Hasil untuk "Communities. Classes. Races"

Penny Sanz, Mary Beth Doucette

Keerthana K, Pachiyappan Sathish, Joseph Augustine et al.

Stefano Moroni, Anita De Franco, Carolina Pacchi et al.

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic has been analysed and discussed from many disciplinary perspectives. An aspect that still needs critical exploration is the role—that is, the modes and forms—of regulatory interventions during the pandemic. It is interesting to note in this regard that, in many studies, regulatory measures are labelled “non-pharmaceutical interventions”, as if they do not have any specificity on their own and only represent a theoretically residual category. The main aim of this article is instead to focus on the distinctive features of normative measures as such. As regards the article’s focus, it centres on the normative interventions in the first period of the pandemic—that is, 2020—with particular reference to Italy. We have chosen to focus on this period because the most extensive and severe restrictions introduced to combat Covid-19 were established at that time. And we have chosen to consider Italy because it was the first country, after China, to be hard hit by the virus and to react in a draconian manner. As regards the methodology, the article is based, in general and primarily, on an extensive interdisciplinary literature review. With reference to the Italian case, the study is additionally based on: first-hand data collection and analysis (especially concerning Italian normative measures mainly issued at the national level: their type, frequency, target, hierarchical relationships); second-hand data and analysis (for instance as regards the effectiveness of Italy’s and other countries’ regulatory measures). In discussing the Italian response to the Covid-19 pandemic, certain weaknesses have been identified; and possible lessons have been highlighted, in terms of both “planning” (i.e. the necessity to better pre-define concrete and circumscribed sets of actions) and of “meta-planning” (i.e. the necessity of better planning the way in which public authorities could and should plan and act). Although this article is mainly based on the Italian situation, what we can learn from this case is largely generalizable.

Grazia Concilio, Irene Bianchi, Ilaria Tosoni

Abstract This article reports a first attempt to combine the analysis of socio-technical mechanisms and initiative-based learning to sense sustainability transition signals in cities. Relying on the analysis of cultural initiatives in six European Cities, the study identifies those factors that enabled social impact generation. It then formulates hypotheses about their contribution to the inception and rooting of sustainability transition dynamics. As a result, the article proposes a set of analytical categories of enabling factors acting across niches and regimes. The same factors are then reinterpreted by referring to scaling mechanisms (scaling up, out and deep). The proposed analytical scheme seeks to offer a broader reflection on the conceptual and methodological challenges related to sensing and interpreting urban sustainability transition pathways.

Carolin Schütze

Colour blindness is a concept that is established in the US context, and it has gained increased attention among European scholars. Yet we find less studies in the European context that measure colour-blind attitudes and show its prevalence among different groups. Therefore, this paper examines the prevalence of colour-blind attitudes among Swedish welfare professionals’ and how these attitudes are associated with anti-immigration attitudes but also social desirability. To this end, survey data is examined with a regression analysis. Welfare professionals who report greater levels of colour-blind attitudes are simultaneously more likely to report greater levels of anti-immigration attitudes. This paper thereby tests how colour-blind attitudes, a concept from the US context, can be applied to a Swedish welfare institutional context and finds convergent results.

Van Dan Dang, Hoang Chung Nguyen

Purpose ─ The paper empirically explores the conditioning role of loan portfolio diversification in the monetary policy pass-through via the bank lending and risk-taking channels. Methods ─ Data of Vietnamese commercial banks during 2007–2019 is employed to perform regression using the two-step system generalized method of moments in dynamic panel models. For robustness, we approach different choices of monetary policy indicators, ranging from interest-based tools to quantitative-based policy, and consider a rich set of sectoral exposure measures to proxy loan portfolio diversification. Findings ─ Lower interest rates or greater liquidity injection during monetary expansion may increase bank lending and bank risk, thus confirming the working of the bank lending and risk-taking channels of monetary policy transmission. Notably, the potency of these banking channels may be weakened for banks diversifying loan portfolios more into various economic sectors. Implication ─ The findings call for monetary authorities to concentrate on certain types of banks, depending on their loan portfolios when setting monetary policy. When managing banking supervision, banking supervisors should also acknowledge the tradeoff between bank lending and bank risk in response to monetary shocks. Originality ─ For the first time, this paper explores the conditional role of loan portfolio composition and thus further supports the recent upsurge in empirical studies highlighting the role of business models in monetary policy pass-through.

Cecilia Rocha, Melody Mendonça, Do Huy Nguyen et al.

