This book argues that Putin's strategy for rebuilding the state was fundamentally flawed. Taylor demonstrates that a disregard for the way state officials behave toward citizens - state quality - had ...a negative impact on what the state could do - state capacity. Focusing on those organizations that control state coercion, what Russians call the 'power ministries', Taylor shows that many of the weaknesses of the Russian state that existed under Boris Yeltsin persisted under Putin. Drawing on extensive field research and interviews, as well as a wide range of comparative data, the book reveals the practices and norms that guide the behavior of Russian power ministry officials (the so-called siloviki), especially law enforcement personnel. By examining siloviki behavior from the Kremlin down to the street level, State Building in Putin's Russia uncovers the who, where and how of Russian state building after communism.
There is increasing attention to decision making in social work as we become more concerned about 'risk' and the most effective design of assessment tools to aid professional judgement. In order to ...develop practice, a better conceptual understanding is required of the cognitive processes in making these judgements. This paper explores the potential use of heuristic (small-scale, 'rule-of-thumb') models of cognitive judgement in social work, recognising that human beings (including social work professionals) cannot simultaneously process large numbers of factors with associated statistical weightings. This paper discusses heuristic models of professional judgement based on a proposed concept of psycho-social rationality. Such heuristic models would take account of the psycho-social environment in which the decision is being made as well as of the cognitive processes of the decision maker. The potential application to professional judgement in social work is discussed with reference to examples of various types of social work decision. Potential issues in developing and adopting this theoretical approach in practice are raised—including legal dimensions and potential bias—and the implications for social work research are discussed.
Social workers are frequently involved in making decisions and in managing risks, although there has been limited conceptualisation to connect these tasks with each other or with assessment ...processes. This lack of connection reflects the general separateness of the wider academic discourses on risk and uncertainty (often sociological and organisational, relating frequently to business or economic contexts) and those on decision-making (often focusing on psychology of individual judgement, and typically relating to medical or military contexts). This article presents and explores the potential of a ‘risk-managing decision model’, as an example of a model linking risk management with decision science. This is a psycho-social rationality model for choosing between options, such as possible care, support or intervention plans for a client or family. Rather than treating the options as ‘given’ (i.e. unchangeable), as in most decision theories, this model proposes that the decision maker(s) look for ways to manage or reduce the risks inherent in the preferred option as part of the decision process. Like other psycho-social rationality models, this model incorporates both individual cognitive dimensions and framing aspects of the decision environment. Relevance to social work is discussed with examples and reference to various settings and decision processes.
Oceanic plateaus are mafic igneous provinces commonly thought to derive from ascending mantle plumes. By far the largest, the Ontong Java Plateau (OJP) was emplaced ca. 120 Ma, with a much smaller ...magmatic pulse of ca. 90 Ma. Of similar age and composition, the Manihiki and Hikurangi Plateaus (MP and HP) are separated from the OJP by ocean basins formed during the Cretaceous long normal magnetic period. I present new seafloor fabric data that indicate the three plateaus formed as one (OJMHP). The data support previous interpretations that the Osbourn Trough is the relict of the spreading center that separated the MP and HP but they require a different interpretation than prevailing tectonic models for the Ellice Basin. Closely spaced, large offset, fracture zones in the Ellice Basin bound former right-stepping spreading segments that separated the OJP and MP. The MP was emplaced near the axis of the Pacific–Phoenix ridge and additional plateau fragments formerly bordered its eastern margins. Following OJMHP break-up, seafloor spreading removed these fragments to the east and SSE, together with the symmetric conjugates to the extant Phoenix magnetic lineations.
Tools of the Trade? Siddiq, Fariba; D. Taylor, Brian
Journal of the American Planning Association,
10/2021, Letnik:
87, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
A growing number of planning researchers and practitioners argue for a shift from mobility-centered transportation planning to an accessibility-focused one. Accessibility is a compelling concept that ...has proven more difficult to operationalize than mobility, which helps to explain why so many accessibility metrics have been developed for urban research and planning practice. To assess the state of these metrics, we reviewed 54 of them in light of their theoretical basis, data requirements, units of analysis, travel modes and trip purposes accounted for, and potential applications to planning practice. We also reviewed the substantial literature on accessibility measurement and interviewed planning practitioners who are applying accessibility metrics in practice. We find that accessibility theory and measurement has advanced more rapidly than applications in practice. However, a new generation of tools is emerging that may accelerate the move to accessibility planning. Although many of the measures focus on a single travel mode, the number of multimodal metrics is growing. Most of the measures are designed for regional-scale planning and scenario evaluation; only a few to date are intended for project evaluation.
