Suchergebnisse

Participatory Design (PD) – whose inclusive benefits are broadly recognised in design – can be very challenging, especially when involving children. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to further barriers to PD with such groups. One key barrier is the advent of social distancing and government-imposed social restrictions due to the additional risks posed for e.g. children and families vulnerable to COVID-19. This disrupts traditional in-person PD (which involves close socio-emotional and often physical collaboration between participants and researchers). However, alongside such barriers, we have identified opportunities for new and augmented approaches to PD across distributed geographies, backgrounds, ages and abilities. We examine Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) as a solution for overcoming these new barriers, during and after COVID-19. We offer new ways to think about DPD, and unpick some of its ambiguities. We do this through an examination of the results from an online Interaction Design and Children (IDC) 2020 workshop. The workshop included 24 researchers with experience in PD, in a range of forms, in the context of children. Initially designed to take place in-person and to include a design session with children in a school in London, the workshop was adjusted to an online format in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the adverse circumstances, we discovered that the unexpected change of the workshop style from in-person to online was an opportunity and an impetus for us to address the new PD challenges of the global pandemic. In this article we contribute seven themes which were revealed during our IDC workshop, providing guidance on important areas for consideration when planning and conducting PD in the context of a global pandemic. With a focus on the term 'distributed', we offer insights on how DPD can be applied and explored in these circumstances with child participants. We conclude with a number of lessons learned, highlighting the opportunities and challenges DPD offers to enable continued co-design during a global pandemic. In particular, DPD provides greater access for some populations to be involved in PD, but technical and social challenges must be addressed.

The workload of campus leaders continues to increase with new expectations for evaluation and supervision, changing legislative mandates, and mounting pressures for improved school accountability. Educational Leadership preparation programs are built on national and state standards related to principal leadership and competency. However, while principal preparation programs have focused intently on instructional leadership development for future principals, most educational leadership candidates do not immediately enter the principalship but rather start their administrative careers as assistant principals. School districts can implement a comprehensive training protocol for their emerging principals using research-based practices to ensure assistant principals have the training, coaching, and mentoring necessary for the next level of leadership. The professional development strategies presented here can be pivotal in ensuring that individuals are prepared for campus leadership and potentially mitigate principal burnout. Increasing the competencies of assistant principals to prepare them for campus leadership will help support the future of the school district and ensure a pipeline of strong leaders.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a major loss event for the insurance industry. This chapter begins with an overview of the pandemic's most significant insurance implications. Because business interruption has been the most prominently discussed of these impacts, the second part of this chapter takes a closer look at business interruption insurance. This part describes how markets for this coverage are structured in the U.S., and then undertakes a detailed analysis of one of the most common business interruption policy forms, demonstrating that some aspects of this form, insofar as pandemic-caused business interruption is concerned, were not drafted with utmost precision. This part also discusses how disputes over common policy language used in the U.S. have unfolded, both in legislatures and the courts. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the future of insuring the business continuity risk. It explores the limitations of private markets, the role of government, and the need for an overarching strategy for pandemic risk management, within which insurance would play a significant but partial role. ; La pandemia de la COVID-19 ha supuesto uno de los eventos con mayores pérdidas para la industria de los seguros. Este artículo comienza con una visión de las implicaciones más significantes que la pandemia ha supuesto para los seguros. Debido a que la interrupción del negocio ha sido el más destacado de estos impactos, en la segunda parte se analiza más de cerca el seguro de interrupción del negocio. Esta parte describe cómo se estructuran los mercados para esta cobertura en los EE. UU. Se realiza un análisis detallado de uno de los contratos de política de interrupción de negocios más comunes, demostrando que algunos aspectos de este contrato, en lo que respecta a la interrupción de negocios causada por una pandemia, no fueron redactados con la máxima precisión. Esta parte también analiza cómo se han desarrollado las causas sobre el lenguaje de política común utilizado en los EE. UU., tanto por los legisladores como por los tribunales. El artículo concluye con una discusión sobre el futuro de asegurar el riesgo de continuidad del negocio. Explora las limitaciones de los mercados privados, el papel del Gobierno y la necesidad de una estrategia global para la gestión del riesgo pandémico, dentro de la cual los seguros jugarían un papel significativo pero parcial.

ABSTRACTThis article explores Chinese environmental politics as a complex strategy for engineering weather and climate at national and then planetary scales. It argues that in times of meteorological insecurity, we can explore diverse sites in China's state environmental political apparatus as attempts at coordinating diverse physical, natural, and social processes into components of manipulable weather systems. Through considering two programs of state environmental intervention, the article explores "infrastructure" as a political practice and opportunity. First, in considering aerial seeding and ecological migration programs in the context of anti‐dust storm programs spearheaded by state forestry agencies, I show how environmental engineering involves the continual retooling of wind flows, local ecologies, and ex‐herder precarity into a variegated strategy of atmospheric control for downwind places in the path of dust storms. Then, I explore how the recent ascendance of the Chinese state in international climate accords builds on a decade‐long theorization of "socialist ecological civilization" by Party theorists. In aligning the longevity of state socialism with the sustaining of planetary climate systems, I argue that Chinese international politics increasingly rely on a vision of China as infrastructural to the political and climatic apparatus of the planet as such. [climate change, environment, infrastructure, dust storms, China]

The Sykes commentary advocates "a more sensible, graded approach for protection from low dose ionizing radiation" until the LNT dose-response issue is resolved. It urges scientists to stop criticizing the LNT model that links radiation to a risk of cancer and accept regulatory use of the threshold model to "protect" people, but with higher limits. It fails to mention the 120-year history of successful low-dose treatments of a wide variety of serious diseases, including cancers. The commentary ignores published evidence of a threshold at 1.1 Gy for radiogenic leukemia and a dose-rate threshold at about 0.6 Gy per year for lifespan shortening. LNT came from politicized science, replete with scientific misconduct and conflict of interest. Its acceptance created a false cancer scare that was likely intended to stop atomic bomb testing, but it has severely damaged human welfare. Many vitally important low-dose therapies were discarded when the radiation scare was disseminated in 1956. The rapid growth of nuclear energy ended with the media-inflamed public panic after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Extreme implementation of the precautionary principle made it uneconomic. Availability of a low-dose therapy for lung inflammation could have dramatically decreased the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

L'émergence des véhicules autonomes (VA) et des véhicules hautement autonomes (VHA) pose de nombreux défis aux régulateurs fédéraux, étatiques et locaux aux États-Unis. Elle entraîne des développements véritablement perturbateurs qui laissent présager des gains sociaux élevés en regard de coûts sociaux incertains. Les défis analysés menacent également de brouiller les attributions historiques des autorités de régulation et de rendre les techniques de régulation traditionnelles anachroniques et dysfonctionnelles. Cet article cartographie le paysage des défis régulatoires présentés par ces nouvelles générations de véhicules et fournit une évaluation préliminaire de la voie à suivre.