Rough-terrain groundspeed measurement:a radar-based commercial solution

Off-highway motive plant equipment is costly in capital outlay and maintenance. To reduce these overheads and increase site safety and workrate, a technique of assessing and limiting the velocity of such equipment is required. Due to the extreme environmental conditions met on such sites, conventional velocity measurement techniques are inappropriate. Ogden Electronics Limited were formed specifically to manufacture a motive plant safety system incorporating a speed sensor and sanction unit; to date, the only such commercial unit available. However, problems plague the reliability, accuracy and mass production of this unit. This project assesses the company's exisiting product, and in conjunction with an appreciation of the company history and structure, concludes that this unit is unsuited to its intended application. Means of improving the measurement accuracy and longevity of this unit, commensurate with the company's limited resources and experience, are proposed, both for immediate retrofit and for longer term use. This information is presented in the form of a number of internal reports for the company. The off-highway environment is examined; and in conjunction with an evaluation of means of obtaining a returned signal, comparisons of processing techniques, and on-site gathering of previously unavailable data, preliminary designs for an alternative product are drafted. Theoretical aspects are covered by a literature review of ground-pointing radar, vehicular radar, and velocity measuring systems. This review establishes and collates the body of knowledge in areas previously considered unrelated. Based upon this work, a new design is proposed which is suitable for incorporation into the existing company product range. Following production engineering of the design, five units were constructed, tested and evaluated on-site. After extended field trials, this design has shown itself to possess greater accuracy, reliability and versatility than the existing sensor, at a lower unit cost.

Post-registration learning trends of community pharmacists

Background: Some Australian pharmacists use continuing education to maintain knowledge and acquire new information. There has been a progression from continuing education to continuing professional development (CPD) - a mandatory requirement for pharmacists in all jurisdictions of Australia. Aim: To identify post-registration learning trends of community pharmacists in Western Australia. Method: A questionnaire was developed and administered by face-to-face interviews with community pharmacists in metropolitan Perth. Pharmacists registered for less than 12 months and pharmacists working in hospitals were excluded. Results: 103 pharmacists were approached with a response rate of 95%. Journals (41%), reference books (23%) and the Internet (18%) were the most commonly used educational resources cited by pharmacists. Keeping scientific information up-to-date (39%) and gathering practical knowledge (22%) were the leading motivators for pharmacists to participate in continuing education. Factors that hindered participation in continuing education included lack of time (34%), family commitments (21%) and business commitments (21%). 79% of pharmacists agreed with the concept of mandatory CPD. 47% of pharmacists suggested that the primary sanction for not complying with mandatory CPD should be counselling to determine reasons for non-compliance. Conclusion: Community pharmacists preferred educational resources that were easily accessible at convenient times. Most pharmacists were able to fulfil the requirements of CPD, however, further educational support and promotion would ensure the successful uptake of CPD by community pharmacists in Western Australia.

Multilevel Governance and Accountability: Does Decentralization Promote Good Governance?

Today, the trend towards decentralization is far-reaching. Proponents of decentralization have argued that decentralization promotes responsive and accountable local government by shortening the distance between local representatives and their constituency. However, in this paper, I focus on the countervailing effect of decentralization on the accountability mechanism, arguing that decentralization, which increases the number of actors eligible for policy making and implementation in governance as a whole, may blur lines of responsibility, thus weakening citizens’ ability to sanction government in election. By using the ordinary least squares (OLS) interaction model based on historical panel data for 78 countries in the 2002 – 2010 period, I test the hypothesis that as the number of government tiers increases, there will be a negative interaction between the number of government tiers and decentralization policies. The regression results show empirical evidence that decentralization policies, having a positive impact on governance under a relatively simple form of multilevel governance, have no more statistically significant effects as the complexity of government structure exceeds a certain degree. In particular, this paper found that the presence of intergovernmental meeting with legally binding authority have a negative impact on governance when the complexity of government structure reaches to the highest level.

