Search results for "QUALITY"
showing 10 items of 8136 documents
Making sense of crises: the implications of information asymmetries for resilience and social justice in disaster-ridden communities
2017
New information and communication technologies (ICT) have enabled communities to collect and share information and tap into a network of peers in unprecedented ways. For more than a decade, informa...
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 …
Preventive maintenance versus cost of repairs in asset management: An efficiency analysis in wastewater treatment plants
2020
Abstract The operation and management of Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) is of paramount importance to guarantee the sustainability of water resources. Just like any other production process, wastewater treatment process involves different costs, such as: energy, personnel, maintenance and reagents. Regarding maintenance costs, they have become an issue of great concern to many operators in the last years. Maintaining the facilities in good condition ensures the proper performance of these infrastructures and reduces the risk of failures. It should be known that equipment breakdowns imply an increase in operating costs, with a high risk of generating an environmental damage due to the m…
Can Gender Equality Be Institutionalized?
1999
Institutional innovation can be understood as launching an institution within an intact institutional and cultural context. Such attempts of guided institutionalization pose a crucial built-in problem. The goal of institutional innovation is to create new routine-reproduced, taken-for-granted behaviour patterns. The means to reach this goal is rational, purposive action, which is the very opposite of routinized enacting. This immanent contradiction of institutional innovation is discussed on the basis of a comparative study on the introduction of gender quotas in Norwegian and German political parties. The analysis draws on more than 50 qualitative interviews with parliamentarians from bot…
How women are imagined through conceptual metaphors in United Nations Security Council Resolutions on women, peace and security
2017
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 is a landmark pronouncement on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Not only does this resolution highlight the important role of the involvement of women in peace processes, but it also stresses the importance of their equal participation in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace. Furthermore, it also triggers the approval of some other resolutions, which are all further elaborations on that first document. The aim of this paper is to analyse, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, the way in which women are actually narrated in these pronouncements by means of the two conceptual metaphors that are most often repeated: WOME…
Terrorism in the Website
2020
Without any doubt, terrorism causes higher levels of anxiety and very well enhances our fears as never before. The post 9/11 context witnesses the multiplication of xenophobic expressions, such as Islamophobia or tourist-phobia, only to name a few. These expressions result from a culture of intolerance, which not only was enrooted in the ideological core of western capitalism but was accelerated just after 9/11. Some voices emphasize the needs of employing technology to make this world a safer place. This chapter goes in a contradictory direction. The authors focus on the ethical limitations of technologies when they are subordinated to the ideals of zero-risk society. Echoing Sunstein and …
Measuring the quality of humanitarian information products: Insights from the 2015 Nepal earthquake
2018
Information plays a critical role in humanitarian assistance. It has become a product that is shared for multiple purposes such as situational awareness, decision-making, coordination, reporting, and attracting funding. In the aftermath of sudden onset disasters, humanitarians are constrained with huge workload, time pressure, and uncertainties and thus, information products are often criticized with respect to quality issues. In this paper, we aim at developing an empirically grounded framework that can measure the quality of information products through accuracy, objectivity, completeness, and consistency. We validate the framework with the help of practitioners and apply it to the inform…
Corporealising a Healthy Democracy? Inequality, Bodies and Participation
2019
Socio-economic inequality is associated with differentiated levels of health and poor health affects political participation; inequalities are embodied in political life. This contribution, focusin...
Food, health and society: the town meets the countryside
2017
It is not long time that food culture has undertaken a process of renewal started when severe food safety problems did reveal through the “food scandals”: the so called mad cow disease (BSE, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) or the swine flu and bird flu, and other various contaminations occurred in the late 20th century. The first development in food culture, so long, was due to safety needs but was the beginning of a new consciousness about the importance of food and diet on human health. Quickly, the demand for quality food oriented itself towards qualitative – local, traditional, organic – food features. This was a great challenge and a new opportunity for agriculture: to supply valuabl…
Life satisfaction of refugees living in Germany
2021
Since 2015, Germany has been hosting noticeable incoming flows of refugees and asylum seekers, leading, in 2020, the ranking of European countries and being the fifth in the world ranking for the number of hosted refugees. Despite the quality of life of refugees is expected to be improved in the aftermath of their arrival to Germany, refugees are still facing several problems of integration and economic deprivation (e.g., about 90% are unemployed). Hence, it is a worthwhile exercise to study how satisfied they are with their present life. Using a sample of 3,408 individuals from the German IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees (regarding refugees and asylum seekers who came to the country betwee…