Milpirri: Jennifer Biddle in Discussion with Tracks Dance Company

Jennifer Biddle interviews the artistic directors of Tracks Dance Company, Tim Newth and David McMicken, about the company's ongoing involvement in the Milpirri festival

Oil, gas and conflict: a mathematical model for the resource curse

Oil and natural gas are highly valuable natural resources, but many countries with large untapped reserves suffer from poor economic and social-welfare performance. This conundrum is known as the resource curse. The resource curse is a result of poor governance and wealth distribution structures that allow the elite to monopolize resources for self-gain. When rival social groups compete for natural resources, civil unrest soon follows. While conceptually easy to follow, there have been few formal attempts to study this phenomenon. Thus, we develop a mathematical model that captures the basic elements and dynamics of this dilemma. We show that when resources are monopolized by the elite, increased exportation leads to decreased domestic production. This is due to under-provision of the resource-embedded energy and industrial infrastructure. Decreased domestic production then lowers the marginal return on productive activities, and insurgency emerges. The resultant conflict further displaces human, built, and natural capital. It forces the economy into a vicious downward spiral. Our numerical results highlight the importance of governance reform and productivity growth in reducing oil-and-gas-related conflicts, and thus identify potential points of intervention to break the downward spiral.Yiyong Cai gratefully acknowledges financial support from Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0988281

Strategic choice of preferences: The persona model

We introduce a modification to the two-timescale games studied in the evolution of preferences (EOP) literature. In this modification, the strategic process occurring on the long timescale is learning by an individual across his or her lifetime, not natural selection operating on genomes over multiple generations. This change to the longer timescale removes many of the formal difficulties of EOP models and allows us to show how two-timescale games can provide endogenous explanations for why humans sometimes adopt interdependent preferences and sometimes exhibit logit quantal response functions. In particular, we show that our modification to EOP explains experimental data in the Traveler´s Dilemma. We also use our modification to show how cooperation can arise in nonrepeated versions of the Prisoner´s Dilemma (PD). We then show that our modification to EOP predicts a crowding out phenomenon in the PD, in which introducing incentives to cooperate causes players to stop cooperating instead. We also use our modification to predict a tradeoff between the robustness and the benefit of cooperation in the PD

Brexit Report - Impact on Business Models of Scottish Companies

The Brexit Business Model Report is a preliminary assessment of research, interviews and survey results regarding the impact of Brexit on the business models of Scottish companies as they prepare for post-Brexit scenarios. The survey was used to compile data to support research questions gathered during the research and interview process for this graduate class project. Questions were designed to assess how Brexit is impacting the ability of Scottish companies in the areas of business model, contingency planning, supply chain, staffing, innovation, global reach, risk assessment, and opportunities. The questions reflected areas of the business model that may have present and future implications. The answers help measure the Brexit impact on Scottish firms’ business models and the potential for international growth. The upper management of Scottish companies from the “Insider Top 500” list, “FactSet list, and various trade organizations were selected to receive the survey. The focus of this study was on the potential impact of Brexit on Scottish companies’ business models. The survey findings show the importance of understanding the elements of a business model in the Brexit context (see Additional File, Executive Summary below for Business Model Brexit Implications on Scottish Companies based on Key Findings table)

Reinforcing Regulatory Regimes: How States, Civil Society, and Codes of Conduct Promote Adherence to Global Labor Standards

In response to pressure from various stakeholders, many transnational businesses have developed codes of conduct and monitoring systems to ensure that working conditions in their supply chain factories meet global labor standards. Many observers have questioned whether these codes of conduct have any impact on working conditions or are merely a marketing tool to deflect criticism of valuable global brands. Using a proprietary dataset from one of the world’s largest social auditors, containing audit-level data for 31,915 audits of 14,922 establishments in 43 countries on behalf of 689 clients in 33 countries, we conduct one of the first large-scale comparative studies of adherence to labor codes of conduct to determine what combination of institutional conditions promotes compliance with the global labor standards embodied in codes. We find that these private transnational governance tools are most effective when they are embedded in states that have made binding domestic and international legal commitments to protect workers’ rights and that have high levels of press freedom and nongovernmental organization activity. Taken together, these findings suggest the importance of multiple, robust, overlapping, and reinforcing governance regimes to meaningful transnational regulation

SCOPE New Photographic Practices

The photographic practices brought together for this exhibition and publication provide a broad scope of how photographic and lens based media may be used in order to have a visceral and conceptual impact. The methods on show demonstrate the way that artists might pick and choose from the approaches, processes and debates that have arisen through the medium’s history. This collection of work features film, video and photography that demand a renegotiation of the relationship between camera, subject and viewer. Visual Art Centre Gallery, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Chin

Projected changes in wet-bulb globe temperature under alternative climate scenarios

The increased levels of Greenhouse Gasses (GHGs) in the atmosphere will result in increased near-surface air temperature and absolute humidity. These two factors increasingly pose a risk of heat stress to humans. The Wet-Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) is a widely used and validated index for assessing the environmental heat stress. Using the output from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) simulations of the four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), we calculated the global and regional changes in WBGT. Globally, the WBGT is projected to increase by 0.6–1.7 C for RCP 2.6 and 2.37–4.4 C for RCP 8.5. At the regional scale, our analysis suggests a disproportionate increase in the WBGT over northern India, China, northern Australia, Africa, Central America and Southeast Asia. An increase in WBGT has consequences not only on human health but also on social and economic factors. These consequences may be exacerbated in developing economies, which are less able to adapt to the changing environmental conditions

Uncovering the nutritional landscape of food

Recent progresses in data-driven analysis methods, including network-based approaches, are revolutionizing many classical disciplines. These techniques can also be applied to food and nutrition, which must be studied to design healthy diets. Using nutritional information from over 1,000 raw foods, we systematically evaluated the nutrient composition of each food in regards to satisfying daily nutritional requirements. The nutrient balance of a food was quantified herein as nutritional fitness, using the food's frequency of occurrence in nutritionally adequate food combinations. Nutritional fitness offers prioritization of recommendable foods within a global network of foods, in which foods are connected based on the similarities of their nutrient compositions. We identified a number of key nutrients, such as choline and alpha-linolenic acid, whose levels in foods can critically affect the foods' nutritional fitness. Analogously, pairs of nutrients can have the same effect. In fact, two nutrients can impact the nutritional fitness synergistically, although the individual nutrients alone may not. This result, involving the tendency among nutrients to show correlations in their abundances across foods, implies a hidden layer of complexity when exploring for foods whose balance of nutrients within pairs holistically helps meet nutritional requirements. Interestingly, foods with high nutritional fitness successfully maintain this nutrient balance. This effect expands our scope to a diverse repertoire of nutrient-nutrient correlations, integrated under a common network framework that yields unexpected yet coherent associations between nutrients. Our nutrient-profiling approach combined with a network-based analysis provides a more unbiased, global view of the relationships between foods and nutrients, and can be extended towards nutritional policies, food marketing, and personalized nutrition.Comment: Supplementary material is available at the journal websit