Search results for "Cybernetics"
showing 10 items of 331 documents
THE EXPECTED DEMOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES ON THE PROVISION OF EDUCATION SERVICES IN THE NEIGHBOURHOODS OF RIGA
2020
This paper discusses the spatial extent of population change and provides new insights into the relationships between demographic characteristics and the provision of education services in urban neighbourhoods of Riga. Thus, our empirical evidence confirms that the provision of social infrastructure is fundamentally dependent on the nature of demographic processes. The aim of this paper is twofold: to explore the spatial extent of changes in the number of pre-school and school-aged children in Riga, and to assess how the demographic change of particular age cohorts are associated with the provision of educational establishments at the neighbourhood level. Using available statistics and base…
Ecological modernisation and discourses on rural non-wood bioenergy production in Finland from 1980 to 2005
2009
Abstract Rural bioenergy production is currently a much debated question worldwide. It is closely connected to questions of environmental protection and rural development in both developing and industrial world. In Finland, rural bioenergy production has traditionally meant the production of wood fuels for heating purposes. The utilisation of forest biomasses is undiminished even today, and other biomasses are scarcely used for energy production. The purpose of this article is to discuss the possibility of widening the bioenergy production palette to include biomasses other than forest-based woody ones. This matter is approached from an environmental aspect using the concept of ecological m…
The future of health communication : innovating through partnerships
2015
The Preamble of the Constitution of the World Health Organization reminds us that «Informed opinion and active cooperation on the part of the public are of the utmost importance in the improvement of the health of the people» (Grad, 2002). Nonetheless, nearly seven decades later, the conditions under which people can be informed and actively participate in their health management in a meaningful way are being globally challenged. Drawing from experience in a variety of areas that I will delve into in this article, I remain a believer that we can marshal the necessary forces to advance the communication of health issues and create a base for a health-literate population to make smart(er), he…
Quality of government and economic growth at the municipal level: Evidence from Spain
2021
This paper analyzes the relationship between quality of government and economic growth at the municipal level in 1,820 Spanish municipalities during the period 2008–2015. At this level of dis- aggregation, the literature is virtually non-existent due to severe data constraints. To address this limitation, we proxy institutional quality with a measure of local government efficiency, which provides an accurate indicator of how good local authorities are at managing their budgets. This variable is expected to be highly correlated with other more traditional quality of government indicators such as corruption. After computing our measure, we then use it in a growth regression framework. We find…
Do Eurosceptic Parties Influence Their Party Systems?
2021
This book is written around—and anchored in—the Radical Party Hypothesis, which states that the success of Eurosceptic parties leads to changes of policy position/preferences by the other parties. In order to test it, it seeks to analyse whether the position changes of centrist parties on the issue of European Integration correlate with the electoral success of Eurosceptic Parties in those aforementioned parties’ countries, when controlling for a variety of factors, such as public opinion/sentiment on EU integration, socio-economic factors, time, as well as characteristics of those parties whose position changes this study measures: their size, their ideological orientation, their electoral…
Representative bureaucracy and seconded national government officials in the European Commission
2015
The bureaucratic arms of modern international organizations increasingly consist of staff with ambiguous organizational affiliations. This article analyses the implications of this trend from the perspective of representative bureaucracy – using seconded national experts (SNEs) in the European Commission (Commission) as the empirical laboratory. Using a variety of datasets, we unveil Commission SNEs' profiles (to assess their passive representativeness) and link these profiles to their role perceptions (to evaluate their potential for active representation). This illustrates that Commission SNEs' background characteristics do not match those of their constituent population (i.e. the EU27 po…
Unsolved questions and preferred solution about living will
2018
Abstract Background Ethical problems about end-of-life medicine include a variety of issues approached in different ways by physicians and, more recently, special emphasis to this kind of ethical issues and possible answers has done by Italian National Ethical Committee in the issue named “Deep and continuous palliative sedation in the imminence of Death” (January, 2016). The debate is very critical in Intensive Care Units and Cancer Wards, where health care professionals face-off with terminally-ill patients is an outright routine; the Authors investigated their medical knowledge and ethical perception about patient critical and terminal condition to discuss the most relevant conclusions. …
Happy-Productive Teams and Work Units: A Systematic Review of the ‘Happy-Productive Worker Thesis’
2019
The happy-productive worker thesis (HPWT) assumes that happy employees perform better. Given the relevance of teams and work-units in organizations, our aim is to analyze the state of the art on happy-productive work-units (HPWU) through a systematic review and integrate existing research on different collective well-being constructs and collective performance. Research on HPWU (30 studies, 2001-2018) has developed through different constructs of well-being (hedonic: team satisfaction, group affect; and eudaimonic: team engagement) and diverse operationalizations of performance (self-rated team performance, leader-rated team performance, customers' satisfaction, and objective indicators), t…
The Sociocultural Basis for Innovation
2018
This chapter argues how economic behaviour in geography could be understood as historically anchored varieties of practice. Contemporary European patterns replicate deep anthropological dispositions as suggested by authors like Geert Hofstede and Emmanuel Todd, and substantiated by Duranton et al. (Types and the persistence of regional disparities in Europe. Economic Geography, 85(1), 23–47, 2009). Old, formative schemes are still operating and new institutional forms, be they cultural, economic or political, are conditioned by their mechanisms. This also goes for innovation. However, in the field of innovation policies, culturally explained variations, cleavages and mismatches are translat…
From Multiple Perspectives to Shared Understanding: A small group in an online learning environment
2008
The aim of this study was to explore how learners operating in a small group reach shared understanding as they work out joint research questions and build a theoretical framework and to identify the resources and tools they used in the process. The learners' own interpretations of their group activities and learning were also taken into account. The data, consisting of group discussions and the documents produced by the group, were subjected to a qualitative content analysis. The group members employed a variety of resources and tools to exchange their individual perspectives and achieve shared understanding. Summaries of relevant literature laid a foundation for the group's theoretical di…