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Labelling schemes are practical arrangements aimed at making 'ethical' products widely available and visible. They are crucial to expanded development of ethical markets and hence to the addition of moral dimensions to the normall...
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Labelling schemes are practical arrangements aimed at making 'ethical' products widely available and visible. They are crucial to expanded development of ethical markets and hence to the addition of moral dimensions to the normally amoral behaviour linking consumers and retail and production businesses. The study reported here attempts to assess the contribution of UK ethical, social and environmental certification and labelling initiatives to 'sustainable' consumption and production. The research sought to assess the overall potential of initiatives to inject human values into the supply-distribution chains, through a qualitative survey of 15 of the 26 main UK initiatives: in social justice, animal welfare and environmental sustainability from the agriculture, food processing, timber, aquaculture, textiles and personal care sectors. By analysing the basic characteristics and concepts of these labels and investigating the emergence of labelling initiatives, we assess whether labels help add an ethical dimension, or whether, in some respects, they also reduce such missions to the technical management of adding only another 'utility' to a product. The analysis assesses whether the gradual 'mainstreaming' of ethical initiatives such as
'Fairtrade' risks subsuming ethical goals within business participants' competitive and profit-oriented logics. However, the contrasting perspectives revealed between rival labelling initiatives show that the scope and functions of labelling projects go beyond the manifest ones of information communication between consumers and producer and actually introduce elements of socio-political regulation. These are essential for more sustainable and ethical business practices and are an integral part of any humanisation of business involvement.
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摘要 :We are Not short of alarming accounts of the global power asymmetries and detrimental environmental, social, and political effects fostered and amplified by the production, design, and use of artificial intelligence technologies (...
展开We are Not short of alarming accounts of the global power asymmetries and detrimental environmental, social, and political effects fostered and amplified by the production, design, and use of artificial intelligence technologies (AITs). From “surveillance capitalism” [66], via the “black box society” [50], “automated inequality” [22], “algorithms of oppression” [47] to “extractive politics” [17]; from the “Californian ideology” [4] of “Big Tech” in Silicon Valley to the world of start-ups and specialist public sector contractors, like Palantir and Clearview, scholars highlight a wild west of disruptive technological innovation that has gone largely untamed. The whole globe is embroiled in its production and effects while the costs of “externalities” are paid by others: through large-scale environmental degradation from rare metal mining [17], intensive carbon consumption [19], underpaid and underemployed click workers [3], [58], [61], violations of privacy and data protection [5], [48], and the amplification of societal biases in automated decision-making (a useful collection in a 2021 special issue of it Fordham Law Review).
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This paper explores the premise that children in poverty are disadvantaged in their potential to learn by the extent and quality of their social networks and educational relationships. The research examines the quality and sustain...
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This paper explores the premise that children in poverty are disadvantaged in their potential to learn by the extent and quality of their social networks and educational relationships. The research examines the quality and sustainability of educational relationships between children and adults in out-of-school activities. We build a theoretical argument to suggest that children with a greater number of successful, formal and informal educational relationships stand a better chance of success in terms of on-going learning and rewarding employment. The study probes how children act as agents in developing and maintaining educational relationships with adults and the constraints on the use of their own agency in negotiating more formal educational settings. It explores educational relationships out of school and compares and contrasts the educational relationships experienced by children in poverty with a matched sample of those in more affluent circumstances. In doing so, it illuminates the nature and scope of educational relationships in supporting children's engagement with learning; identify perceived gaps in their experiences and capture their explanations of the cause. Learning how to develop and sustain relationships, how to work with others, make use of, and build on other's expertise are vital in improving life chances and these are the skills much demanded by employers. This research contributes to the understanding of the relationships that support the learning of children in poverty and of the barriers that obstruct their development in school.
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Conflict prevention has been a long-standing and high-profile international policy goal, and yet in practice international agencies have found it difficult to operationalise, with the structural dimension of conflict prevention pr...
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Conflict prevention has been a long-standing and high-profile international policy goal, and yet in practice international agencies have found it difficult to operationalise, with the structural dimension of conflict prevention proving especially challenging. Drawing on a review of policy documents, parliamentary debates, and key informant interviews, this article uses a detailed case study of the UK government's structural conflict prevention policy between 2010 and 2015 to understand why international agencies have found it difficult to implement such policies. Our analysis traces this failure by examining top-level strategy, translation into department-level policy, and country-level implementation in South Sudan. The article finds that the UK government failed to implement structural conflict prevention for three key reasons: because the concepts were not well defined or communicated, because priorities were quickly drawn to more urgent problems, and because the approach was not institutionalised within departments or country offices. We argue that for SCP to succeed, international agencies need to be more realistic about the complex challenges associated with SCP and pay more attention to the process of institutionalisation.
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In this paper, we seek to understand how the rapid expansion of off-grid solar energy across the global South since the turn of the century is influencing local and national processes of economic development. We do so through a sy...