Despite recent improvements in health, Vietnam continues to face significant problems with food security and chronic malnutrition among children. In the Northern Mountainous Region, small-scale farmers and ethnic minority groups are particularly hit hard. Anemia is present in almost half the local population of children under two, and close to 20% of children experience stunted growth. Anemia and stunting can cause irreversible deficiencies in learning and child development. Fortification of food products that are complementary to breast milk has been identified as an option to intervene and tackle chronic child malnutrition, particularly in situations requiring rapid results. Our paper describes how the ECOSUN project addressed food security and chronic child malnutrition in northern Vietnam (Lào Cai, Lai Châu, and Hà Giang provinces) using a food-system approach to design and implement a viable and sustainable value chain for fortified complementary foods. Through public-private partnerships, the project procured locally grown crops from small-scale women farmers to produce affordable fortified complementary food products in a small-scale food processing plant. Social marketing campaigns and nutrition education counseling centers supported product distribution through local vendors while emphasizing and promoting the value of fortified foods for healthy child development. The ECOSUN project also aimed to contribute to the broader goal of transforming the local economy. The process, lessons, challenges, successes, and methods employed to assess and test the delivery mechanisms of the project can offer insights to researchers, program implementers, and decision-makers involved in research-integrated development projects embedded in local socio-ecological systems. 

Thomas Mtonga, E. Lungu, Kalisto Kalimaposo et al.

Albinism is an inherited skin pigmentation condition which affects all races in the world. However, the condition is more conspicuous among the black population because of the absence of pigmentation which leads to some whitish appearance. This condition also leads to multiple disabling experiences to the individuals with albinism. The overriding aim of the study was to establish the learning experiences of learners with albinism in both regular and special schools. The study was located within an interpretive qualitative paradigm and used a phenomenology research design. The Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to explore in detail how participants made sense of their personal and social world with regard to learners with albinism in regular and special schools. The researchers conducted one-on-one interviews with the participants and content – analyzed the data. Parents of learners with albinism, teachers, school administrators and learners with albinism participated in interviews. The findings revealed that in regular schools’ learners with albinism tended to exclude themselves from other learners so as to avoid discrimination and stereotypes surrounding their condition. The findings also confirmed the existence of myths and stereotypes regarding albinism. The findings further revealed that teachers in regular schools were not patient with learners with albinism and did not give them extra attention and that some teachers used negative comments and did not want learners with albinism in their classes. It was observed that the majority of learners with albinism felt more secure in special schools rather than regular schools. Parents of children with albinism supported the idea of learners with albinism learning in special schools where the learning environment was conducive for them. The study recommended inter alia that government through the Ministry of Education should enhance teacher education programmes by providing requisite knowledge and skills to trainee and serving teachers on handling learners with albinism and other disabilities. School administrators, teachers, learners and the community should raise sensitization and awareness campaigns on disability issues. Article visualizations:

Olivier Arvisais, Patrick Charland, François Audet et al.

The academic community has highlighted the lack of research into accelerated education programs (AEPs) in refugee camps. Furthermore, AEPs take different forms in different countries. Generally speaking, however, several AEPs in different parts of the world are known for their low attendance rates. Accordingly, this article presents the key barriers causing absenteeism or preventing students from continuing their education within the program in Dadaab Refugee Camp. Our study shows that humanitarian action itself plays a significant role in pupil academic persistence. Also, flexible schedules are not a solution to absenteeism in AEP.

C. Ikeya

Alexander S. Abroskin, Natalia A. Abroskina

<p>The subject area of the research in this article is the existing methodological framework and approaches applied in Russian and international practice to establish boundaries that determine the property status of the population. The topicality of the research is determined by the features of the approach used in Russian practice of poverty measurement, based on the comparison of per capita income with per capita cost of living, which, with a rather simple calculation scheme, has a number of shortcomings that limit its application in constructing integrated assessments of a population’s standard of living. The purpose of the research is to analyze the features of measuring the level of poverty based on consumer characteristics of households.</p> <p>The research tasks are connected with identification of the most problematic aspects of the current practice of measuring the level of poverty in the Russian Federation, determination the factors that may affect the results of measurements, and assessment the impact of these factors on the quality of indicators developed by official statistics. Special attention in the research is paid to the analysis of international organizations’ recommendations and foreign experience in developing a system of indicators that characterize various aspects of the population’s property status, building of appropriate estimates taking into account the standardization of households’ consumer characteristics, as well as indicators that complement the basic monetary characteristics used in measuring the population’s level of poverty. Based on the systematization of the most promising developments in this area, implemented in foreign practice, proposals for improvement the existing approaches to measuring the level of poverty in Russian statistics are formulated, and new research directions in the field of methodology for building comprehensive estimates of the level of poverty as an information basis for developing effective measures of targeted social support for the most problematic groups of the population are identified.</p>

