Twin Trends Research Articles

The Polar Mediterranean Imaginary. A Renewed Paradigm by Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Southern social imaginaries have typically conceived of the North as a frozen and inhospitable area, depriving it of much interest. However, during the first part of the 20th century, the anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson unveiled many mysteries about the Arctic. Throughout his life and writings, he tried to modify many inaccurate and now old-fashioned imaginings and imaginaries about the Arctic. The concept of the Polar Mediterranean Imaginary was thus proposed by him, whereby the Arctic region could be seen as a place similar to the Mediterranean region, i.e., an important socio-cultural, economic and political hub. Past and present events (e.g., global conflicts, scientific and technologic developments) contribute also to determining how the Arctic is shaped and understood today. The contemporary twin trends of globalization and climate change are making the North more and more globally connected and interconnected, especially through the rise of transpolar routes, which represent an opportunity for the affirmation of the Arctic’s central role, precisely along the lines envisioned by Vilhjalmur Stefansson and his Polar Mediterranean Imaginary one hundred years ago.

Exploring the Potential of iPad-LiDAR Technology for Building Renovation Diagnosis: A Case Study

Digitalization and sustainability are twin trends in the construction industry (CI). Mobile devices are becoming more and more powerful, gaining the ability to support tasks that, until recently, were unthinkable. One example is LiDAR. The use of this technology embedded in tablets and smartphones brings new possibilities at a scan-to-BIM level. Given the commitment to circularity, waste audits will become mandatory for renovation projects. This is a heavy task that can benefit from existing processes and from digital technologies. This paper aims to demonstrate how everything is related and can be efficiently combined. The research convenes digital transition, green transition, circular economy, waste audit, LiDAR, and design processes’ improvement. A mixed-methods approach aims to demonstrate how it is possible to establish digital waste audits and how these can become the core of the diagnosis process to be made during strategic definition or as part of the renovation design’s initial actions. LiDAR technology embedded in mobile devices is worthy and can bring major improvements to the diagnosis phase. This will become more compliant with objectives set for digitalization and improved sustainability, contributing to the sector’s twin digital and green transitions.

A comprehensive review of digital twin — part 1: modeling and twinning enabling technologies

As an emerging technology in the era of Industry 4.0, digital twin is gaining unprecedented attention because of its promise to further optimize process design, quality control, health monitoring, decision and policy making, and more, by comprehensively modeling the physical world as a group of interconnected digital models. In a two-part series of papers, we examine the fundamental role of different modeling techniques, twinning enabling technologies, and uncertainty quantification and optimization methods commonly used in digital twins. This first paper presents a thorough literature review of digital twin trends across many disciplines currently pursuing this area of research. Then, digital twin modeling and twinning enabling technologies are further analyzed by classifying them into two main categories: physical-to-virtual, and virtual-to-physical, based on the direction in which data flows. Finally, this paper provides perspectives on the trajectory of digital twin technology over the next decade, and introduces a few emerging areas of research which will likely be of great use in future digital twin research. In part two of this review, the role of uncertainty quantification and optimization are discussed, a battery digital twin is demonstrated, and more perspectives on the future of digital twin are shared. Code and preprocessed data for generating all the results and figures presented in the battery digital twin case study in part 2 of this review are available on Github .

Patents and the University

This Article advances two novel claims about the internalization of academic science within patent law and the concomitant evolution of “academic exceptionalism.” Historically, relations between patent law and the university were characterized by mutual exclusion, based in part on normative conflicts between academia and exclusive rights. These normative distinctions informed “academic exceptionalism” — the notion that the patent system should exclude the fruits of academic science or treat academic entities differently than other actors — in patent doctrine. As universities began to embrace patents, however, academic science has become internalized within the traditional commercial narrative of patent protection. Contemporary courts frequently invoke universities’ commercial nature to reject exceptional treatment for such institutions. The twin trends of internalization and exceptionalism have evolved again in recent legislative patent reform. On one hand, the interests of academic science have become completely internalized within the patent system to the extent that they inform general rules of patentability applying to all inventions. On the other hand, academic exceptionalism has been resurrected in the form of special statutory carve-outs for universities. Turning from the descriptive to the normative, this Article concludes with recommendations for improving the patent system’s regulation of academic science.

Estimating Direct Gains in Consumer Welfare in Telecommunications Sector

This paper discusses the benefits of product and process innovation as well as deregulation in consumer telecommunication products markets. The twin trends of price reduction and new features have benefited consumers. These major changes have taken place alongside deregulation. Using the data from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development telecommunication reports, the paper provides estimates of gains in consumer welfare over the years. These direct gains are significant (hundreds of billions of dollars) and thus justify the public investment that goes into the telecommunication infrastructure improvement.