The 54 accessibility metrics and tools we reviewed vary widely and none stands out as obviously superior for planning practice. Although most calculate the accessibility of places, and many do so reasonably well, we see the most promise in measures of the accessibility of travelers, which can then be aggregated for place-based analyses while still shedding light on how access can vary substantially across different types of travelers. The principal challenge to broadly deploying accessibility analyses in practice in the years ahead is in developing measures that meaningfully measure the many salient dimensions of access, have manageable data requirements, and are understandable to planners, public officials, and community members.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
While the COVID-19 pandemic upended many aspects of life as we knew it, its effects on U.S. public transit were especially dramatic. Many former transit commuters began to work from home or switched ...to traveling via private vehicles. But for those who continued to work outside the home and could not drive—who were more likely low-income and Black or Hispanic—transit remained an important means of mobility. However, most transit agencies reduced service during the first year of the pandemic, reflecting reduced ridership demand, increasing costs, and uncertain budgets. To analyze the effects of the pandemic on transit systems and their users, we examine bus ridership changes by neighborhood in Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles from 2019 to 2020. Combining aggregated stop-level boarding data, passenger surveys, and census data, we identify associations between shifting travel patterns and neighborhoods. We find that early in the pandemic, neighborhoods with more poor and non-white households lost proportionally fewer riders; however, this gap between high- and low-ridership-loss neighborhoods shrank as the pandemic wore on. We also model ridership change controlling for multiple factors. Ridership in Houston and LA generally outperformed Boston, with built environment and demographic factors accounting for some of the observed differences. Neighborhoods with high shares of Hispanic and African American residents retained more riders in the pandemic, while those with higher levels of auto access and with more workers able to work from home lost more riders, all else equal. We conclude that transit’s social service role elevated during the pandemic, and that serving travelers in disadvantaged neighborhoods will likely remain paramount emerging from it.
The rate of cell growth is crucial for bacterial fitness and drives the allocation of bacterial resources, affecting, for example, the expression levels of proteins dedicated to metabolism and ...biosynthesis
. It is unclear, however, what ultimately determines growth rates in different environmental conditions. Moreover, increasing evidence suggests that other objectives are also important
, such as the rate of physiological adaptation to changing environments
. A common challenge for cells is that these objectives cannot be independently optimized, and maximizing one often reduces another. Many such trade-offs have indeed been hypothesized on the basis of qualitative correlative studies
. Here we report a trade-off between steady-state growth rate and physiological adaptability in Escherichia coli, observed when a growing culture is abruptly shifted from a preferred carbon source such as glucose to fermentation products such as acetate. These metabolic transitions, common for enteric bacteria, are often accompanied by multi-hour lags before growth resumes. Metabolomic analysis reveals that long lags result from the depletion of key metabolites that follows the sudden reversal in the central carbon flux owing to the imposed nutrient shifts. A model of sequential flux limitation not only explains the observed trade-off between growth and adaptability, but also allows quantitative predictions regarding the universal occurrence of such tradeoffs, based on the opposing enzyme requirements of glycolysis versus gluconeogenesis. We validate these predictions experimentally for many different nutrient shifts in E. coli, as well as for other respiro-fermentative microorganisms, including Bacillus subtilis and Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
The nature of type Ia supernovae (SNIa)-thermonuclear explosions of white dwarf stars-is an open question in astrophysics. Virtually all existing theoretical models of normal, bright SNIa require the ...explosion to produce a detonation in order to consume all of stellar material, but the mechanism for the deflagration-to-detonation transition (DDT) remains unclear. We present a unified theory of turbulence-induced DDT that describes the mechanism and conditions for initiating detonation both in unconfined chemical and thermonuclear explosions. The model is validated by using experiments with chemical flames and numerical simulations of thermonuclear flames. We use the developed theory to determine criteria for detonation initiation in the single-degenerate Chandrasekhar-mass SNIa model and show that DDT is almost inevitable at densities of 10
to 10
grams per cubic centimeter.
In Fighting for Citizenship , Brian Taylor complicates
existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War.
Civil War-era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core
political ...concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by
this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring
black rights, goals that had eluded earlier generations of black
veterans. Some, like Frederick Douglass, urged immediate enlistment
to support the cause of emancipation, hoping that a Northern
victory would bring about the end of slavery. But others counseled
patience and negotiation, drawing on a historical memory of
unfulfilled promises for black military service in previous
American wars and encouraging black men to leverage their position
to demand abolition and equal citizenship. In doing this, they also
began redefining what it meant to be a black man who fights for the
United States. These debates over African Americans' enlistment
expose a formative moment in the development of American
citizenship: black Northerners' key demand was that military
service earn full American citizenship, a term that had no precise
definition prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. In articulating this
demand, Taylor argues, black Northerners participated in the
remaking of American citizenship itself-unquestionably one of the
war's most important results.
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