In a recent line of cases, senior judges in the UK have been called upon to adjudicate in complaints over the failure of health and local authorities to meet the welfare needs of citizens. Local authorities claimed that the disputes had been precipitated by a lack of resources allocated by central government to meet local demand. This article examines the role of the courts in resolving a fundamental tension between central government policy of financial cost-cutting on the one hand and (...) welfarist principles embodied in legislation for the delivery of public services on the other. Questions are raised about the relevance and appropriateness of rights-based adjudication in welfare needs contexts and about the reluctance of courts to intervene in the resolution of resource allocation disputes even where fundamental rights, particularly in areas such as health, community care, and education where notions of rights are inextricably bound up with use of financial resources. These key cases have arisen prior to the implementation of the Human Rights Act 1998. Where relevant, the likely impact of the Act on welfare needs disputes is considered. (shrink)

Dinner times provide rich opportunities for overt and covert socialization. Drawing upon a larger corpus of 35 video-recorded family meals involving the three-year-old Zoe and her parents, this conversation analytic study describes how Zoe displays such agency through the practice of “voicing control” – momentarily sounding and acting like an adult by performing a range of controlling acts such as leading, instructing, advising, assessing, and mediating. I argue that by playing with such activities bound to the category of a (...) higher position than hers, the child manages to grow “a head taller” in the Vygotskyan sense. The findings contribute to the budding literature on documenting socialization in naturalistic settings with a specific focus on the child’s role in such socialization. (shrink)

This paper addresses the sliding mode control problem for a class of networked control systems with long time delay and consecutive packet dropout. A new modeling method is proposed, through which time delay and packet dropout are modeled in a unified model described by one Markov chain. To avoid the chattering problem of classic reaching law, a new chattering-free reaching law is proposed. Then with a focus on the problem that controller-actuator channel network condition cannot be foreseen by (...) the controller, a new compensation strategy is proposed, which can effectively compensate for the effect of time delay and packet dropout in controller-actuator channel. Finally, a simulation example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Armstrong’s account of attachment-based claims to natural resources, the kind of rights that follow from attachment-based claims, and the limits we should impose on such claims. We hope to clarify how and why attachment matters in the discourse on resource rights by presenting three challenges to Armstrong’s theory. First, we question the normative basis for certain attachment claims, by trying to distinguish more clearly between different kinds of attachment and other kinds of claims. Second, (...) we highlight the need to supplement Armstrong’s account with a theory of how to weigh different attachment claims so as to establish the normative standing that different kinds of attachment claims should have. Third, we propose that sustainability must be a necessary requirement for making attachment claims to natural resources legitimate. Based on these three challenges and the solutions we propose, we argue that attachment claims are on the one hand narrower than Armstrong suggests, while on the other hand they can justify more far-reaching rights to control than Armstrong initially considers, because of the particular weight that certain attachment claims have. (shrink)

Attention to differences within communities is important in working toward sustainability of an agro-ecosystem. In the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program, gender made a difference in terms of access and control over key resources – financial, human, natural, and social capital – critical for project success. Efforts to build social capital among women proved critical in developing both collective and households strategies for sustainability. The sites differed greatly in both landscape and lifescape. Women's (...) position within each landscape provided an important perspective with which to assess and act toward achieving ecosystem, economic, and social sustainability. (shrink)

Immigrant nurses make up a large percentage of the Australian nursing workforce. Since the support in the workplace is expected to be inclusive for all nurses, the aim of this article is to explore how support and opportunities for professional growth, learning and development are distributed across different categories of nurses working in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). An ethnographic approach has opened an examination of the everyday workplace practices in the NICU to gain insight into how nurses made (...) sense of the social and power relations occurring between themselves and their senior colleagues and how they experienced the support and opportunities they received in their workplace. As today's workplaces such as the NICU are diverse in races, culture and experiences, the concepts of intersectionality and cultural safety assisted in identifying inequality and injustice related to such diversity. The results showed how patronage relations rendered nurses with immigrant status with major disadvantage and left them clinically and culturally vulnerable. Such inequity defeats the reasons for encouraging skilled migration of nurses and poses questions on the cultural competency of recruiting organisations. Considering how cultural safety might guide staff development offers opportunities for authentic support to culturally diverse nurses. (shrink)