La tensión estandarización-diferenciación en las políticas culturales. El caso de España y Francia

A partir de una interpretación “intergubernamental” de las políticas públicas, el presente artículo estudia las tendencias hacia la diferenciación y la estandarización, tomando como caso comparado de estudio la política cultural franco-española, dos modelos con similitudes y diferencias especialmente relevantes. Para ello, se parte de un esquema analítico que combina cinco ejes: la configuración institucional, los instrumentos de intervención, la distribución por niveles de gobierno, las lógicas con capacidad de influencia y las prioridades, objetivos y valores de las políticas. Una primera hipótesis es que la doble tendencia hacia la diferenciación o hacia la estandarización no se limita al diálogo/tensión entre los Estados y los organismos supranacionales, sino que integran al conjunto de interacciones con los niveles subestatales; y ello más allá de la estructura federal o unitaria del Estado. La segunda hipótesis es que en cada nivel de gobierno se dan tendencias hacia la diferenciación y hacia la estandarización. El análisis de los argumentos de legitimación y eficiencia en un conjunto de observaciones contextualizadas permite contrastar las hipótesis.

The Twin Trends of Administrative Traditions in Egypt and United States: A Thematic Study

The Twin Trends of Administrative Traditions in Egypt and United States: A Thematic Study

Disability and employment: lessons from natural policy experiments

Across Europe, the situation for working age people not in employment through disability or ill-health is a serious issue for public health and social welfare policy. Why? The scale and upward trend is one reason. In the UK, incapacity benefits are paid to those who are unable to work because of ill-health or disability. The numbers on incapacity benefits trebled during the 1980s and 1990s and now stand at more than 2.6 million people,1 accounting for 25% of total social security benefit expenditure, corresponding to 1.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).2 In the Nordic countries, Sweden has also seen a trebling of the proportion of the population receiving sickness or activity compensation in the past 30 years,3 with almost 15% of the working age population outside the labour market due to ill-health. Nearly 8% are on disability pensions and the cost of sick leave and disability pensions together corresponds to around 4% of the Swedish GDP. In Denmark and Norway, the proportion of the working age population in receipt of disability pension has risen to 8 and 10%, respectively. There is recognition across Europe that the ageing of populations will exacerbate these trends: in the near future, it is estimated that there will be eight non-working persons per 10 working persons in the European Union (EU), as a result of the twin trends of the ageing of the population and the increase in the proportions leaving the labour force due to ill-health. These figures are not just about a financial problem for governments, but about opportunities for large sections of the population to participate fully in society as a whole and have a better quality of life. For public health, the issue is intricately linked to health inequalities. Being in poor health is an important risk factor …

Declining memberships, changing members? European political party members in a new era

In recent years, membership in established political parties has been shrinking, but at the same time members of some parties have received increased powers to help select candidates, leaders and party policies. These twin trends make it important to re-examine who is joining today’s smaller parties. As parties shrink, do they attract a changed mixture of members, possibly with different political priorities? Using data from two sets of European surveys, our study investigates this question to study longitudinal change in party membership. The data show a growing gap between the age of party members and the general population. In most other respects, however, party members seem to be becoming more, not less, like their fellow citizens. This suggests that today’s smaller but more powerful memberships still have the potential to help link their parties to a wider electoral base.

The Chinese Discourse on the ‘Rise of China’

The ‘rise of China’ discourse articulates the transformation of China's internal structure and growth of its comprehensive national strength. From a Chinese perspective, the ‘rise of China’ and ‘peaceful development’ are concurrent themes that express and blend with the twin trends of globalisation and multipolarisation. This article argues that by adhering to the processes of ‘multilateralism’ and promoting ‘commercial diplomacy’, China has consciously made efforts to improve its international image.

Geographies of Care and Responsibility

Across the decades geographers have been concerned with questions of our ethical responsibilities to care. It would seem that care is nothing new in geography. I argue however, that contemporary societal shifts are extending market relations into caring realms of our lives and that we are witnessing reductions in public provision of social supports. These twin trends have made care a more pressing concern and have simultaneously marginalized care from view. Geographers are well positioned to draw attention to these trends and I urge us to think about our responsibility to care about these issues, and the geographies that they make. I ask us all to think about our responsibilities as geographers to pose questions in the face of (i) market extensions, (ii) currently pervasive discourses of personal responsibility (for poverty, inner city decline, unemployment, etc.), and (iii) the withdrawal of public support from many crucial arenas. Care ethics focuses our attention on the social and how it is constructed through unequal power relationships, but it also moves us beyond critique and toward the construction of new forms of relationships, institutions, and action that enhance mutuality and well-being. I consider how our research, teaching, and professional practices might shift in conversation with care ethics. Care ethics suggests that we build spatially extensive connections of interdependence and mutuality, that we attend to the ways in which historical and institutional relationships produce the need for care (extension of market relations; famine, unnatural disasters, environmental and cultural destruction), and that we take up social responsibility in our professional practices. Nearly all of us care, because we ourselves know what it means to have our hearts cut away by life… —(Kingsolver 2002)

