How to secure sustainable competitiveness of Chemical Industry Parks:global competitive challenges and a systematic, customer-centric response

The central question of the following paper is how Chemical Industry Park operators could systematically integrate the external investors' perspective into their decisions about the park's future competitive positioning and continuous improvement of operational excellence. In today's chemical industry landscape, Chemical Industry Parks and their operators face great challenges. On the one hand, they have to meet increased and more complex demands of globally-active chemical companies. On the other hand, ongoing globalization leads to an intensified competition amongst Chemical Industry Parks that try to be successful in attracting investors on an international level. The presented methodology and some insights from an international competitiveness study of leading Chemical Industry Parks shall serve as a guideline as to how operators of Chemical Industry Parks could introduce customer centricity in their business model and how they could effectively compete on a global scale

Electrically-assisted bikes: potential impacts on travel behaviour

This paper reports on a review of the European literature about the impacts of having an electrically-assisted bike available to use, together with results from a trial in the UK city of Brighton, where 80 employees were loaned an electrically-assisted bike for a 6–8 week period. In the Brighton trial, three-quarters of those who were loaned an e-bike used them at least once a week. Across the sample as a whole, average usage was in the order of 15–20 miles per week, and was accompanied by an overall reduction in car mileage of 20%. At the end of the trial, 38% participants expected to cycle more in the future, and at least 70%said that they would like to have an e-bike available for use in the future, and would cycle more if this was the case. This is consistent with the results of the European literature which shows that when e-bikes are made available, they get used; that a proportion of e-bike trips typically substitutes for car use; and that many people who take part in trials become interested in future e-bike use, or cycling more generall

Product Service System Innovation in the Smart City

Product service systems (PSS) may usefully form part of the mix of innovations necessary to move society toward more sustainable futures. However, despite such potential, PSS implementation is highly uneven and limited. Drawing on an alternate socio-technical perspective of innovation, this paper provides fresh insights, on among other things the role of context in PSS innovation, to address this issue. Case study research is presented focusing on a use orientated PSS in an urban environment: the Copenhagen city bike scheme. The paper shows that PSS innovation is a situated complex process, shaped by actors and knowledge from other locales. It argues that further research is needed to investigate how actors interests shape PSS innovation. It recommends that institutional spaces should be provided in governance landscapes associated with urban environments to enable legitimate PSS concepts to co-evolve in light of locally articulated sustainability principles and priorities

Social assistance performance in Central and Eastern Europe: A pre-transfer post-transfer comparison

The anti-poverty impact of national social assistance programmes in eight Central and Eastern European countries is examined using data from the European Union-Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Results indicate that social assistance programmes achieve only limited poverty reduction, while spending a significant amount of their resources on the non-poor. The more extensive and generous programmes achieve higher effectiveness in reducing poverty. Efficiency on the other hand appears to be linked only to programme size and not to benefit levels. Unlike Western Europe, no trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency could be detected

Synchronous oceanic spreading and continental rifting in West Antarctica

Magnetic anomalies associated with new ocean crust formation in the Adare Basin off north-western Ross Sea (43 – 26 Ma) can be traced directly into the Northern Basin that underlies the adjacent morphological continental shelf, implying a continuity in the emplacement of oceanic crust. Steep gravity gradients along the margins of the Northern Basin, particularly in the east, suggest that little extension and thinning of continental crust occurred before it ruptured and the new oceanic crust formed, unlike most other continental rifts and the Victoria Land Basin further south. A pre-existing weak crust and localisation of strain by strike slip faulting are proposed as the factors allowing the rapid rupture of continental crust

Atmospheric mixing ratios of methyl ethyl ketone (2-butanone) in tropical, boreal, temperate and marine environments

Methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) enters the atmosphere following direct emission from vegetation and anthropogenic activities, as well as being produced by the gas-phase oxidation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as n-butane. This study presents the first overview of ambient MEK measurements at six different locations, characteristic of forested, urban and marine environments. In order to understand better the occurrence and behaviour of MEK in the atmosphere, we analyse diel cycles of MEK mixing ratios, vertical profiles, ecosystem flux data, and HYSPLIT back trajectories, and compare with co-measured VOCs. MEK measurements were primarily conducted with proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometer (PTR-MS) instruments. Results from the sites under biogenic influence demonstrate that vegetation is an important source of MEK. The diel cycle of MEK follows that of ambient temperature and the forest structure plays an important role in air mixing. At such sites, a high correlation of MEK with acetone was observed (e.g. r2 = 0.96 for the SMEAR Estonia site in a remote hemiboreal forest in Tartumaa, Estonia, and r2 = 0.89 at the ATTO pristine tropical rainforest site in central Amazonia). Under polluted conditions, we observed strongly enhanced MEK mixing ratios. Overall, the MEK mixing ratios and flux data presented here indicate that both biogenic and anthropogenic sources contribute to its occurrence in the global atmosphere