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study examined how and when sense of control influence safety behavior. Linear regression analysis was performed on data collected from 481 students in 58 classes at a university. The results indicated that psychological stress mediated the negative effect of sense of control on safety compliance, as well as the positive effect of sense of control on safety participation. They further showed that perceptions of stronger safety regulations heightened the positive relationship (...) between student psychological stress and safety compliance, and buffered the negative effects of psychological stress on safety participation. These results provide a benchmark against which the effectiveness and relevance of epidemic prevention and control in higher education institutions can be assessed. (shrink)

In its governance activities for genetic resources, the international community has adopted various approaches to their ownership, including: free access; common heritage of mankind; intellectual property rights; and state sovereign rights. They have also created systems which combine elements of these approaches. While governance of plant and animal genetic resources is well-established internationally, there has not yet been a clear approach selected for human genetic resources. Based on assessment of the goals which international governance of human genetic resources ought to (...) serve, and the implications for how they will be accessed and utilised, it is argued that common heritage of mankind will be the most appropriate approach to adopt to their ownership/control. It does this with the aim of stimulating discussion in this area and providing a starting point for deeper consideration of how a common heritage of mankind, or similar, regime for human genetic resources would function and be implemented. (shrink)

Many formalisms for reasoning about knowing commit an agent to be logically omniscient. Logical omniscience is an unrealistic principle for us to use to build a real-world agent, since it commits the agent to knowing infinitely many things. A number of formalizations of knowledge have been developed that do not ascribe logical omniscience to agents. With few exceptions, these approaches are modifications of the possible-worlds semantics. In this paper we use a combination of several general techniques for building non-omniscient reasoners. (...) First we provide for the explicit representation of notions such as problems, solutions, and problem solving activities, notions which are usually left implicit in the discussions of autonomous agents. A second technique is to take explicitly into account the notion of resource when we formalize reasoning principles. We use the notion of resource to describe interesting principles of reasoning that are used for ascribing knowledge to agents. For us, resources are abstract objects. We make extensive use of ordering and inaccessibility relations on resources, but we do not find it necessary to define a metric. Using principles about resources without using a metric is one of the strengths of our approach.We describe the architecture of a reasoner, built from a finite number of components, who solves a puzzle, involving reasoning about knowing, by explicitly using the notion of resource. Our approach allows the use of axioms about belief ordinarily used in problem solving – such as axiom K of modal logic – without being forced to attribute logical omniscience to any agent. In particular we address the issue of how we can use resource-unbounded (e.g., logically omniscient) reasoning to attribute knowledge to others without introducing contradictions. We do this by showing how omniscient reasoning can be introduced as a conservative extension over resource-bounded reasoning. (shrink)

This article explores John Dewey’s conceptualization of the public as polity in his lecture notes from 1928. Dewey’s conceptualization suggests an account of the democratic legitimacy of public regulation of economic activities by focusing on polity members’ mutual interest. Contextualized through Dewey’s involvement in practical politics the article specifies the conceptualization by a policy focus on natural resources and technology, and explores and discusses it through two issues for democratic control over policy development: centralization of power in federal government; (...) and the failure to understand, predict and control consequences of technology. Finally, exploring its relevance in a context of economic globalization the article rearticulates the conceptualization in terms of transnational relations and solidarities, using the transnational peasant organization La Via Campesina as an example. (shrink)

