Expanding Agri-Food Production and Employment in the Presence of Climate Policy Constraints: Quantifying the Trade-Off in Ireland

This chapter explores the trade-off between competing objectives of employment creation and climate policy commitments in Irish agriculture. A social accounting matrix (SAM) multiplier model is linked with a partial equilibrium agricultural sector model to simulate the impact of a number of GHG emission reduction scenarios, assuming these are achieved through a constraint on beef production. Limiting the size of the beef sector helps to reduce GHG emissions with a very limited impact on the value of agricultural income at the farm level. However, the SAM multiplier analysis shows that there would be significant employment losses in the wider economy. From a policy perspective, a pragmatic approach to GHG emissions reductions in the agriculture sector, which balances opportunities for economic growth in the sector with opportunities to reduce associated GHG emissions, may be required.

Growing Well-beings: the Positive Experience of Care Farms

Objectives: Care farms enable people who are in some way vulnerable to engage with agricultural places and farming activities. This study investigates how this impacts on the health and well-being of service users and explores associated processes and outcomes. Design: A mixed methods design was adopted that allowed for the integration of quantitative measurements of change with qualitative descriptions of this change. A pragmatic approach provided sufficient flexibility to support the investigation of complex contexts. Methods: A total of 216 service users completed an initial questionnaire, and 137 (63%) of this number provided comparative data in a follow-up questionnaire. Questionnaires contained multiple choice and open-ended questions alongside standardized health and well-being measures requiring Likert-format responses. Semi-structured interviews with 33 service users allowed personal experiences to be detailed. Results: Statistical analysis of well-being measure scores identified significant positive relationships with the length of time people had been attending the care farm. Questionnaire and interview data presented health benefits as being enabled by the farm environment, the positive experience as supporting personal development, and associated social interactions as becoming increasingly influential as time progressed. Conclusions: The health and well-being outcomes that result from participating at a care farm influence multiple elements of the human condition and apply amongst vulnerable people with a wide range of personal needs. Care farms have access to a potentially unique range of resources that can support many service users in becoming happier and healthier individuals.

Entrepreneurial Orientation: do we actually know as much as we think we do?

International audience

Le processus d’élaboration des politiques publiques comme espace d’autodétermination : les cas de l’Accord de Kelowna et de la Loi sur le contrôle par les Premières Nations de leur système d’éducation

L’objectif du présent mémoire est double. D’une part, il cherche à identifier les facteurs qui permettent au gouvernement canadien et aux peuples autochtones de s’entendre sur des politiques publiques, malgré la persistance d’une logique coloniale. Nous verrons que l’atteinte d’une entente est conditionnelle à la légitimité du processus d’élaboration de la politique publique d’un point de vue autochtone. D’autre part, ce travail invite à penser le processus d’élaboration des politiques publiques comme espace potentiel d’autodétermination. Étant donné la malléabilité des règles qui encadrent l’élaboration des politiques publiques en contexte canadien, le gouvernement – s’il en a la volonté - peut modeler le processus d’élaboration de façon à le rendre plus égalitaire et donc plus légitime d’un point de vue autochtone. Il sera démontré que, dans une optique de changements progressifs, un tel processus d’élaboration peut permettre aux peuples autochtones de regagner une certaine autonomie décisionnelle et ainsi atténuer les rapports de pouvoir inégalitaires. Notre cadre théorique a été construit à l’aide de différents courants analytiques, issus notamment des littératures sur le colonialisme, sur les politiques publiques et sur la légitimité. La comparaison de deux études de cas, soit les processus d’élaboration de l’Accord de Kelowna et du projet de loi C-33, Loi sur le contrôle par les Premières Nations de leur système d’éducation, permettra d’illustrer nos arguments et d’en démontrer l’applicabilité pratique. En somme, nous verrons comment la première étude de cas permet de concevoir l’élaboration des politiques publiques comme espace potentiel d’autodétermination, et comment la deuxième, au contraire, démontre que cette sphère peut encore en être une d’oppression.

