems. On the other hand, event-based proofs can be readily applied to continuous-time / hybrid models of distributed systems. In the paper [2] we presented a compositional approach to reasoning about behavior of distributed systems in terms of events. Compositionality here means (informally) that semantics and properties of a program is determined by semantics of processes and process communication mechanisms. We demonstrated the proposed approach on a proof of the mutual exclusion property of the Peterson’s algorithm [11]. We have also demonstrated an application of this approach for proving the mutual exclusion property in the setting of continuous-time models of cyber-physical systems in [8]. Using Mizar [3], in this paper we give a formal proof of the mutual exclusion property of the Peterson’s algorithm in Mizar on the basis of the event-based approach proposed in [2]. Firstly, we define an event-based model of a shared-memory distributed system as a multi-sorted algebraic structure in which sorts are events, processes, locations (i.e. addresses in the shared memory), traces (of the system). The operations of this structure include a binary precedence relation ⩽ on the set of events which turns it into a linear preorder (events are considered simultaneous, if e 1 ⩽ e 2 and e 2 ⩽ e 1), special predicates which check if an event occurs in a given process or trace, predicates which check if an event causes the system to read from or write to a given memory location, and a special partial function “val of” on events which gives the value associated with a memory read or write event (i.e. a value which is written or is read in this event) [2]. Then we define several natural consistency requirements (axioms) for this structure which must hold in every distributed system, e.g. each event occurs in some process, etc. (details are given in [2]). After this we formulate and prove the main theorem about the mutual exclusion property of the Peterson’s algorithm in an arbitrary consistent algebraic structure of events. Informally, the main theorem states that if a system consists of two processes, and in some trace there occur two events e 1 and e 2 in different processes and each of these events is preceded by a series of three special events (in the same process) guaranteed by execution of the Peterson’s algorithm (setting the flag of the current process, writing the identifier of the opposite process to the “turn” shared variable, and reading zero from the flag of the opposite process or reading the identifier of the current process from the “turn” variable), and moreover, if neither process writes to the flag of the opposite process or writes its own identifier to the “turn” variable, then either the events e 1 and e 2 coincide, or they are not simultaneous (mutual exclusion property).

Approaches to surveillance of Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia and Clostridium difficile infection in Australian states and territories

Abstract Introduction Surveillance of healthcare-associated infection (HAI) is aimed at improving patient safety, decreasing healthcare-associated infections and reducing morbidity and mortality. Methods The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care surveyed Australian states and territories during 2012-13 about state-based approaches to surveillance of healthcare-associated Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia (SAB) and hospital-identified Clostridium difficile infection (CDI), including collection, validation and reporting of healthcare-associated infection surveillance data against national surveillance definitions. Results At the time of the survey, all states and territories classified cases of SAB using the national surveillance definition, while most states and territories classified cases of CDI using the national surveillance definition. Notification of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia was mandatory in two states. Four states had electronic access to microbiology results in jurisdictional surveillance units. The implementation of national surveillance definitions has led to more consistent practices for reporting of SAB and CDI. Conclusion Systems and processes for surveillance of SAB and CDI vary across states and territories; however, the development of national surveillance definitions has led to greater consistency nationally. The presence of an active jurisdictional HAI surveillance unit and a statewide surveillance information system enhances data validation, hospital-level reporting, and education and support for surveillance staff in hospitals.

Municipal Fiscal Emergency Laws: Background and Guide to State-Based Approaches

Since the Great Recession of 2008, many municipalities have faced difficult fiscal conditions. During these fiscal emergencies, states have often intervened in an attempt to minimize the damage done to credit markets and public safety. This paper is a survey of the resulting state laws, currently in place in 16 states, and their ramifications throughout the country. These laws involve the state government's becoming directly or indirectly enmeshed in local fiscal and governing affairs. The laws vary in the powers each state may use to address a fiscal emergency, from altering union bargaining laws to allowing tax increases to appointing a state receiver to altering a municipality's organizational structure. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of these state policies and some of the factors that may have influenced the adoption of such policies.

‘Human-Centred’ Development? Rethinking ‘Freedom’ and ‘Agency’ in Discourses of International Development

Today’s dominant discourses of international development increasingly focus on human agency as the measure of development in terms of individual capabilities. The individualised understanding of development takes a ‘human-centred’ or ‘agent-orientated’ view of the barriers to development. This article seeks to critically engage with the view of the human and of human agency articulated within this approach. In this discourse, development is taken out of a macro-political-economy context, in which development policies are shaped by social and political pressures or state-led policies. Foucault’s insights on the rearticulation of power – shifting from the state-based, sovereign and disciplinary approaches of government ruling over society, towards the biopolitical or ‘human-centred’ approaches of governance through social processes – will be used to critically engage with the capabilities approach. This article genealogically draws out the changing nature of Western discourses of development and the understanding of policy practices as promoting the empowerment of the post-colonial other in order to examine how development and autonomy have been radically differently articulated in discourses of Western power and how today’s discursive framing feeds on and transforms colonial and early post-colonial approaches to the human subject.