This study investigated the effects of the 6 Minutes Journal, a commercial diary combining several positive psychology interventions, including gratitude, goal-setting, and self-affirmation exercises, on several mental health outcome measures. In a randomized controlled trial, university students were randomly assigned to one of two groups: 6MT and a wait list control group. Participants in the intervention group were instructed to follow the instructions of the 6MT for 4 weeks. Participants in both groups completed measures of perceived stress, positive and (...) negative affect, self-efficacy and resilience at baseline, after 2, and 4 weeks. We used path-analyses with autoregressive and cross-lagged effects to test our hypotheses of the effects of the 6MT. Participants in the intervention group reported decreased levels of perceived stress and negative affect, as well as increased levels of resilience and self-efficacy compared to the control group. Positive affect was not statistically significantly influenced. The data showed a statistically significant increased levels of self-efficacy and resilience only after 4 weeks, suggesting that changing these constructs needs more time. The 6-minute diary does not appear to make individuals fundamentally more positive. However, the intervention may have a protective function against negative influences on well-being. (shrink)

This paper examines heterogeneous impacts of gendered household headship and control of resources on food security in rural Tanzania. Analysis with minimal attention to heterogeneity in gender considerations indicates no differences in household food security between male and female-headed households. But with a more differentiated household headship variable and accounting for gendered differences in resource ownership, the results differ markedly. Using more gender-disaggregated variables, our results show significant differences between female-headed and male-headed households. In these results we find (...) support for the claim that gender norms in the study villages often restrict women’s access to resources, resulting in more vulnerable female-headed households. Female-headed households with no male adults present are particularly vulnerable. The study also points to specific opportunities for enhanced food security with attention to female and joint ownership of livestock. These results represent a hopeful sign that efforts to enhance female livestock ownership could be a useful strategy to address lower levels of food consumption in these Tanzanian villages. (shrink)

It has been argued that the explanation of self-control requires positing special motivational powers. Some think that we need will-power as an irreducible mental faculty; others that we need to think of the active self as a dedicated and depletable pool of psychic energy or – in today more respectable terminology – mental resources; finally, there is the idea that self-control requires postulating a deep division between reason and passion – a deliberative and an emotional motivational system. This (...) essay argues that no such special motivational powers are necessary. Yet, at the same time, self-control does powerfully illustrate the importance of a feature of the mind. What it illustrates, I argue, is the importance of the mental activity of attention in the control of all action. It is by appeal to this mental activity that we can dispense with special motivational powers. If we think of Humeanism as the view that there is fundamentally only one kind of motivational system and that all action is based in that system, then this essay contributes to a defense of Humeanism. On the other hand, the essay also shows that any model of agency in terms of only beliefs and desires, motivational and representational states, or preferences and credences is incomplete. A different conception of Humeanism as the view that every mental state is either motivational, representational, or a combination of them, is false. (shrink)

Leader behavior significantly influences employees’ safety performance. This study aimed to examine the effect of abusive supervision on the safety behaviors of subordinates. By drawing on the strength model of self-control, we predicted that abusive supervision would negatively affect safety behaviors through emotional exhaustion, and trait self-control and attentional bias toward safety would moderate the relationship between abusive supervision, emotional exhaustion, and safety behaviors. Our hypothesized model was supported by results from a sample of 159 workers at a (...) chemical product manufacturing enterprise in China. Emotional exhaustion mediated the link between abusive supervision and safety behaviors. Moreover, trait self-control moderated the relationship between abusive supervision and emotional exhaustion, and attentional bias toward safety moderated the relationship between emotional exhaustion and safety compliance. This study elucidates the effects of abusive supervision on safety behaviors through the resource depletion process. Likewise, the importance of trait self-control and attentional bias toward safety in mitigating the potentially harmful effects of abusive supervision in workplace safety is highlighted. Minimizing abusive supervision, providing self-control training, and implementing safety-specific implicit cognition intervention can effectively improve employees’ safety behaviors. (shrink)

