Humanities for the Environment, or HfE, is an ambitious project that from 2013-2015 was funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project networked universities and researchers internationally through a system of 'observatories'. This book collects the work of contributors networked through the North American, Asia-Pacific, and Australia-Pacific observatories. Humanities for the Environment showcases how humanists are working to 'integrate knowledges' from diverse cultures and ontologies and pilot new 'constellations of practice' that are moving beyond traditional contemplative or reflective outcomes (the book, the essay)towards solutions to the greatest social and environmental challenges of our time. With the still controversial concept of the 'Anthropocene' as a starting point for a widening conversation, contributors range acrossgeographies, ecosystems, climates and weather regimes; moving from icy, melting Arctic landscapes to the bleaching Australian Great Barrier Reef, and from an urban pedagogical 'laboratory' in Phoenix, Arizona to Vatican City in Rome. Chapters explore the ways in which humanists, in collaboration with communities and disciplines across academia, are responding to warming oceans, disappearing islands, collapsing fisheries, evaporating reservoirs of water, exploding bushfires, and spreading radioactive contamination. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences interested in interdisciplinary questions of environment and culture.
The concept of happiness is one of the most discussed and emphasized topics in human history. Many disciplines deal closely with the subject. The concept of happiness, which is supposed to be in the relevant field of philosophy, psychology, sociology, medicine, etc., is primarily concerned with issues in economics, economics and management science, especially after 1950s. Countries consider happiness as an index of the level of development and try to establish values through extensive research. Creating happy individuals has been turned into public policies by the states. Advanced societies accept that; Information society, globalization, technological developments make variable in the parameters of happiness perception. Researchers are expected to take into account time-dependent variables of all investigations and measurements. Economics and management disciplines are inevitably interested in the concept of happiness for efficiency, success, and sustainability politics. As a natural consequence of this, the business world closely follows the happiness of its employees. Among the main issues of the business world are the happiness of their employees. Motivation and motivation techniques are of interest to professionals. If governments are going to make policy decisions by measuring results of happiness, companies also recognize that there is a linear relationship between employee loyalty and happiness. Employee loyalty surveys determine the policies of the companies. In this study, it has been tried to pay attention by presenting a brief literature about employee happiness, especially the sense of happiness of female employees.
This case study explores the challenges encountered in undertaking a qualitative study of Brisbane residents who experienced the 2011 flood. The case study provides an overview of the research design and then steps the reader through a variety of theoretical considerations and logistical issues encountered by the author in the process of completing the research. The case study provides a reflection on the experience of translating research ethics to practice, when the consideration of ethics literature ceases to be about getting an ethics approval and becomes the tools to navigate your personal interaction with your subjects. The case touches on the emotional impact on the researcher of conducting research and how reflective practice is a critical tool to inform ethical behavior. Finally, the case study presents the autho?s personal observations about how to balance the process of researching against concerns of exploiting subjects, finding that empathy and empathetic practice provide a bridge between ethics in the abstract and the practice of interviewing real people.
Abstract Intangible assets and knowledge are key drivers of today's economy, called knowledge economy, as a consequence of globalisation process and information and communication technology development. Knowledge and intellectual capital became leading factors that provide basis for gaining superior performance and sustainable competitive advantage of firms in dynamic and uncertain business environments. Invisible goods based on knowledge are becoming more important in generating and successful managing businesses. The purpose of this research is to test the impact of human resources on creation of the firm or, in other words, to examine individual's inclination toward becoming an entrepreneur in transition economy such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. While investigating the relationship between human resources and firm creation, additional social, economic and emotional factors are included in analysis. Proposed theoretical model is tested using logistic regression model to analyse a sample of 2.015 individuals in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a participant in GEM project in 2014. Obtained results show that the amount of individual's knowledge, skills and expertise and its capability to seek and recognize new entrepreneurial opportunities, considered as human resources owned by individual, increase probability to generate a firm in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Beside human resources, certain economic and social factors, such as work status and social perception of entrepreneurship as an attractive profession, are important for firm creation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In: Alcohol and alcoholism: the international journal of the Medical Council on Alcoholism (MCA) and the journal of the European Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism (ESBRA), Volume 39, Issue 4, p. 290-296
Action research and arts-based activities were used to investigate the experiences of youths, ages 16-20 years, in the Guelph community who identified as being socially marginalized through poverty and/or unstable housing. The focus of the group was on identifying the influences of structural violence in their lives. As part of their discussions, they identified the ways in which their personal safety and well-being, their sense of feeling comfortable and included in the broader community, and their presence and role within this community were influenced by the ways others in their neighbourhoods and social networks treated them. In particular, they described the assumptions and treatment by others that were based on classism and ageism as excluding them and threatening their feelings of safety and well-being when living on the street and/or receiving social assistance. The youth group expressed these ideas through discussion, photovoice, and drawing their version of a 'community map.' This paper includes examples of these participant-produced arts projects to demonstrate their observations and ideas.