On the Regulation of Small Actors: Three Experimental Essays about Policies based on Voluntary Compliance and Decentralized Monitoring

Monitoring and enforcement are perhaps the biggest challenges in the design and implementation of environmental policies in developing countries where the actions of many small informal actors cause significant impacts on the ecosystem services and where the transaction costs for the state to regulate them could be enormous. This dissertation studies the potential of innovative institutions based on decentralized coordination and enforcement to induce better environmental outcomes. Such policies have in common that the state plays the role of providing the incentives for organization but the process of compliance happens through decentralized agreements, trust building, signaling and monitoring. I draw from the literatures in collective action, common-pool resources, game-theory and non-point source pollution to develop the instruments proposed here. To test the different conditions in which such policies could be implemented I designed two field-experiments that I conducted with small-scale gold miners in the Colombian Pacific and with users and providers of ecosystem services in the states of Veracruz, Quintana Roo and Yucatan in Mexico. This dissertation is organized in three essays.

The first essay, “Collective Incentives for Cleaner Small-Scale Gold Mining on the Frontier: Experimental Tests of Compliance with Group Incentives given Limited State Monitoring”, examines whether collective incentives, i.e. incentives provided to a group conditional on collective compliance, could “outsource” the required local monitoring, i.e. induce group interactions that extend the reach of the state that can observe only aggregate consequences in the context of small-scale gold mining. I employed a framed field-lab experiment in which the miners make decisions regarding mining intensity. The state sets a collective target for an environmental outcome, verifies compliance and provides a group reward for compliance which is split equally among members. Since the target set by the state transforms the situation into a coordination game, outcomes depend on expectations of what others will do. I conducted this experiment with 640 participants in a mining region of the Colombian Pacific and I examine different levels of policy severity and their ordering. The findings of the experiment suggest that such instruments can induce compliance but this regulation involves tradeoffs. For most severe targets – with rewards just above costs – raise gains if successful but can collapse rapidly and completely. In terms of group interactions, better outcomes are found when severity initially is lower suggesting learning.

The second essay, “Collective Compliance can be Efficient and Inequitable: Impacts of Leaders among Small-Scale Gold Miners in Colombia”, explores the channels through which communication help groups to coordinate in presence of collective incentives and whether the reached solutions are equitable or not. Also in the context of small-scale gold mining in the Colombian Pacific, I test the effect of communication in compliance with a collective environmental target. The results suggest that communication, as expected, helps to solve coordination challenges but still some groups reach agreements involving unequal outcomes. By examining the agreements that took place in each group, I observe that the main coordination mechanism was the presence of leaders that help other group members to clarify the situation. Interestingly, leaders not only helped groups to reach efficiency but also played a key role in equity by defining how the costs of compliance would be distributed among group members.

The third essay, “Creating Local PES Institutions and Increasing Impacts of PES in Mexico: A real-Time Watershed-Level Framed Field Experiment on Coordination and Conditionality”, considers the creation of a local payments for ecosystem services (PES) mechanism as an assurance game that requires the coordination between two groups of participants: upstream and downstream. Based on this assurance interaction, I explore the effect of allowing peer-sanctions on upstream behavior in the functioning of the mechanism. This field-lab experiment was implemented in three real cases of the Mexican Fondos Concurrentes (matching funds) program in the states of Veracruz, Quintana Roo and Yucatan, where 240 real users and 240 real providers of hydrological services were recruited and interacted with each other in real time. The experimental results suggest that initial trust-game behaviors align with participants’ perceptions and predicts baseline giving in assurance game. For upstream providers, i.e. those who get sanctioned, the threat and the use of sanctions increase contributions. Downstream users contribute less when offered the option to sanction – as if that option signal an uncooperative upstream – then the contributions rise in line with the complementarity in payments of the assurance game.