Many in the international development community have embraced the randomized controlled field experiment, akin to a biomedical clinical trial for social interventions, as the new “gold evidential standard” in program impact evaluation. In response, critics have called upon the method’s advocates to consider the moral dimensions of randomization, leading to a debate about the method’s ethics. My research intervenes in this debate by empirically investigating how researchers manage the perception of randomization in the field. Without the possibility of a placebo, (...) researchers rhetorically and materially frame the experiment differently for the control and treatment groups. Three technologies allow for this differential framing: geographic separation, temporal delay, and public randomization ceremonies. Geographic separation is a “technology of opacity” designed to obscure unequal resource distribution by disentangling the intervention and research components of the experiment for the control group. The latter two are technologies of transparency designed to expose the element of randomization but downplay conditions that may affect participant buy in. All three technologies work to preclude collective definitions of fair resource allocation, yet they are not fully successful in preventing modes of confrontation and resistance that lie outside of the experiment’s framing. (shrink)

I contend that Kurzban et al.'s model is silent on three issues. First, the extent to which opportunity-cost computations are automatic or deliberative is unclear. Second, the role of individual differences in biasing opportunity-cost computations needs elucidating. Third, in the absence of tasks, task persistence will be indefinite, which seems unfeasible, so perhaps integration with a limited-resource account is necessary.

The current statist order assumes that states have a right to make rules involving the transfer and/or extraction of natural resources within the territory. Cosmopolitan theories of global justice have questioned whether the state is justified in its control over natural resources, typically by pointing out that having resources is a matter of good luck, and this unfairness should be addressed. This paper argues that self-determination does generate a right over resources, which others should not interfere with. It does (...) not entail, however, that there is no obligation on rich countries to redistribute to poor countries. Indeed, in some rare instances, it might be necessary for a particular political community to use its resources, but the presumption is that the collectively self-determining group should have the right to decide that. (shrink)

Translation abstractSummary: Control versus Complexity: Approaches to the Carbon Dioxide Problem at IIASA. In the 1970s and 1980s the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) hosted several research projects, workshops and conferences in order to discuss the implications of rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere. A number of distinguished scholars, some of whom later became prominent protagonists within the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and sustainability communities more generally, participated in these debates. Since (...) those at IIASA did not engage in obviously related fields such as geophysics or climatology, there is a need to explain how, and via which contexts the issue entered the institute's agenda. This article examines this historical context and contrasts two competing paradigms that emerged at IIASA in order to assess and respond to the carbon dioxide question: The first approach was related to the organisation's research projects on the future of energy systems, which drew on physics, engineering, economics and applied system dynamical modeling; the second approach drew earlier research into ecological management and complex dynamical systems theory, and argued for the use of multiple methods to assess the carbon dioxide question. The first approach invoked ideas of techno‐economical control mechanisms, the second resulted in a more embedded framing of climate change as one of a larger complex of issues relating to sustainable development. Based on resources from IIASA's research repositories and institutional archive, this study retraces these competing discourse framings and outlines the specific research and modeling strategies, policies, and cultural and technological imaginaries related to them. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of mineral resources’ governance and trading rules. In doing so, it takes a closer look at the 2012 World Trade Organization case pertaining to Chinese exportation quotas of rare earth elements and other minerals. It argues that the current governance system based on national responsibility over resources control and global trading rules is not well adapted to a sustainable and fair management of mineral resources, and concludes by suggesting two paths towards a better governance (...) of such resources. (shrink)

I classify different sorts of natural resources and suggest how these resources may be acquired. I also argue that inventions, whether gadgets or artificial life forms, should not be privately owned. Gadgets and life-forms are not created (although the term 'invention' suggests otherwise); they are discovered, and hence have much in common with more familiar natural resources such as sunlight that ought not to be privately owned. Nonetheless, inventors of gadgets, like discoverers of certain more familiar resources, sometimes should be (...) granted exclusive but temporary control over their inventions as an incentive for making unknown items widely accessible. (shrink)

Struggles over precious resources such as oil, water, and land are increasingly evident in the contemporary world. States, indigenous groups, and corporations vie to control access to those resources, and the benefits they provide. These conflicts are rapidly spilling over into new arenas, such as the deep oceans and the Polar regions. How should these precious resources be governed, and how should the benefits and burdens they generate be shared? Justice and Natural Resources provides a systematic theory of natural (...) resource justice. It argues that we should use the benefits and burdens flowing from these resources to promote greater equality across the world, and share governance over many important resources. At the same time, the book takes seriously the ways in which particular resources can matter in peoples lives. It provides invaluable guidance on a series of pressing issues, including the scope of state resource rights, the claims of indigenous communities, rights over ocean resources, the burdens of conservation, and the challenges of climate change and transnational resource governance. It will be required reading for anyone interested in natural resource governance, climate politics, and global justice. (shrink)

