Addressing Scottish rural fuel poverty through a regional industrial symbiosis strategy for the Scottish forest industries sector

Tackling fuel poverty is central to the delivery of the Scottish Executive’s commitment to social justice. Many Scottish rural households are not linked into the mains gas network and rely on expensive alternatives, despite being surrounded by plentiful supplies of low-cost renewable wood biomass. A regional study was undertaken to establish the potential market for pelletised wood fuel, available as a low-value by-product from the rapidly expanding Scottish forest industry sector. The wider implications of the research findings are analysed by extending the principles of industrial symbiosis from a site-specific to a regional scale. Promoting an indigenous pellet-based wood fuel market for rural Scotland would fulfil important Scottish Executive economic, social and environmental sustainability objectives. Adding off-site social symbiotic elements increases the potential for on-site technical symbiosis in nascent Scottish forest industry clusters. At present, market failure is preventing the realisation of these benefits, and the paper concludes by identifying ways in which market intermediation, through wood fuel energy service companies, might overcome the current barriers to exploiting such symbiosis.     

Knowing wildfire risk: Scientific interactions with risk mitigation policy and practice in Victoria,Australia

Over the past decade, major landscape wildfires (or ‘bushfires’ in Australia) in fire-prone countries have illustrated the seriousness of this global environmental problem. This natural hazard presents a complex mesh of dynamic factors for those seeking to reduce or manage its costs, as ignitions, hazard behaviour, and the reactions of different human and ecological communities during and after hazard events are all extremely uncertain. But while those at risk of wildfire have been subject to significant research, the social dimensions of its management, including the role of science, have received little attention. This paper reports on a case study of the Barwon-Otway area of Victoria in Australia, a high wildfire risk area that has recently been a pilot site for a new risk mitigation strategy utilising the wildfire simulation model PHOENIX RapidFire. Against simple equations between ‘more science’ and ‘less uncertainty,’ this paper presents results from interviews and a workshop with practitioners to investigate how scientific research interacts with and informs both wildfire policy and practice. We suggest that attending to cultural and social specificities of the application of any technical innovation—such as next generation modelling—raises questions for future research about the roles of narrative, performance, and other knowledges in the sedimentation of science.     

我国城市规划中的公众参与研究

公众参与是随着政治文明和法制建设不断成熟、发展而产生的一种民主理念,已经成为城市规划工作中一项必不可少的内容。文章就我国城市规划中公众参与的现状提出我国城市规划过程中公众参与的必要性和紧迫性,总结出我国现阶段公众参与的现状与问题,并提出对策和合理化建议,从而把公众参与真正落实到我国的城市规划过程当中。     

面向地理信息服务链的工作流技术应用研究

通过分析借鉴当今服务链技术与工作流技术研究成果,充分考虑地理信息数据量大、数据源异构性的特点,对适于地理信息服务链的过程建模方法、过程定义语言、建模工具以及工作流引擎的体系结构、调度算法、应用框架进行重新设计,实现了地理信息服务的可视化组合建模和服务链的自动执行。     

Historical space as narrative medium: on the configuration of spatial narratives of time at historical sites

This paper examines how narratives of history are organized spatially at historical sites and memorial spaces, especially in urban settings and in places invested with a sense of collective memory. Much recent research has focused on landscape, memory, and place and how relationships of political and social power influence the representation of historical events in public spaces. Although the meaning of such sites may be hotly contested for long periods of time, we focus here on narrative theory and the related, but unexplored, issue of how such historical stories are configured on the ground at actual historical sites. We identify a number of narrative strategies which are frequently used to configure historical stories in space. Declamatory strategies using markers presenting a snapshot of an event are common, but sequential and non-sequential linear strategies are also used, as are thematic strategies that cross-cut space and time to present complex historical stories at various spatial scales. Examples are drawn from a range of historical sites in North America, Europe and Israel.     

浅议建筑边坡工程技术规范中的若干规定

现行《建筑边坡工程技术规范》存在着一些争议。规范中规定适用范围可为岩石基坑,但很多条款是针对边坡工程的,对基坑工程不适用,建议适用范围不要扩大到基坑;规定临时性边坡使用年限为2年,已不满足工程建设要求,建议提高为5年;几个术语定义不准确,宜重新定义;适用边坡高度及边坡安全等级已不满足工程建设要求,建议适当调整;滑塌区范围估算公式意义不大且有缺陷,建议取消;对坡率法适用范围限制过于严格,建议放宽;查坡率表设计法已过时,建议取消;规定锚杆基本试验时可将锚固段长度减短,但这样得到的极限粘结强度值偏高,将导致工程设计不安全,不能减短;锚杆验收试验标准不明确且应用困难,建议按相关原则重新编写等等。这些意见供规范修编时参考。     

大数据在地质资料管理与服务中“落地”问题分析

大数据已成为继云计算、物联网之后新的IT热词。大数据与每个人的生活息息相关。地质资料数据包括了基础地质、矿产、地球物理、地球化学等丰富的信息,对国家、社会具有巨大的潜在应用价值和保存价值。地质资料管理与服务如何与大数据技术更好地结合,产生更大的价值,值得研究。以基层地质资料馆为例,分析地质资料管理与服务的现状及需求,探索如何借鉴大数据思维,改进地质资料管理与服务工作,实现地质数据高效管理,有效地挖掘,使宝贵的地质资料数据发挥出更大的社会使用价值。     

酒店气象专用电视频道技术方案

阐述了酒店气象专用电视频道的工作原理,同时还推荐了本系统软硬件具体的配置,最后对专用系统软件的工作流程及其使用方法进行了详细的说明。     

公众天气预报传播过程的数学模型

仿照流行病传播模型的思路,给出了公众天气预报传播过程最简单的数学模型     

Measuring,mapping and quantifying the effects of trust and informal communication on transboundary collaboration in the Great Lakes fisheries policy network

Ecosystem-based management of fisheries and other transboundary natural resources require a number of organizations across jurisdictions to exchange knowledge, coordinate policy goals and engage in collaborative activities. Trust, as part of social capital, is considered a key mechanism facilitating the coordination of such inter-organizational policy networks. However, our understanding of multi-dimensional trust as a theoretical construct and an operational variable in environmental and natural resource management has remained largely untested. This paper presents an empirical assessment of trust and communication measures applied to the North American Great Lakes fisheries policy network. Using a scale-based method developed for this purpose, we quantify the prevalence of different dimensions of trust and in/formal communication in the network and their differentiated impacts on decision-making and goal consensus. Our analysis reveals that calculation-based ‘rational trust’ is important for aligning mutual goals, but relationship-based ‘affinitive trust’ is most significant for influencing decision-making. Informal communication was also found to be a strong predictor of how effectively formal communication will influence decision-making, confirming the “priming” role of informal interactions in formal inter-agency dealings. The results also show the buffering and interactive functions of these components in strengthening institutional resilience, with procedural trust undergirding the system to compensate for a lack of well-developed relationships. Overall, this study provides evidence to suggest that informal communication and multi-dimensional trust constitute a crucial element for improving collaboration and reducing conflict in the networked governance of transboundary natural resource systems.