Search results for "Economics."

The influence of oversizing on maintenance cost in wastewater treatment plants

2021

Abstract Management of Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) is a complex process, not only from a technical point of view but also from an economic point of view. There are several factors that influence the wastewater treatment process and can cause an increase in management costs. One of these factors is the treatment capacity, in particular the WWTPs’ oversizing problem. The difference between the design population equivalent (p.e.) and the actual p.e. treated generates imbalances in the wastewater treatment process costs. This paper analyses the influence that oversizing has on the maintenance costs for WWTPs in the Valencia region (Spain). Through an econometric approach, the behaviour …

Proper Incentives for Proper IT Security Management _ A System Dynamics Approach

2017

Committee Parliamentary Specialization Index. Explaining MPs’ specialisation in the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados

2019

Nowadays legislatures are largely based on committee systems. This enables a division of work and specialisation, in the context of highly complex politics and policy development. It seems clear that MP specialisation in the field of the committee they serve on is an important political asset, both for MPs and their parliamentary party group. This paper presents the Committee Parliamentary Specialization Index. This index measures the degree an MP is specialised in the jurisdiction of the committee they serve on. In the second part of the paper, the index is applied to the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados, an interesting case for testing this multi-faceted index, to find institutional, pol…

Building Resilience Through Effective Disaster Management

2017

Existing literature argues that taking a holistic approach to disaster management is important for organizations in building resilience. Theoretical underpinnings to achieve a holistic understanding, however, is lacking. This article applies the notion of an ecosystem as a holistic lens to understand complex disaster management. The paper reports two case studies from Japan and Nepal to illustrate how an ecosystem works during a disaster. The theoretical framework of information ecology is used in analyzing the cases. Based on the findings, the study shows three interconnected mechanisms that can build resilience of an ecosystem in a disaster management context, namely (1) coevolution, (2) …

Event Management and Terrorism in a Global Order

2020

Over the recent years, the public spectacle and media events have become fertile grounds for terrorist attacks. Particularly, media events play a leading role enhancing the social cohesion as well as revitalizing the psychological frustrations that happened during the working days. Paradoxically, terrorism needs to maximize its gains while the costs are minimized. The spectacularisation tourism and events offer a double-edge sword. The same attractiveness that makes global cities a safer place to live are employed by the terrorist cells to cause chaos and uncertainty. The chapter theoretically explores the difficult interrelation between terrorism and event management as well as the concept…

Comparing Freedom House Democracy Scores to Alternative Indices and Testing for Political Bias: Are US Allies Rated as More Democratic by Freedom Hou…

2014

AbstractSeveral scholars have criticized the Freedom House democracy ratings as being politically biased. Do countries indeed incorrectly receive better ratings that have stronger political ties with the United States? This article tests whether differences between a number of alternative indices of democracy and the FH ratings can be explained in a systematic manner by variables that record relationships between the US and the countries under investigation. Differentiating between the periods before 1988 and after 1989, strong and consistent evidence of a substantial bias in the FH ratings is obtained for the former period. For the latter period, the estimates are less consistent, but stil…

Sustainable growth and environmental catastrophes

2017

Abstract In the standard AK growth model we introduce the threat of an ecological catastrophe and study the consequences for the economic variables in the long-run. We extend the basic framework by considering two environmental externalities: the first one is local and gives account of the marginal damage from emissions flow; the second one is aggregate, or global, and relates to the extreme damage which may happen if the accumulated stock of pollutants is on the threshold of a worldwide catastrophe. In this context dominated by market failures, we focus on the socially optimal solution and the search of conditions for sustainability. We identify the efficient balanced growth path, which ma…

Language constraints in producing prefiguration posters for a scientific exhibition

1997

The museographic transposition of scientific knowledge leads notably to the preparation of exhibition posters. This is a delicate operation, on account of the constraints imposed by space, language, concepts and the text. These difficulties are even greater in the case of bovine reproduction biotechnologies, such as cloning, where knowledge is not yet stable. This paper deals with the choices made during the phase of museographic transposition. First of all, based on an epistemological approach, a historical analysis of knowledge-building underpins the choice of information to be presented. Language is then selected according to the linguistic analysis of a series of articles which popular…

BDI Modelling and Simulation of Human Behaviours in Bushfires

2016

Each summer in Australia, bushfires burn many hectares of forest, causing deaths, injuries, and destruction of property. Emergency management strategies rely on expected citizens’ behaviour which differs from reality. In order to raise their awareness about the real population behaviour, we want to provide them with a realistic agent-based simulation. The philosophically-grounded BDI architecture provides a very suitable approach but is little used due to the lack of adapted tools. This paper uses this case study to illustrate two new tools to fill this gap: the Tactics Development Framework (TDF) and GAMA BDI architecture.

A Critical View of Neurofeedback Experimental Designs: Sham and Control as Necessary Conditions

2016

C l i n M e d International Library Citation: Alino M, Gadea M, Espert R (2016) A Critical View of Neurofeedback Experimental Designs: Sham and Control as Necessary Conditions. Int J Neurol Neurother 3:041 Received: January 29, 2016: Accepted: February 25, 2016: Published: February 27, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Alino M, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ISSN: 2378-3001 Volume 3 | Issue 1 Alino et al. Int J Neurol Neurother 2016, 3:041