Self-control is essential to the Buddhist soteriological project, but it is not immediately clear how we can make sense of it in light of the doctrine of no-self. Exercising control over our actions, thoughts, volitions, and emotions seems to presuppose a conception of self and agency that is not available to the Buddhist. Thus, there seems to be a fundamental mismatch in the practical instructions for exercising control in the Buddhist texts and the doctrine of no-self. In (...) this paper, we develop and defend a general account of self-control that coheres with Abhidarma Buddhism. We defend the Buddhist against recent arguments that self-control depends on an executive self; instead, for the Buddhist, the psychology of self-control must be ‘horizontal’ (for example, one desire winning out over another). However, the characterization of the psychological process isn’t sufficient for a Buddhist theory of self-control. For the Buddhist account is substantive. According to Buddhism, a paradigmatic instance of self-control is an episode in which the desire that wins is a desire that conforms to Buddhist values; by contrast, an episode is not an instance of self-control if the desire that wins is opposed to Buddhist values. We also argue that there are significant resources on which the Buddhist can draw for enhancing self-control despite the denial of self. (shrink)

Hutto and Satne identify three research traditions attempting to explain the place of intentional agency in a wholly natural world: naturalistic reduction; sophisticated behaviourism, and pragmatism, and suggest that insights from all three are necessary. While agreeing with that general approach, I develop a somewhat different package, offering an outline of a vindicating genealogy of our interpretative practices. I suggest that these practices had their original foundation in the elaboration of much more complex representation-guided control structures in our lineage (...) and the support and amplification of those control structures through external resources. Cranes became increasingly important in the explanation of systematically successful action. These more complex representational engines coevolved with selection to detect and respond to the control structures of others. Since much of that selection was driven by the advantages of cooperation and coordination, in part these control structures were co-opted as external signals and guarantees, in cooperation and coordination. As the time depth of cooperation and co-ordination extended, these public signals of belief and intent acquired secondary functions, as mechanisms to stabilise and structure control systems, making humans not just more transparent to one another at a time, but more predictable over time. Mindshaping, not just mindreading, became increasingly important in our lineage. (shrink)

We advance an account that grounds cognition, specifically decision-making, in an activity all organisms as autonomous systems must perform to keep themselves viable—controlling their production mechanisms. Production mechanisms, as we characterize them, perform activities such as procuring resources from their environment, putting these resources to use to construct and repair the organism's body and moving through the environment. Given the variable nature of the environment and the continual degradation of the organism, these production mechanisms must be regulated by control (...) mechanisms that select when a production is required and how it should be carried out. To operate on production mechanisms, control mechanisms need to procure information through measurement processes and evaluate possible actions. They are making decisions. In all organisms, these decisions are made by multiple different control mechanisms that are organized not hierarchically but heterarchically. In many cases, they employ internal models of features of the environment with which the organism must deal. Cognition, in the form of decision-making, is thus fundamental to living systems which must control their production mechanisms. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty is an insidious problem that besets most tertiary institutions, where considerable resources are expended to prevent and manage students' dishonest actions within academia. Using a mixed retrospective and prospective design this research investigated Gottfredson and Hirschi's self-control theory as a possible explanation for academic dishonesty in 264 university students. The relationship between academic dishonesty and general criminality was also examined. A significant but small to moderate relationship between academic dishonesty and general criminality was present, including correlations with (...) general dishonesty, violent crime and drug offending subcategories. These findings suggested that a general criminological theory may be of use in explaining academic dishonesty, but the overall ability of self-control variables to explain academic dishonesty was not strong. Controlled logistic regressions indicated that a significant positive association with academic dishonesty was only present for one of 6 self-control subscales (self-centeredness), and even this association was only present in the prospective study component. A strong relationship between past and future academic dishonesty was present. Implications of the study for institutions are discussed. (shrink)