Crustal structure and rift flank uplift of the Adare Trough, Antarctica

The Adare Trough, located 100 km northeast of Cape Adare, Antarctica, represents the extinct third arm of a Tertiary spreading ridge between East and West Antarctica. It is characterized by pronounced asymmetric rift flanks elevated up to over 2 km above the trough's basement, accompanied by a large positive mantle Bouguer anomaly. On the basis of recently acquired seismic reflection and ship gravity data, we invert mantle Bouguer anomalies from the Adare Trough and obtain an unexpectedly large oceanic crustal thickness maximum of 9–10.5 km underneath the extinct ridge. A regional positive residual basement depth anomaly between 1 and 2.5 km in amplitude characterizes ocean crust from offshore Victoria Land to the Balleny Islands and north of Iselin Bank. The observations and models indicate that the mid/late Tertiary episode of slow spreading between East and West Antarctica was associated with a mantle thermal anomaly. The increasing crustal thickness toward the extinct ridge indicates that this thermal mantle anomaly may have increased in amplitude through time during the Adare spreading episode. This scenario is supported by a mantle convection model, which indicates the formation and strengthening of a major regional negative upper mantle density anomaly in the southwest Pacific in the last 50 million years. The total amount of post-26 Ma extension associated with Adare Trough normal faulting was about 7.5 km, in anomalously thick oceanic crust with a lithospheric effective elastic thickness (EET) between 3.5 and 5 km. This corresponds to an age between 3 and 5 million years based on a thermal boundary layer model and supports a scenario in which the Adare Trough formed soon after spreading between East and West Antarctica ceased, confined to relatively weak lithosphere with anomalously thick oceanic crust. There is little evidence for major subsequent structural activity in the Adare trough area from the available seismic data, indicating that this part of the West Antarctic Rift system became largely inactive in the early Miocene, with the exception of minor structural reactivation which is visible in the seismic data as offsets up to end of the early Pliocene