Nuevas capacidades estatales para una sociedad transformada : Instituciones y políticas sanitarias en la provincia de Santa Fe primera mitad del siglo XX

El presente trabajo indaga las dinámicas de transformación de las políticas sanitarias en la provincia de Santa Fe en la primera mitad del siglo XX, focalizando tres coyunturas: en primer lugar, el contexto previo y la sanción de la ley de sanidad en 1932; en segundo término, los cambios sostenidos durante la segunda mitad de la década de 1930 que darían lugar a la creación del Ministerio de Salud y Trabajo en 1941; finalmente las innovaciones proyectadas desde la intervención de 1943 y los posteriores gobiernos peronistas. A partir de los debates parlamentarios, las memorias ministeriales, la prensa y las publicaciones especializadas, nos proponemos dar cuenta de algunos aspectos de este proceso de transformación en las políticas sanitarias locales en diálogo con el plano nacional.

Feminismo, sufragismo y mujeres en los partidos políticos en la Argentina de la primera mitad del siglo XX

El objetivo de este estudio es analizar el recorrido de las sufragistas argentinas a lo largo de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Destacaremos sus espacios de militancia y los cambios habidos en ellos teniendo en cuenta las modificaciones que la llegada del gobierno peronista imprimió a la movilización política de las mujeres después de la sanción de la ley de derechos políticos femeninos en 1946

Nuevas capacidades estatales para una sociedad transformada : Instituciones y políticas sanitarias en la provincia de Santa Fe primera mitad del siglo XX

El presente trabajo indaga las dinámicas de transformación de las políticas sanitarias en la provincia de Santa Fe en la primera mitad del siglo XX, focalizando tres coyunturas: en primer lugar, el contexto previo y la sanción de la ley de sanidad en 1932; en segundo término, los cambios sostenidos durante la segunda mitad de la década de 1930 que darían lugar a la creación del Ministerio de Salud y Trabajo en 1941; finalmente las innovaciones proyectadas desde la intervención de 1943 y los posteriores gobiernos peronistas. A partir de los debates parlamentarios, las memorias ministeriales, la prensa y las publicaciones especializadas, nos proponemos dar cuenta de algunos aspectos de este proceso de transformación en las políticas sanitarias locales en diálogo con el plano nacional.

Nuevas capacidades estatales para una sociedad transformada : Instituciones y políticas sanitarias en la provincia de Santa Fe primera mitad del siglo XX

El presente trabajo indaga las dinámicas de transformación de las políticas sanitarias en la provincia de Santa Fe en la primera mitad del siglo XX, focalizando tres coyunturas: en primer lugar, el contexto previo y la sanción de la ley de sanidad en 1932; en segundo término, los cambios sostenidos durante la segunda mitad de la década de 1930 que darían lugar a la creación del Ministerio de Salud y Trabajo en 1941; finalmente las innovaciones proyectadas desde la intervención de 1943 y los posteriores gobiernos peronistas. A partir de los debates parlamentarios, las memorias ministeriales, la prensa y las publicaciones especializadas, nos proponemos dar cuenta de algunos aspectos de este proceso de transformación en las políticas sanitarias locales en diálogo con el plano nacional.

Feminismo, sufragismo y mujeres en los partidos políticos en la Argentina de la primera mitad del siglo XX

El objetivo de este estudio es analizar el recorrido de las sufragistas argentinas a lo largo de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Destacaremos sus espacios de militancia y los cambios habidos en ellos teniendo en cuenta las modificaciones que la llegada del gobierno peronista imprimió a la movilización política de las mujeres después de la sanción de la ley de derechos políticos femeninos en 1946

Feminismo, sufragismo y mujeres en los partidos políticos en la Argentina de la primera mitad del siglo XX

El objetivo de este estudio es analizar el recorrido de las sufragistas argentinas a lo largo de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Destacaremos sus espacios de militancia y los cambios habidos en ellos teniendo en cuenta las modificaciones que la llegada del gobierno peronista imprimió a la movilización política de las mujeres después de la sanción de la ley de derechos políticos femeninos en 1946

Veer e midir. The licensing of private building works in Lisbon in the modern period

Using legal instruments and council records, this article analyses the legal rules, the procedure and the cost of licensing a private building work as well the practices used by competent authorities to sanction and solve illegal actions in Lisbon through the modern age.