Le processus d’élaboration des politiques publiques comme espace d’autodétermination : les cas de l’Accord de Kelowna et de la Loi sur le contrôle par les Premières Nations de leur système d’éducation

L’objectif du présent mémoire est double. D’une part, il cherche à identifier les facteurs qui permettent au gouvernement canadien et aux peuples autochtones de s’entendre sur des politiques publiques, malgré la persistance d’une logique coloniale. Nous verrons que l’atteinte d’une entente est conditionnelle à la légitimité du processus d’élaboration de la politique publique d’un point de vue autochtone. D’autre part, ce travail invite à penser le processus d’élaboration des politiques publiques comme espace potentiel d’autodétermination. Étant donné la malléabilité des règles qui encadrent l’élaboration des politiques publiques en contexte canadien, le gouvernement – s’il en a la volonté - peut modeler le processus d’élaboration de façon à le rendre plus égalitaire et donc plus légitime d’un point de vue autochtone. Il sera démontré que, dans une optique de changements progressifs, un tel processus d’élaboration peut permettre aux peuples autochtones de regagner une certaine autonomie décisionnelle et ainsi atténuer les rapports de pouvoir inégalitaires. Notre cadre théorique a été construit à l’aide de différents courants analytiques, issus notamment des littératures sur le colonialisme, sur les politiques publiques et sur la légitimité. La comparaison de deux études de cas, soit les processus d’élaboration de l’Accord de Kelowna et du projet de loi C-33, Loi sur le contrôle par les Premières Nations de leur système d’éducation, permettra d’illustrer nos arguments et d’en démontrer l’applicabilité pratique. En somme, nous verrons comment la première étude de cas permet de concevoir l’élaboration des politiques publiques comme espace potentiel d’autodétermination, et comment la deuxième, au contraire, démontre que cette sphère peut encore en être une d’oppression.

Comparative Functional Analysis of Boundary Infrastructures, Library Classification, and Folksonomies

This paper outlines three information organization frameworks: library classification, social tagging, and boundary infrastructures. It then outlines functionality of these frameworks. The paper takes a neo-pragmatic approach. The paper finds that these frameworks are complementary, and by understanding the differences and similarities that obtain between them, researchers and developers can begin to craft a vocabulary of evaluation.

A pragmatic Bayesian approach to wind field retrieval

The ERS-1 Satellite was launched in July 1991 by the European Space Agency into a polar orbit at about 800 km, carrying a C-band scatterometer. A scatterometer measures the amount of backscatter microwave radiation reflected by small ripples on the ocean surface induced by sea-surface winds, and so provides instantaneous snap-shots of wind flow over large areas of the ocean surface, known as wind fields. Inherent in the physics of the observation process is an ambiguity in wind direction; the scatterometer cannot distinguish if the wind is blowing toward or away from the sensor device. This ambiguity implies that there is a one-to-many mapping between scatterometer data and wind direction. Current operational methods for wind field retrieval are based on the retrieval of wind vectors from satellite scatterometer data, followed by a disambiguation and filtering process that is reliant on numerical weather prediction models. The wind vectors are retrieved by the local inversion of a forward model, mapping scatterometer observations to wind vectors, and minimising a cost function in scatterometer measurement space. This thesis applies a pragmatic Bayesian solution to the problem. The likelihood is a combination of conditional probability distributions for the local wind vectors given the scatterometer data. The prior distribution is a vector Gaussian process that provides the geophysical consistency for the wind field. The wind vectors are retrieved directly from the scatterometer data by using mixture density networks, a principled method to model multi-modal conditional probability density functions. The complexity of the mapping and the structure of the conditional probability density function are investigated. A hybrid mixture density network, that incorporates the knowledge that the conditional probability distribution of the observation process is predominantly bi-modal, is developed. The optimal model, which generalises across a swathe of scatterometer readings, is better on key performance measures than the current operational model. Wind field retrieval is approached from three perspectives. The first is a non-autonomous method that confirms the validity of the model by retrieving the correct wind field 99% of the time from a test set of 575 wind fields. The second technique takes the maximum a posteriori probability wind field retrieved from the posterior distribution as the prediction. For the third technique, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques were employed to estimate the mass associated with significant modes of the posterior distribution, and make predictions based on the mode with the greatest mass associated with it. General methods for sampling from multi-modal distributions were benchmarked against a specific MCMC transition kernel designed for this problem. It was shown that the general methods were unsuitable for this application due to computational expense. On a test set of 100 wind fields the MAP estimate correctly retrieved 72 wind fields, whilst the sampling method correctly retrieved 73 wind fields.

