At the dawn of Italo-Chinese modern relations: Ludovico Nocentini's experience

In 1904 Ludovico Nocentini described China as a hub of colonial and commercial development for European powers. Europe in the Far East and the Italian Interests in China was Nocentini’s last and most critical book, in which he compared the performance of the Italian government with that of other countries and showed Rome’s inefficiency overseas. The book expatiated on the “carving up” of China into spheres of influence by the Western powers, while examining how the Italian government’s scant regard for the definition and pursuit of the country’s national interest jeopardized not only the development of its colonial policy, but also its foreign trade and industrial progress.

'Dancing the Downward Slide: Spaces of Affective Adjacency in Rian and Bird with Boy'

This chapter examines how the choreography of affect in two dance theatre works creates a space of affective adjacency—a space in which the building of an alternative structure of feeling and an alternative economy of the body can be experienced. Focusing on the choreographic use of repetition in Junk Ensemble’s Bird With Boy (2011) and Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s Rian (2011), it shows how the work required to build an alternative affective space can become visible. Although affect is most often viewed as a preconscious, ephemeral phenomenon (a passage of intensities), that can have little or no lasting impact on socio-political action, theorists such as Megan Watkins have argued for a consideration of the ‘cumulative aspects of affect’. Highlighting Spinoza’s distinction between affectus (the capacity for a body to affect and be affected), and affectio (the impact the affecting body leaves on the affected), Watkins points out that affectio can ‘leave a residue’ allowing for the ‘capacity of affect to be retained, to accumulate, to form dispositions and thus shape subjectivities’. The choreography of repetition in Bird With Boy and Rian presents sites for an examination of this accumulation of affect and its capacity not only to form and shape dispositions, but also, as Lauren Berlant suggests, ‘to move along and make worlds, situations, and environments’.

Facing the Face of the Other: The Case of the Nia Centre

Until comparatively recently there has been little systematic effort to record the contribution to British theatre history of the diversity represented by Black British and British South and East Asian theatre makers. That failure to ‘see’ and acknowledge this lacuna within the academy reflected what in 2001 was condemned as widespread institutional racism within the theatre industry itself. The other ‘faces’ had been rendered effectively invisible. This chapter considers the ethical and evidential challenges associated with the task of recovering the history of a project created to enhance an important concept of cultural identity: the little-documented failure in the 1990s of the Nia Centre, the UK’s first black arts centre which opened in Hulme, Manchester in 1991. My exploration raises a number of key ethical challenges: How in the aftermath of the Nia’s collapse and in the almost complete absence of archival records, is the historian to mediate what inevitably are multiple truths coming from different perspectives? Whose, and what values were, and remain, at stake both at the time of the project itself, and in the telling of the history? How does the historian deal with failure especially if the circumstances were obscure and little regarded? The dream of the Nia died more than a decade ago, but the participants in that history are very much alive and their sensitivities have to be respected as part of the ethical challenge.

A DST-based Approach for Construction Project Risk Analysis

Despite its huge potential in risk analysis, the Dempster–Shafer Theory of Evidence (DST) has not received enough attention in construction management. This paper presents a DST-based approach for structuring personal experience and professional judgment when assessing construction project risk. DST was innovatively used to tackle the problem of lacking sufficient information through enabling analysts to provide incomplete assessments. Risk cost is used as a common scale for measuring risk impact on the various project objectives, and the Evidential Reasoning algorithm is suggested as a novel alternative for aggregating individual assessments. A spreadsheet-based decision support system (DSS) was devised to facilitate the proposed approach. Four case studies were conducted to examine the approach's viability. Senior managers in four British construction companies tried the DSS and gave very promising feedback. The paper concludes that the proposed methodology may contribute to bridging the gap between theory and practice of construction risk assessment.

A City's Toys: Theatre in Birmingham 1914-1918

This chapter provides a wide-ranging account of theatre in Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city. As a vital centre for the production of mass armaments and vehicles essential for the war effort, Birmingham was home to a rapidly expanding and socially diverse population. I show how theatres overcame wartime constraints to reflect that diversity with examples drawn from the popular entertainment provided by the city’s music halls, variety and melodrama theatres contrasted with the more decorous touring plays, musicals and spectacular home-grown pantomimes enjoyed at the prestigious Theatre Royal and Prince of Wales. The dogged attempts by the recently-established Birmingham Repertory Theatre to sustain an artistically and intellectually ambitious programme of new and classic drama also reveal a more complex response to the effects of war.

The Role of the Ocean Economy in the National Income Accounts of Indonesia

This paper presents the role of the Ocean Economy in the National Income Accounts of Indonesia including the concept and methodology used to estimate the contribution of this ecosystem to Indonesian value added. Currently, the national income account of Indonesia only recognizes the fishery sector. Fishery activities have been considered as one of the sub-sectors of agricultural sector together with sub-sectors of farm food crops, plantation or non-food crops, forestry, and livestock. There are some drawbacks in the concept of national income accounts, since it follows the UN system of national accounts (SNA) that recognize only economic sectors or activities which produce the value added, while it does not recognize the ecosystems such as lakes and river ecosystems, forests as well as terrestrial and ocean ecosystems as production sectors. The present concept of the SNA produces an undervaluation of forest and ocean sectors, which in turn may direct the policy makers to have a tendency to deplete the forestry and fishery resources in order to increase the contribution of those two sectors to the national income accounts. Otherwise, the two sectors will be allocated small national budget for their operations. Therefore the paper concludes that a new concept of national income accounts based on ecosystem products and services to be developed, as a satellite account to the national income account is needed. Furthermore the new concept of national income account for the ocean economy should adopt the UN System of Environmental and Economic Accounts, which takes into account the extractive and non-extractive products as environmental and biological services in to the ocean income account. The new concept of ocean accounting based on both extractive and non-extractive products instead of only based on the extractive one which have market values may guarantee the sustainability of the ocean in particular and will be good for the whole economy of the country in generally. Hence the national income accounts of the ocean economy will show how the blue economy or the ocean economy really function as one of the important sectors for the whole economy of the country.

