Logistics and the waste sector: a London case study

London has traditionally exported most of its waste to former mineral workings in surrounding counties for landfill. Many of these sites are being filled and opportunities for new sites are limited. Virtually all waste reprocessing and recycling facilities, with the exception of textile sorting and some facilities for glass and organic waste composting, are outside London. The Mayor of London's Vision for Waste in London is that by 2020, municipal waste should not compromise London’s future as a sustainable city. This will involve managing waste better, so that its impact on the local and global environment and on London communities, economy and health is minimised. The majority of waste and recyclable materials in London are currently collected and transported for recovery, disposal or reprocessing by road in large vehicles. Environmental costs include, adding to congestion, noise, energy usage, air pollution, and accidents. The Mayor is keen to increase recycling and reuse of waste materials in London, and to ensure that as more of London's waste is diverted away from landfill sites to recycling facilities. Several projects and initiatives have been established and these are reviewed in the paper.

Testing the weak-form market efficiency and the day of the week effects of some African countries

The aims of this work are twofold. On the one hand, it aims to find evidence supporting the presence of the weak form efficiency of several emerging African stock markets by using both parametric as well as non parametric tests. The results indicate that none of the markets are characterised by random walks with the exception of the South African stock market. On the other hand, this study aims to detect the presence of the day of the week effects of these African stock markets. Results show the existence of day of the week effects, that is the typical negative Monday and Friday positive effects in several stock markets.

The Potential of Participedia as a Crowdsourcing Tool for Comparative Analysis of Democratic Innovations

For two reasons, our capacity for systematic comparison of innovative participatory democratic processes remains limited. First, the category of participatory democratic innovations remains relatively vague when compared to more traditional democratic institutions and practices. Second, until recently there existed no large-sample databases that captured relevant variables in the practice of democratic innovation. The lone exception to these patterns is the Participedia database, located online. Participedia is well placed to respond to the two obstacles to systematic comparative research on democratic innovation. First, its crowdsourced data collection strategy means that many of the cases on the platform are not well known and have not been the subject of sustained academic analysis. Second, the data captured in the articles provides the basis for systematic comparative analysis of democratic innovations both within type (e.g., participatory budgeting, mini-publics) and across types. The platform allows for systematic content analysis of text descriptions and/or statistical analysis of the datasets generated from the structured data fields. This article describes the data about innovative participatory democratic processes available from Participedia, and furnishes examples of the kinds of quantitative and qualitative insights about those processes that Participedia enables.

Digital evidence as a means of proof before the International Court of Justice

This article discusses the use of digital evidence as a means of proof before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The absence of specific Court rules and procedures for digital evidence (with the exception of Practice Direction IX bis) is not necessarily an obstacle to its production and evaluation before the ICJ, as the general evidentiary rules can also be applied to digital evidence. The article first looks at the rules on the production of documentary evidence and then examines the specific issues related to audiovisual evidence. Finally, it examines the admissibility of digital evidence unlawfully obtained by a litigant through unilateral transborder access to data. The article concludes that, even if specific regulation may be needed as to the specific way in which authenticity and accuracy of digital evidence are to be established, the particular facts of the case and the grounds of challenge can vary widely, and it is doubtful that any regulation could be sufficiently flexible to deal with this in advance.