FDI, Skilled Labour and the Caribbean's Emerging Competitive Disadvantage

This article analyses why the Caribbean economies have not been able to take advantage of their physical proximity to the highly developed economies and the likely role of shortage of skilled labour in this. Our analysis reveals that the twin trends of growing need for FDI and lack of enough highly-skilled workers is giving rise to the emerging competitive disadvantage of the Caribbean countries. We show that in spite of having achieved high levels of human development, including high literacy levels, the higher education and skill development strategy of the region lacks vision especially in terms of the development of institutional aspects. The Caribbean economies may be able to partly neutralize the advantage typically enjoyed by large economies by making effective use of information technology, especially in the area of services. But the associated need for highly skilled and knowledge-intensive workers would require continuous upgrading of educational and training systems.

Combattre la corruption et améliorer la gouvernance financière : les institutions financières internationales et le renforcement du contrôle budgétaire dans les pays en développement

Curbing corruption and improving fiscal governance : Strengthening budget oversight and public sector auditing in emerging economies It is increasingly acknowledged that improving economic governance and fostering fiscal responsibility in emerging economies necessarily requires greater transparency and accountability in the management of public finances. Additionally, new and old forms of aid delivery, notably direct budgetary support and policy-based lending, involve greater reliance on national public finance management systems. Therefore, improving aid effectiveness and mitigating fiduciary risk also entail strengthening external scrutiny, financial oversight and fiscal control. These twin trends have led to a renewed in interest in the institutions overseeing the budget, in particular parliaments and external audit agencies. This study reviews a decade of support by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank to parliaments and external audit agencies in Latin America. It underscores recent developments in development finance reflecting a broader understanding of the determinants of fiscal credibility and financial integrity. It reveals a learning curve in multilateral assistance to budget oversight institutions. It argues that there exists unexplored potential to improve the effectiveness of multilateral assistance to fiscal control institutions, including in the choice of lending strategies and the synergies between instruments. More fundamentally, it underscores the need to tackle the underlying political economy of public finance accountability.

Segmenting the convenience and health trends in the British food market

Convenience and health trends are arguably the two most prevailing consumption trends in the British food market, with single‐adult households as keener followers than many other household types. Two portfolios of food products have been developed as proxies of the twin trends respectively, and the Poisson regression technique is employed to segment these two trend markets. Results confirm some previously held views, challenge others, and make some serendipity that has not been found in previous studies. Marketers are informed of greater accessibility in the health trend market vis‐à‐vis the convenience trend market for segmentation purpose, and are advised to treat the two trend markets as non‐overlapping. A number of future research directions, including a multivariate measure of the aspiration intensity of the two food trends and a measure of the twin trends for a wider range of typical products within the consumer market, are suggested.

Whose Left? Working-Class Political Allegiances in Post-industrial Britain

A romanticized view of class alignment in Britain exists that has been attacked and defended equally in academic works over the last twenty years. Historically, the Labour Party was seen as the defender of working-class interests, though critics within the party and the British socialist movement have often questioned this notion. Such questions have appeared more pertinent with the diminution of the working class due to the de-industrialization of the British economy. In 1983 Andrew Gamble noted that: “The greatest threat to this underlying strength of the British labour movement are the twin trends of declining manufacturing output and rising unemployment”. He argued that it was the failure of the Labour Party to arrest these trends and “translate the overwhelming objective strength [...] into organizational strength and political leadership” which had led to the dealignment of the working class away from Labour.

Decentralization and School Council Empowerment in Kentucky: Implications for Community Relations

We introduce the topic of community building as a central ingredient of systemic reform. After noting that devolution of decision making has been characteristic of many organizations in the 1990s, we contend that decentralizing schooling implies empowerment both of teachers and parents. Having described school councils in Kentucky as illustrative of the twin trends of decentralization and empowerment, we note the (largely) disappointing results on teacher job attraction to council positions and on teacher and parent empowerment. We conclude that the teacher-parent-student relationship for poor families, precisely those targeted by the Kentucky reform cycle, is problematic: Reconfiguring this crucial relationship should in part frame “community relations” for the 21st century.