Paraphrasing : scope and typology : a computational approach

This PhD project aims to study paraphrasing, initially understood as the different ways in which the same content is expressed linguistically. We will go into that concept in depth trying to define and delimit its scope more accurately. In that sense, we also aim to discover which kind of structures and phenomena it covers. Although there exist some paraphrasing typologies, the great majority of them only apply to English, and focus on lexical and syntactic transformations. Our intention is to go further into this subject and propose a paraphrasing typology for Spanish and Catalan combining lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge. We apply a bottom-up methodology trying to collect evidence of this phenomenon from the data. For this purpose, we are initially using the Spanish Wikipedia as our corpus. The internal structure of this encyclopedia makes it a good resource for extracting paraphrasing examples for our investigation. This empirical approach will be complemented with the use of linguistic knowledge, and by comparing and contrasting our results to previously proposed paraphrasing typologies in order to enlarge the possible paraphrasing forms found in our corpus. The fact that the same content can be expressed in many different ways presents a major challenge for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Thus, research on paraphrasing has recently been attracting increasing attention in the fields of NLP and Computational Linguistics. The results obtained in this investigation would be of great interest in many of these applications.

A road map toward a globally harmonized approach for occupational health surveillance and epidemiology in nanomaterial workers

OBJECTIVE: Few epidemiological studies have addressed the health of workers exposed to novel manufactured nanomaterials. The small current workforce will necessitate pooling international cohorts. METHOD: A road map was defined for a globally harmonized framework for the careful choice of materials, exposure characterization, identification of study populations, definition of health endpoints, evaluation of appropriateness of study designs, data collection and analysis, and interpretation of the results. RESULTS: We propose a road map to reach global consensus on these issues. The proposed strategy should ensure that the costs of action are not disproportionate to the potential benefits and that the approach is pragmatic and practical. CONCLUSIONS: We should aim to go beyond the collection of health complaints, illness statistics, or even counts of deaths; the manifestation of such clear endpoints would indicate a failure of preventive measures.

A rationalist perspective on the autonomy of international sport governing bodies : towards a pragmatic autonomy in the steering of sports

International sport governing bodies (ISGBs) are built on the foundations of freedom of association and traditionally enjoy a large degree of autonomy in their decision-making. Their autonomy is increasingly confined, however, and their hierarchical self-governance is giving way to a more networked governance, in which different stakeholders exert power in different ways and in different contexts in a complex web of interrelationships. Taking a rationalist perspective on the autonomy of ISGBs, this article demonstrates that ISGBs are deploying strategies to safeguard their waning governing monopoly over international sport. Opting for an inductive approach, the authors present four possible conceptualizations of autonomy as applied to ISGBs, namely political autonomy, legal autonomy, financial autonomy and pyramidal autonomy. For each dimension, they describe the different strategies ISGBs wield in order to safeguard different dimensions of their autonomy. This article uses governance theories to hypothesize that the autonomy of ISGBs can be understood as 'pragmatic autonomy' since ISGBs only cede certain aspects of their autonomy under particular circumstances and when being subject to specific threats. Acting in a rationalist manner, they are able to keep control over governance developments in sport by using indirect and more subtle forms of governance.

Social Opportunities and Individual Responsibility: The Capability Approach and the Third Way

The fashionable widespreading of Sen’s ideas coincides with a new mood in the shaping of public policies in affluent societies. In Europe indeed, an “opportunity”-based approach to social security has been implemented through the European Employment Strategy. Public action tends to rely on a procedural concern with individual opportunities or potentialities in the labour market. The underlying ethics is that individuals are then responsible to use these background opportunities in order to lead the kind of life they value most. More broadly, the discourse and practice of the so-called “Third Way” shares with the capability approach an appeal for a procedural and enabling depiction of the role of the State. The paper intends to clarify the relation between procedural and opportunity-based approaches to social justice, among them the capability approach, and these new patterns of public action. Our vision goes in the way of a yet renewed, but deeper action of the welfare state, where social agency is envisaged as the very condition of individual agency. Drawing on the various critics of mainstream equality of opportunity, two opposed approaches to responsibility are identified: on the one hand, responsibility is conceived of as i) a “luck vs. choice” fixed starting point, ii) a backward-looking conception and iii) a highly individualistic framework. On the other hand, responsibility is envisaged as i) an outcome of public policies rather than a starting point, ii) a forward-looking conception, and iii) a combined institutional-individual framework. We situate here Sen’s capability approach, as well as critics of the luck egalitarianism path. The Third Way rhetoric is assessed against both these perspectives. The issue eventually boils down to an ethical reflection on the articulation of responsibilities, and to a pragmatic and substantial concern for the content of what providing security should mean in practice.