Sarah A. Stevenson, Gregory A. Kopp, Ayman M. El Ansary

High-wind events cause significant damage to structures and property; in particular, light-frame wood homes are especially vulnerable and are the most abundant housing type in North America. As with many regions, Canadian homes are built to prescriptive standards that are based on historical construction methods and have remained relatively unchanged structurally across several decades, even though energy requirements have changed substantially. The present work reviews existing recommendations and campaigns for wind resilience in other jurisdictions, assesses their relevance to the Canadian context, and evaluates current construction methods as well as proposed improvement alternatives. Components that are commonly observed to fail in Canadian tornado damage surveys are of primary interest; namely, roof sheathing, roof-to-wall connections, and discontinuities in wall-to-floor links. Limit states design-based calculations are completed to assess the adequacy of nailed components from an engineering design standpoint. Past work quantifying the inadequacy of roof sheathing provisions in the current version of the National Building Code of Canada is discussed, and new analyses are done for the other components. Sources of conservatism in design calculations are identified, and unfactored results are provided to describe more representative limit states. When the redundancy of load and resistance factors is removed, the results show that current prescriptive provisions for roof-to-wall fasteners are likely to be sufficient up to a failure wind pressure of about 0.6 kPa—this applies to most regions in Canada. The wall capacity calculations suggest significant vulnerability to uplift or sliding withdrawal of nailed connections; however, these results are considered to be especially conservative. Potential, non-structural sources of house capacity are discussed. In general, current prescriptive provisions are deemed suitable for the synoptic wind events that they are expected to face. However, concern is identified for houses in open terrain or those prone to tornado risk. Design recommendations are presented in the context of providing resistance to up to EF2 tornadoes.

Isidoro Fasolino, Michele Grimaldi, Francesca Coppola

Urban planning is one of the sectors that is able to provide a contribution to the definition of a desirable scenario for the future of the city and the territory as it deals with the physical and functional organisation of human settlements, more than others, also for reasons related to its historical origin. The paradigms now acquired from a disciplinary point of view, such as densification, sustainable mobility, mixitè, urban green, etc., raise the issue of compatibility with the needs of social distancing imposed by the health emergency. One wonders if and how the principles and criteria for the physical and functional organisation of settlements, which inform and substantiate the technical-scientific documents and the spatial and urban planning instruments themselves, will change. The response confirms the overall goodness of the organisational model shared by the community of urban planners. This can only be a stimulus to continue the research and application activities in the field with even greater commitment and determination. The crisis must in any case build an opportunity to rethink the functioning of the city, its spaces, its times and its forms of social and economic interaction, as we imagine will happen in all other fields

H. Popli, Taiyyaba Razique

Stephanie J. Brown

This paper considers the journalism and poetry Claude McKay produced for Sylvia Pankhurst's communist weekly Workers' Dreadnought in 1920 as a collaboratively produced body of work. This allowed Pankhurst to have a Black communist commentator on hand to cover workers' issues, and McKay used Pankhurst's periodical as a platform from which to dramatise the aesthetic and political potential inherent in collaboration between working-class activists, journalists, and artists for the paper's readers. In the Dreadnought's pages, McKay's poems very publicly weighed the value of collaborative labour and considered the arts' place in the class struggle. He simultaneously produced journalism that advocated collaboration among races to resist the racial antagonism that sparked violence in the most impoverished East End communities in the summers of 1919 and 1920. Ultimately, McKay's work for the Dreadnought produced a holistic representation of working-class intellectual life founded on the production of beauty and the exercise of aesthetic as well as political judgment, one that depicts these activities as inevitably commingled and collaboratively produced.

Amr Hassan Yassin, Hany Hamdy Hussien

Due to the exponential growth of E-Business and computing capabilities over the web for a pay-for-use groundwork, the risk factors regarding security issues also increase rapidly. As the usage increases, it becomes very difficult to identify malicious attacks since the attack patterns change. Therefore, host machines in the network must continually be monitored for intrusions since they are the final endpoint of any network. The purpose of this work is to introduce a generalized neural network model that has the ability to detect network intrusions. Two recent heuristic algorithms inspired by the behavior of natural phenomena, namely, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and gravitational search (GSA) algorithms are introduced. These algorithms are combined together to train a feed forward neural network (FNN) for the purpose of utilizing the effectiveness of these algorithms to reduce the problems of getting stuck in local minima and the time-consuming convergence rate. Dimension reduction focuses on using information obtained from NSL-KDD Cup 99 data set for the selection of some features to discover the type of attacks. Detecting the network attacks and the performance of the proposed model are evaluated under different patterns of network data.

Natalino Perovano Filho

Expediente da Revista

Yifan Xu, I. Lee, Kunal Agrawal

Tayeb Otmane, Abed Bendjelid

The family farm of the Western oases in the Algerian Sahara evolves in a context of difficulties related on the decline of the water resources resulting from foggaras, on the weak profit drawn from agriculture and the diversification of the remunerative nonagricultural activities. To these factors are added the effects of an atomization of the agricultural oasis property, due to the land joint possession in keeping with the increase in population. The oases tend to preserve their agricultural property, even if not worked, which also takes part in this process of unfavourable evolution which mortgages the future of family oasis agriculture.

Aaron L. Haberman