Climate change has already begun to profoundly alter the relationship betweenhumans and their environment for the vast majority of the world's population. How-ever, history has demonstrated that human are nothing if not responsive: as theclimate changes, so too will economies, governments, and individuals. This disser-tation examines impacts and responses to climate change with an eye towards un-derstanding how future societies might adapt to substantial climatic changes. Thefirst chapter measures the welfare cost of changes in amenity values due to climatechange by proxying for temperature preferences using contemporaneous changes inmood, as detected from posts on the social media platform Twitter. The secondchapter examines the response of electricity demand to changes in temperature asa means to project patterns of future energy consumption and large-scale capitalinvestments. The third chapter makes a methodological contribution to test threequasi-experimental methods of estimating electricity savings in dynamic pricing pro-grams versus an empirical "gold standard": the results from this chapter will aidpolicymakers in quantifying the effects these programs on curbing future increasesin electricity generation due to climate change.The first chapter is motivated by a gap in the climate impacts literature: thechange in amenity values resulting from temperature increases may be a substantialunaccounted-for cost of climate change. Without an explicit market for climate, priorwork has relied on cross-sectional variation or survey data to identify this cost. Thispaper presents an alternative method of estimating preferences over nonmarket goodswhich accounts for unobserved cross-sectional and temporal variation and allows forprecise estimates of nonlinear effects. Specifically, I create a rich panel dataset onhedonic state: a geographically and temporally dense collection of updates from thesocial media platform Twitter, scored using a set of both human- and machine-trainedsentiment analysis algorithms. Using this dataset, I find strong evidence of a sharpdeclines in hedonic state above and below 20 ◦ C (68 ◦ F). This finding is robust acrossall measures of hedonic state and to a variety of specifications.The second chapter simulates the effect of climate change on future electricitydemand in the United States. We combine fine-scaled hourly electricity load datawith observations of weather to estimate the response of both average and peakelectricity demand to changes in temperature. Applying these estimates to a set oflocally downscaled climate projections, we project regional end-of-century changesin electricity load. The results document increases in average hourly load across thecountry, with more pronounced changes occurring in the southern United States.Importantly, we find changes in peak demand to be larger than changes in aver-age demand, which has implications for public policy choices around future capitalinvestment.The third chapter compares quasi-experimental designs to experimental designs inthe context of a dynamic pricing setting designed to encourage customers to save en-ergy. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are widely viewed as the "gold standard"for evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention. However, because are percievedto be prohibitively expensive and challenging to implement successfully, they arenot broadly executed in policy settings. In particular, analysis of the effect of energypricing has largely been conducted through a two commonly used quasi-experimentalmethodologies: difference-in-differences and propensity score matching. Using a rareset of large-scale randomized field evaluations of electricity pricing, we compare theestimates obtained from these quasi-experimental designs and from a regression dis-continuity design to the true estimates obtained through the experimental method.We demonstrate empirical evidence in favor of four stylized facts that highlight theimportance of understanding selection bias and spillover effects in this context. First,difference-in-differences and propensity-score methods mis-estimate the true effectby up to 5% of mean peak hour usage. Second, propensity score estimates resembledifference-in-difference findings, but standard errors tend to be larger and point esti-mates are more biased for opt-out models. Third, regression discontinuity methodscan be heavily biased relative to the true average treatment effect. Finally, we findstrong evidence that biases are more pronounced in opt-in vs. opt-out designs.