The autotelic experience : a design approach to user experience

Si les principes d’utilisabilité guident la conception de solutions de design interactif pour s’assurer que celles-ci soient « utilisables », quels principes guident la conception d’objets interactifs pour s’assurer que l’expérience subjective de l’usager (UX) soit adéquate et mémorable? Que manque-t-il au cadre de l‘UX pour expliquer, comprendre, et anticiper en tant que designer une expérience mémorable (‘an experience’; Dewey, 1934)? La question centrale est issue d’une double problématique : (1) le cadre théorique de l’UX est incomplet, et (2) les processus et capacités des designers ne sont pas considérés et utilisés à leur pleine capacité en conception UX. Pour répondre à cette question, nous proposons de compléter les modèles de l’UX avec la notion d’expérience autotélique qui appartient principalement à deux cadres théoriques ayant bien cerné l’expérience subjective, soit l’expérience optimale (ou Flow) de Csikszentmihalyi (1988) et l’expérience esthétique selon Schaeffer (2001). L’autotélie est une dimension interne du Flow alors qu’elle couvre toute l’expérience esthétique. L’autotélie est une expérience d’éveil au moment même de l’interaction. Cette prise de conscience est accompagnée d’une imperceptible tension de vouloir faire durer ce moment pour faire durer le plaisir qu’il génère. Trois études exploratoires ont été faites, s’appuyant sur une analyse faite à partir d’un cadre théorique en trois parties : le Flow, les signes d’activité non verbale (les gestes physiques) et verbale (le discours) ont été évalués pour voir comment ceux-ci s’associent. Nos résultats tendent à prouver que les processus spatiaux jouent un rôle de premier plan dans l’expérience autotélique et par conséquent dans une UX optimale. De plus, ils suggèrent que les expériences pragmatique et autotélique sont ancrées dans un seul et même contenu, et que leur différence tient au type d’attention que le participant porte sur l’interaction, l’attention ordinaire ou de type autotélique. Ces résultats nous ont menés à proposer un modèle pour la conception UX. L’élément nouveau, resté jusqu’alors inaperçu, consiste à s’assurer que l’interface (au sens large) appelle une attitude réceptive à l’inattendu, pour qu’une information puisse déclencher les processus spatiaux, offrant une opportunité de passer de l’attention ordinaire à l’attention autotélique. Le nouveau modèle ouvre la porte à une meilleure valorisation des habiletés et processus du designer au sein de l’équipe multidisciplinaire en conception UX.

Pragmatic oriented data interoperability for smart healthcare information systems

Smart healthcare is a complex domain for systems integration due to human and technical factors and heterogeneous data sources involved. As a part of smart city, it is such a complex area where clinical functions require smartness of multi-systems collaborations for effective communications among departments, and radiology is one of the areas highly relies on intelligent information integration and communication. Therefore, it faces many challenges regarding integration and its interoperability such as information collision, heterogeneous data sources, policy obstacles, and procedure mismanagement. The purpose of this study is to conduct an analysis of data, semantic, and pragmatic interoperability of systems integration in radiology department, and to develop a pragmatic interoperability framework for guiding the integration. We select an on-going project at a local hospital for undertaking our case study. The project is to achieve data sharing and interoperability among Radiology Information Systems (RIS), Electronic Patient Record (EPR), and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). Qualitative data collection and analysis methods are used. The data sources consisted of documentation including publications and internal working papers, one year of non-participant observations and 37 interviews with radiologists, clinicians, directors of IT services, referring clinicians, radiographers, receptionists and secretary. We identified four primary phases of data analysis process for the case study: requirements and barriers identification, integration approach, interoperability measurements, and knowledge foundations. Each phase is discussed and supported by qualitative data. Through the analysis we also develop a pragmatic interoperability framework that summaries the empirical findings and proposes recommendations for guiding the integration in the radiology context.

Service oriented approach to facility management using extended building information modelling

Facility management (FM), from a service oriented approach, addresses the functions and requirements of different services such as energy management, space planning and security service. Different service requires different information to meet the needs arising from the service. Object-based Building Information Modelling (BIM) is limited to support FM services; though this technology is able to generate 3D models that semantically represent facility’s information dynamically over the lifecycle of a building. This paper presents a semiotics-inspired framework to extend BIM from a service-oriented perspective. The extended BIM, which specifies FM services and required information, will be able to express building service information in the right format for the right purposes. The service oriented approach concerns pragmatic aspect of building’s information beyond semantic level. The pragmatics defines and provides context for utilisation of building’s information. Semiotics theory adopted in this paper is to address pragmatic issues of utilisation of BIM for FM services.