The Catholic Church, Resource Allocation and the Priest Shortage

The economics literature, for all its richness and diversity, is peculiarly lacking in studies on organized religion. One reason may be that religious activity is not thought to follow the usual optimizing rules of economics. However, with religious organizations comprising a large portion of the nonprofit sector, it is important that researchers afford them an appropriate amount of attention. This study analyzes the U.S. Roman Catholic Church. One of the primary issues facing the U.S. Catholic Church in the latter third of this century has been the shortage of one of its major resources, priests. In 1966 the American Catholic Church had about 59,000 priests serving some 46 million Catholics, or an average of about one priest per every 780 parishioners. Since that time, there has been a significant decrease in the number of priests, and a corresponding increase in the number of U.S. Catholics. In 1990 there were approximately 53,000 priests to service 57 million U.S. Catholics, or an average of one priest for every 1,100 parishioners. The twin trends of an increasing number of Catholics and a decreasing number of priests is expected to continue into the next century. This shortfall in the number of priests has caused the U.S. Catholic Church to make some resource adjustments. One has been a search for some acceptable substitutes for U.S. priests. For example, there has been an increase in the use of foreign born extern priests serving U.S. Catholic dioceses. The church has revived the use of the permanent deaconate. Lay Catholics and religious sisters and brothers have assumed some of the functions that had previously been performed exclusively by priests. Some parishes are headed by women religious serving in the role of parish administrator, with priests available only on a rotating basis for a Sunday mass. In some parishes even this is not an option, and recently Catholic bishops approved guidelines for priestless liturgies. Another form of adjustment has been the closing of Catholic parishes. Often these are urban parishes, serving the poorest areas of a city. Priests are obviously among the primary resources utilized by the Catholic Church. Rightly or wrongly, it appears that the church employs its resources without a basic understanding of the resource allocation issues involved. Some grasp of the impacts of the various options to deal with the priest shortage, and yet maintain parish life, is imperative. This study views the Church as a nonprofit organization and empirically examines some of the options for dealing with the priest shortage. Specifically, it considers parish management schemes other than the traditional one of a parish headed by a resident pastor. To this end, a model is empirically estimated which relates measures of non-traditional parish management schemes to a measure of parish output. The analysis takes place at the diocesan level, where most resource allocation decisions are made. Viewed as nonprofit organizations, churches can be regarded as mutual benefit organizations, akin in many respects to a country club or labor union. The vast majority of their revenue comes from member donations. Only a small portion results from the sale of goods and services and virtually none comes from the government. Churches provide club goods, which are primarily available to members only.(1) These club goods can be divided into two categories, sacramental and nonsacramental. Sacramental functions include services and religious education, while nonsacramental activities include cultural opportunities, recreational pursuits, and youth programs. Churches also engage in philanthropic activities, contributing money, time and property to nonmembers. Biddle, studying both Protestant and Catholic churches, concluded that local churches spend 71% of their revenues on club-type activities, with 59% of the total spending going toward sacramental functions (1992, p. 104). He further estimated that clergy spend 68% of their time on sacramental activities (1992, p. …

Twin Trends: Health and Convenience in Food Change or Who Killed the Lazy Housewife?

The twin trends of health and convenience which have resulted in changing food consumption patterns are outlined. Research among consumers confirmed that there is awareness and concern about the relationship between health and diet; food scares have brought confusion; and the better educated are more food‐conscious. Changing lifestyles and the changing role of women are shown to affect food habits.

Ideas, Institutions and Political Culture in Western Development

Contemporary Western political culture is characterized by three achievements and ideas: (1) the limitation of government or the rule of law; (2) some institutional separation of the economy and of science from government and religion; and (3) popular participation or democracy. The first two components of Western political culture are prerequisites of the European miracle. In contrast to the great Asian civilizations, Western civilization alone succeeded in overcoming mass poverty. The third component of Western political culture, i.e. democracy, depends on the first two components as well as on a high level of prosperity. Western cultural, political and economic achievements are rooted in political fragmentation, i.e. in the existence of an international system in the West instead of a unified empire, as well as in conflicts between cities and territorial rulers, between secular and spiritual leaders, and later even between crown and parliament. In the twentieth century, however, the most basic Western achievement, i.e. the limitation of government, is threatened by the reassertion and democratization of rent-seeking or creeping socialism. The twin trends towards the growth of distributional coalitions and government reduce Western economic performance without moving us closer to professed egalitarian goals. Western government activities tend to be limited as far as the procurement of public goods is concerned, whether one refers to the maintenance of competition or national security, but increasingly unlimited as far as redistribution is concerned.