The Relevance and Resiliency of the Humanities

Discussion has grown increasingly urgent among those involved in the humanities; threats to funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts are only the most highly visible indicators of what many call a “war on the humanities.” The issue is a familiar one. With everyone’s finances under increasing stress, there is mounting pressure to “cut back on nonessentials,” and among both educational institutions and the broader public community, the humanities seem easy targets for the cutters and the pruners. There’s a general sense that the humanities are not very useful when it comes to objective goals like job opportunities, better paychecks, and career advancement. Even former president Barack Obama proclaimed in 2014 that “young people could make more money in skilled manufacturing than with art-history degrees.” His immediate backtracking—there’s “nothing wrong with an art-history degree” (qtd. in DeSantis)—only underscores what a throwaway the humanities have become in today’s all-for-profit culture, and the Trump administration’s declared intention to eliminate the NEH and the NEA further emphasizes the depth of this myopia. The NEH’s grim Congressional Budget Justification for fiscal year 2018 says it all, requesting only minimal funding for the “orderly closure of the agency” and stating that “no new grants or matching offers will be made beginning in FY 2018” (Appropriations Request). In what follows I discuss some of the stakes in the battle, suggest some strategies for coalition building, and contextualize the current wrangle by looking back some two centuries toward a comparably dire prognosis for art, culture, and creative humanism, concluding with a rallying cry from what may seem like an unlikely ally—today’s military. Some professional humanists have suggested that the humanities have increasingly lost their way and therefore have only themselves to blame: what used to be a clear agenda in the great books tradition, they say, has deteriorated into high school courses in Harry Potter and the history of pop rock and into college courses like The Philosophy of Star Trek and The Art of the Comic Book. Notice, though, that no one suggests that the widely popular college course called Physics for Poets is unacceptably lowbrow or that Math in the City, Consumer Chemistry, and Extraterrestrial Life are mere soft courses. If we consider what made the humanities such easy targets in the first place, we can, as engaged citizens in a society and culture whose priorities seem to be continually shifting, respond to misguided criticism of this sort. Doing so is not just wise; it is essential. And we have, perhaps to our surprise, eloquent and powerful allies in colleagues in the STEM disciplines whom we typically regard as adversaries. More important, we have the humanities themselves. Creatively refiguring and reconnecting the modes of thinking associated with the humanities and the STEM areas can—and will—work to the mutual benefit of both.In October 2013 David A. Hollinger, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley, published a wonderfully sane essay called “The Rift: Can STEM and the Humanities Get Along?” Hollinger points out that the media noise about the supposed death of the humanities ignores “the deep kinship between humanistic scholarship and natural science.” The balkanizing shifts in the academic tectonic plates in all areas of teaching, scholarship, and learning in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, he writes, threaten “the ability of modern disciplines to provide—in the institutional context of universities—the services for which they have been designed.” Hollinger argues that the humanities constitute “the great risk takers in the tradition of the Enlightenment,” embracing as they routinely do the messy, risk- intensive areas of inquiry largely “left aside by the methodologically narrower, largely quantitative” disciplines. This long-standing disciplinary engagement with risk necessarily positions the humanities along those continually fluctuating “borderlands between Wissenschaft [knowledge] and opinion, between scholarship and ideology.” The inevitable product of the troubling questions that the humanities typically ask is critical thinking. While critical thinking both employs and relies on the empirical reasoning we associate with science, it nevertheless involves a large measure of imagination and speculation—of “what if?” The humanities stimulate that variety of creative inquiry that arranges various components of “what is known” (and what is not known) in different, alternative configurations, often discovering among the apparent disconnections new and unsuspected connections.A century and a half ago, writing in On Liberty, John Stuart Mill said that the greatest threat to all of us is the decline of that very sort of rugged, probing critical thinking that challenges our habit of lazy thinking—or of not thinking at all. Mill worried about what he called “the despotism of custom,” which he regarded as a collective social force that was in mid-nineteenth- century Western society increasingly warring against individuality and therefore against genuine liberty. Mill was adamant that the decline of critical thinking inevitably produces mediocrity— mediocrity that comes to characterize and over time erode entire societies, nations, cultures. No one leads; everyone follows, so that “public opinion now rules the world,” as he put it. And no one notices—or cares—that individual liberty is a casualty, because in this world of mediocrity people’s “thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers” (85). Substitute talk radio (and, increasingly, social media and blogs) for newspapers, and the relevance of Mill’s point immediately becomes apparen

Settler colonial origins of intimate partner violence in Indigenous communities

Indigenous women in the United States experience disproportionately higher rates of intimate partner violence (IPV) compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts. Through a framework of settler colonialism, this article examines how settler colonial gender practices disrupted and eroded generational patterns of gender roles and power relationships within Indigenous communities, contributing over time to today\u27s higher levels of IPV perpetrated against Indigenous women. I argue that future research on IPV must attend to the historical, contemporary, and legal impacts of settler colonial policies and laws that contribute to increased rates of violence within marginalized and racialized communities. In this article, I first review dominant theories of IPV, then review how a theoretical framework of settler colonialism expands our understanding of IPV in Indigenous communities, and, finally, address the impacts of federal policies on Indigenous sovereign rights regarding violence against women

9. Regionalism and the Realities of Naming

Complications seem inevitably to arise whenever one tries to define either regionalism in general or any specific region like the South or the Great Plains or to categorize the art and artifacts that come from or relate to that area by means of such language. Commentators occasionally try to take the easy way out of these taxonomic difficulties by simply declaring that “writing is writing,” by which reductive expression they apparently mean that all writing is “universal” in nature (the local manifestation of some “universal language”) and that, therefore, all that varies from “region” to “region” is the inflection. Inflection is a convenient word because it seems to delimit linguistic variation (or other variations) less strictly than words like dialect or idiom. A less immediately diagnostic term, inflection appears to permit a far greater range of localisms within the discourse in question. Even so, it is not convincing that what we usually think of as “regionalisms” (whether in literature, the arts, culture, society, class, or economics) actually amount to little more than differing inflections upon some universal or general language or discourse that is itself associated with a larger and more heterogeneous geographical or cultural entity like a nation, continent, or socioeconomic class. Consequently, this essay represents an attempt to articulate a slightly different perspective upon the matter of regionalism and its slippery definitions. This attempt comes with a significant disclaimer: it does not so much resolve the difficulties as suggest a different and perhaps more constructive way of regarding them