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In this paper, we seek to understand how the rapid expansion of off-grid solar energy across the global South since the turn of the century is influencing local and national processes of economic development. We do so through a systematic review of 125 papers published between 2001 and 2020 that provide much evidence and understanding on the topic. Ninety-six of the reviewed papers claim off-grid solar expansion has positively influenced economic development. However, among other issues, much of this positivity is based upon a narrow conceptualisation of economic development as increased income, often achieved by individuals and firms working longer. To what extent these income gains are likely to be sustained and strengthened over time remains unclear. Based on the findings, we call for future research in this area to adopt a more transformative conceptualisation of economic development, as well as a broader analytical framework that: pays greater attention to the role of the state; adopts a more critical position in relation to the foreign firm; and more fully embraces the contested, contingent, and uneven nature of the process of economic development under observation. We close the paper by identifying several fruitful avenues for future research. It is hoped that these suggested paths might help build on the rich insights generated to date, to further deepen and develop our understanding of to what extent, how, and where off-grid solar expansion is promoting (or undermining) transformative and emancipatory processes of economic development in the global South.
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This article seeks to contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of religion in social mobilization. It argues that existing approaches to the study of the role of religion in social mobilization have been insufficiently nuanc...
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This article seeks to contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of religion in social mobilization. It argues that existing approaches to the study of the role of religion in social mobilization have been insufficiently nuanced and have failed to probe the multiple and often contradictory influences that religion can have on mobilization channels. On the basis of three qualitative case studies from Malaysia, Bangladesh and the United Kingdom, we identify three key factors of religion that can catalyze social mobilization: theological resources; religious spaces; and the interaction of both with the wider context. This leads us to conclude that the boundaries of the 'religious' dimension of social mobilization are fluid, and that the religious element of social mobilization can never be disentangled from its social and political context.
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Mating opportunities may differ between closely related species, although the evidence for such variation is scant. Here we compare remating opportunities and courtship behaviour between three shorebird species: the Kentish plover...
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Mating opportunities may differ between closely related species, although the evidence for such variation is scant. Here we compare remating opportunities and courtship behaviour between three shorebird species: the Kentish plover, Charadrius alexandrinus, the Kittlitz's plover, Charadrius pecuarius, and the white-fronted plover, Charadrius marginatus, using data and an experimental approach from a previous study of the Kentish plover. By experimentally creating unmated males and females, we found that remating opportunities differed between these closely related plover species: remating times were shorter for females than males in a Kentish plover population that had a male-biased adult sex ratio, and in which most brood care after hatching was carried out by males. In contrast, remating times were male-biased in the uniparental Kittlitz's plover and unbiased in the biparental white-fronted plover. Male Kentish plovers spent significantly more time on courtship than females, whereas courtship behaviour was not sex biased in the other two plover species. The mate removal experiments also provided insights into pair bond stability. In the Kittlitz's plover, all 16 newly formed pairs remained together after the release of their former mates from captivity, whereas newly established pairs were replaced by their former mates upon release in all 12 white-fronted plover pairs. Taken together, these results are important in highlighting interspecific variation in mating activities, and suggest that both operational sex ratio and pair bond stability may differ between closely related species. These variations, in turn, may influence mating systems and parental care.
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Mid-air haptic feedback technology produces tactile sensations that are felt without the need for physical interactions. However, mid-air haptic experiences need to be congruent with visual cues to reflect user expectations. To ov...
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Mid-air haptic feedback technology produces tactile sensations that are felt without the need for physical interactions. However, mid-air haptic experiences need to be congruent with visual cues to reflect user expectations. To overcome this, we investigate how to visually present properties of objects, so that what one feels is a more accurate prediction of what one sees. Specifically, this paper investigates the relationship between 8 visual parameters of a point-cloud representation of a surface (particle color, size, distribution, etc.) and 4 mid-air haptic spatial modulation frequencies (20, 40, 60 and 80 Hz). Our results and analysis reveal a statistical significance between low and high-frequency modulations and particle density, particle bumpiness (depth) and particle arrangement (randomness).
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The prion protein is well-established as a copper binding protein. The N-terminus of the protein contains an octameric repeat region with each of the four repeats containing a histidine. The N-terminus has two additional histidine...
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The prion protein is well-established as a copper binding protein. The N-terminus of the protein contains an octameric repeat region with each of the four repeats containing a histidine. The N-terminus has two additional histidines distal to the repeat region that has been commonly known as the fifth site. While binding of copper by the protein has been extensively studied, the contribution of each histidine to copper binding in the full-length protein has not. Here we used a battery of mutants of the recombinant mouse prion protein to assess copper binding with both isothermal titration calorimetry and cyclic voltammetry. The findings indicate that there is extensive cooperativity between different binding sites in the protein. The two highest-affinity binding events occur at the fifth site and at the octameric repeat region. However, the first binding is that to the octameric repeat region. Subsequent binding events after the two initial binding events have lower affinities within the octameric repeat region.
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摘要 :
The prion protein is well-established as a copper binding protein. The N-terminus of the protein contains an octameric repeat region with each of the four repeats containing a histidine. The N-terminus has two additional histidine...
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The prion protein is well-established as a copper binding protein. The N-terminus of the protein contains an octameric repeat region with each of the four repeats containing a histidine. The N-terminus has two additional histidines distal to the repeat region that has been commonly known as the fifth site. While binding of copper by the protein has been extensively studied, the contribution of each histidine to copper binding in the full-length protein has not. Here we used a battery of mutants of the recombinant mouse prion protein to assess copper binding with both isothermal titration calorimetry and cyclic voltammetry. The findings indicate that there is extensive cooperativity between different binding sites in the protein. The two highest-affinity binding events occur at the fifth site and at the octameric repeat region. However, the first binding is that to the octameric repeat region. Subsequent binding events after the two initial binding events have lower affinities within the octameric repeat region.
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