Modern industrial societies have achieved a level of economic prosperity undreamed of in earlier times, but in the view of the contemporary environmental movement, the prosperity has come at the cost of serious degradations to the natural world. For environmental advocates, problems such as resource depletion, air and water pollution, global warming and the loss of biodiversity represent due threats to the well-being of human societies and the planet itself. But just how serious are these threats and how should (...) we go about confronting them? Do environmental problems call for more extensive government controls over industrial activity, energy policy and the like, or is it possible to find solutions by harnessing the incentives of the free market? The essays in this collection address these questions and explore related issues. (shrink)

Government’s responsibility to safeguard the public’s health through law has been part of the social contract since ancient times. Cicero declared salus populi suprema lex esto - “the safety of the people is the supreme law”. Disraeli proclaimed that protecting the public’s health is the first duty of the statesman. Of the ten most important public health achievements of the 20th century in the US., seven are directly related to legal interventions, including legislative interventions. As new and existing risks to (...) health risks emerge internationally, governments have consistently used the law as a tool to define the goals of public health, direct public health authorities to accomplish these goals, and equip them with the power and resources to do so.Tobacco control represents a salient example of how law can be used to ensure health. Like other public health laws, tobacco control laws have historic grounds. Government and other policymakers have enacted laws to control tobacco use for hundreds of years. The Russian church forbade tobacco use as an “abomination.”. (shrink)

The logic of the commons is applied to the U.S. labor pool. lt is argued that the labor pool is an “active” commons, a commons in whichthe resource as weil as the users of the resource can change voluntarily. For this commons to be tended properly, technical solutions are ineffective and inappropriate; both employer and employee must have trust in the mechanisms that tie them together. Collaborative control is given as a possible framework for making the morality (...) shift necessary to avoid ultimate tragedy. (shrink)

Affective dynamics are discussed from the perspective of a view of origin and functions of affective valence based in control processes. This view posits that affect reflects the error signal of a feedback loop managing rate of progress at goal attainment or threat avoidance. Negative feelings signal doing poorly, demanding more effort. Positive feelings signal doing better than necessary, allowing coasting, which yields goal attainment without unnecessary resource expenditure. Given multiple simultaneous goals, these functions assist in moment-to-moment priority (...) management, facilitating attainment of all. (shrink)

We present a distributed control modeling approach for an automated manufacturing system based on the dynamics of one-dimensional cellular automata. This is inspired by the fact that both cellular automata and manufacturing systems are discrete dynamical systems where local interactions given among their elements can lead to complex dynamics, despite the simple rules governing such interactions. The cellular automaton model developed in this study focuses on two states of the resources of a manufacturing system, namely, busy or idle. However, (...) the interaction among the resources such as whether they are shared at different stages of the manufacturing process determines the global dynamics of the system. A procedure is shown to obtain the local evolution rule of the automaton based on the relationships among the resources and the material flow through the manufacturing process. The resulting distributed control of the manufacturing system appears to be heterarchical, and the evolution of the cellular automaton exhibits a Class II behavior for some given disordered initial conditions. (shrink)

This paper brings together the discussions on international resource trade and immigration. Following Wenar’s analysis of the resource curse, the aim is to challenge the conventional view on immigration that asserts the right of states to have discretionary control over these policies. The paper shows that more liberal immigration is required as an additional remedial policy to persons harmed in unjust trade. The right to self-determination and territorial rights, which are used as the basis for the exclusion (...) of immigrants, are in the context of this analysis constrained by both attentiveness to harm and the charge of inconsistency. Both rights, which are protected domestically, are violated by the unjust ‘might makes right’ trade rule in the international context, causing harm to people in resource exporting countries. This inconsistency presents a challenge to the moral plausibility of the conventional view in the context of the resource trade. (shrink)