Motivations to interact with brands on Facebook – Towards a typology of consumer–brand interactions

In recent years, Facebook and other social media have become key players in branding activities. However, empirical research on consumer–brand interactions on Facebook is still in its infancy. Therefore, the aim of this research is to provide additional insights to brand managers on how to adapt their approaches to increase consumers’ interactions with brands on Facebook. In this study, we apply the uses and gratification theory proposed by Katz to develop a new typology of consumers based on consumer motivations to interact with brands on Facebook, and explore the type and intensity of these interactions. We identify five main motivations that might influence consumers’ interactions with a brand on Facebook: (i) social influence, (ii) search for information, (iii) entertainment, (iv) trust and (v) reward. Building on these five motivations, a classification using clustering techniques reveals four different groups of consumers: (i) ‘brand detached’, (ii) ‘brand profiteers’, (iii) ‘brand companions’ and (iv) ‘brand reliants’. Our results provide valuable and applicable insights for social media marketing activities, which will assist brand managers to develop strategies for effectively reaching and influencing the most desirable groups of consumers.

Can Regional Cooperation Promote Sustainable Development?

This chapter argues that regional cooperation may be a promising framework to work towards sustainable development. There are two broad pathways linking regional cooperation and sustainable development. On the one hand, shared or transboundary socio-environmental concerns may spark regional cooperation and on the other, pre-existing regional organisations created for other purposes become frameworks to address sustainability concerns. Yet, neither of these processes is automatic and whether they take place depends on the existence of particular drivers pursuing a sustainability agenda at the regional level. Ultimately, whether regional cooperation fosters sustainable development and how this takes place thus depends to a large extent on the specific people or organisations driving a sustainability agenda at the regional level and their relationship to national governments.

An Estimation of Distribution Algorithm with Intelligent Local Search for Rule-based Nurse Rostering

This paper proposes a new memetic evolutionary algorithm to achieve explicit learning in rule-based nurse rostering, which involves applying a set of heuristic rules for each nurse's assignment. The main framework of the algorithm is an estimation of distribution algorithm, in which an ant-miner methodology improves the individual solutions produced in each generation. Unlike our previous work (where learning is implicit), the learning in the memetic estimation of distribution algorithm is explicit, i.e. we are able to identify building blocks directly. The overall approach learns by building a probabilistic model, i.e. an estimation of the probability distribution of individual nurse-rule pairs that are used to construct schedules. The local search processor (i.e. the ant-miner) reinforces nurse-rule pairs that receive higher rewards. A challenging real world nurse rostering problem is used as the test problem. Computational results show that the proposed approach outperforms most existing approaches. It is suggested that the learning methodologies suggested in this paper may be applied to other scheduling problems where schedules are built systematically according to specific rules.

'An Indirect Genetic Algorithm for Set Covering Problems'

This paper presents a new type of genetic algorithm for the set covering problem. It differs from previous evolutionary approaches first because it is an indirect algorithm, i.e. the actual solutions are found by an external decoder function. The genetic algorithm itself provides this decoder with permutations of the solution variables and other parameters. Second, it will be shown that results can be further improved by adding another indirect optimisation layer. The decoder will not directly seek out low cost solutions but instead aims for good exploitable solutions. These are then post optimised by another hill-climbing algorithm. Although seemingly more complicated, we will show that this three-stage approach has advantages in terms of solution quality, speed and adaptability to new types of problems over more direct approaches. Extensive computational results are presented and compared to the latest evolutionary and other heuristic approaches to the same data instances.

The ethical ambivalence of resistant violence: notes from postcolonial south Asia

In the face of mounting militarism in south Asia, this essay turns to anti-state, ‘liberatory’ movements in the region that employ violence to achieve their political aims. It explores some of the ethical quandaries that arise from the embrace of such violence, particularly for feminists for whom political violence and militarism is today a moot point. Feminist responses towards resistant political violence have, however, been less straightforward than towards the violence of the state, suggesting a more ambivalent ethical position towards the former than the latter. The nature of this ambivalence can be located in a postcolonial feminist ethics that is conceptually committed to the use of political violence in certain, albeit exceptional circumstances on the basis of the ethical ends that this violence (as opposed to other oppressive violence) serves. In opening up this ethical ambivalence – or the ethics of ambiguity, as Simone de Beauvoir says – to interrogation and reflection, I underscore the difficulties involved in ethically discriminating between forms of violence, especially when we consider the manner in which such distinctions rely on and reproduce gendered modes of power. This raises particular problems for current feminist appraisals of resistant political violence as an expression of women's empowerment and ‘agency’.

Housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumption: new evidence for Italy and the UK

This paper aims to investigate the long-run impact of housing and financial wealth on consumption in Italy and the UK using two different estimation methods. The novelty of the paper is to consider the recent financial crisis when studying wealth effects. The dynamics of wealth effects is also evaluated by a rolling regression analysis. The results show that: i) housing wealth plays no role in Italy, whereas it is significant in the UK; ii) in both countries, the financial wealth exerts a positive and significant impact on aggregate consumption; iii) by and large, the housing wealth effect assumes relatively increasing importance over time in the UK, while for Italy this is true for the financial wealth effect