Nuevas capacidades estatales para una sociedad transformada : Instituciones y políticas sanitarias en la provincia de Santa Fe primera mitad del siglo XX

El presente trabajo indaga las dinámicas de transformación de las políticas sanitarias en la provincia de Santa Fe en la primera mitad del siglo XX, focalizando tres coyunturas: en primer lugar, el contexto previo y la sanción de la ley de sanidad en 1932; en segundo término, los cambios sostenidos durante la segunda mitad de la década de 1930 que darían lugar a la creación del Ministerio de Salud y Trabajo en 1941; finalmente las innovaciones proyectadas desde la intervención de 1943 y los posteriores gobiernos peronistas. A partir de los debates parlamentarios, las memorias ministeriales, la prensa y las publicaciones especializadas, nos proponemos dar cuenta de algunos aspectos de este proceso de transformación en las políticas sanitarias locales en diálogo con el plano nacional.

Negros misturados: um estudo de caso sobre identidades negras em Mossoró-RN

With more or less 213.000 habitants, Mossoró is the second more developed city from the Rio Grande do Norte. The town is proclamated like the land of freedom. To so far, exist four moments in your history related with the defence of freedom that is point like truthful from so proclamation. Suchlike happenings are the first female vote on Brazil, the resistance against the Lampião s band, the worman s mutiny and the slave release in 1883, five year before the Áurea law sanction. These happenings are commemorate yearly on setember with one big theatrical event called by the freedom high. Inside this contexto of exaltation to freedom, there is one black movement by name black and beautiful. Is the present dissertation, talked about the building of black identities between the black militants of Mossoró and the dwellers from the Santo Antônio district. With such approach, we intend to think about possibles differences or likeness, how the militants and dwellers from the refered district self-calleds like blacks or not. We are understanding black identity like one process to self-affirmation done by specificities of the social context and the individual particularity. This way, the identity change into one dynamic and contextual reality, gone always by one business process against the interaction of the social actors. So we search to discuss the specificities that involve the process to building of black identities in the city of freedom

How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies.

What drove the transition from small-scale human societies centred on kinship and personal exchange, to large-scale societies comprising cooperation and division of labour among untold numbers of unrelated individuals? We propose that the unique human capacity to negotiate institutional rules that coordinate social actions was a key driver of this transition. By creating institutions, humans have been able to move from the default ‘Hobbesian’ rules of the ‘game of life’, determined by physical/environmental constraints, into self-created rules of social organization where cooperation can be individually advantageous even in large groups of unrelated individuals. Examples include rules of food sharing in hunter–gatherers, rules for the usage of irrigation systems in agriculturalists, property rights and systems for sharing reputation between mediaeval traders. Successful institutions create rules of interaction that are self-enforcing, providing direct benefits both to individuals that follow them, and to individuals that sanction rule breakers. Forming institutions requires shared intentionality, language and other cognitive abilities largely absent in other primates. We explain how cooperative breeding likely selected for these abilities early in the Homo lineage. This allowed anatomically modern humans to create institutions that transformed the self-reliance of our primate ancestors into the division of labour of large-scale human social organization.

Negros misturados: um estudo de caso sobre identidades negras em Mossoró-RN

With more or less 213.000 habitants, Mossoró is the second more developed city from the Rio Grande do Norte. The town is proclamated like the land of freedom. To so far, exist four moments in your history related with the defence of freedom that is point like truthful from so proclamation. Suchlike happenings are the first female vote on Brazil, the resistance against the Lampião s band, the worman s mutiny and the slave release in 1883, five year before the Áurea law sanction. These happenings are commemorate yearly on setember with one big theatrical event called by the freedom high. Inside this contexto of exaltation to freedom, there is one black movement by name black and beautiful. Is the present dissertation, talked about the building of black identities between the black militants of Mossoró and the dwellers from the Santo Antônio district. With such approach, we intend to think about possibles differences or likeness, how the militants and dwellers from the refered district self-calleds like blacks or not. We are understanding black identity like one process to self-affirmation done by specificities of the social context and the individual particularity. This way, the identity change into one dynamic and contextual reality, gone always by one business process against the interaction of the social actors. So we search to discuss the specificities that involve the process to building of black identities in the city of freedom