From Cowboys to Diplomats: Challenges for Social Entrepreneurship in The Netherlands

Social entrepreneurship—a new business model that combines a social goal with a business mentality—is in a transitional phase, from a rough cowboy market to a more established market niche. This process results in two interconnected dilemmas for the social entrepreneur. First, how it can capture market share despite its role as an antagonist to current market values. Second, how it can prevent the loss of its own core values in the course of greater interaction with the incumbent regimes. Using a tool known from innovation sciences to analyse radical innovations, namely strategic niche management, and both survey data and interviews from actors in the Netherlands, this article shows that social entrepreneurs have an attitude that is still more in line with the cowboy market than with the new diplomatic role they are expected to take on. Subsequently, it provides recommendations on how to achieve this new attitude.     

Imagined communities, contested watersheds: Challenges to integrated water resources management in agricultural areas

Integrated water resources management is one of the major bottom-up alternatives that emerged during the 1980s in North America as part of the trend towards more holistic and participatory styles of environmental governance. It aims to protect surface and groundwater resources by focusing on the integrated and collaborative management of land and water resources and interests on a watershed basis. In this paper, we draw on the policy network perspective on governance to shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of watershed-based processes of collaboration and integration for water quality protection in agricultural areas. The policy network perspective focuses on the interaction of actors, institutions and ideas within and among policy sectors to capture the intricacies of the policy process in increasingly complex and fragmented societies. Empirically, this study is based on the analysis of agro-environmental strategies for water quality protection in the Province of Ontario over the last 15 years. The contamination of a rural municipal well in Ontario in 2000, with its tragic consequences, translated into an ongoing pluralistic debate and strong attempts to fundamentally change the provincial policy style for addressing drinking water threats, especially agricultural pollution. Based on our analysis, we suggest that meaningful scales for collaboration and integration of land and water resources and interests at the local level, from the point of view of Ontario's agricultural policy network, do not currently include the watershed. We conclude that, instead of forcing watershed-based governance structures, the exploration and examination of more creative and flexible ways of linking watershed imperatives to existing socially and politically meaningful scales in agricultural areas of Ontario and elsewhere is warranted.     

The Forgotten (Practical) Side of School Safety: What Do Clery Reports Say about CPTED and Crime on College Campuses?

ABSTRACT

Following incidents of school violence, common discourse often neglects the role of practical approaches, such as CPTED, to safeguard campuses. This study utilized a content analysis of U.S. Clery Act Safety Reports from a national, randomly drawn stratified sample of n=100 American universities to determine the extent CPTED techniques were implemented. Findings suggested that 1) CPTED use is limited; 2) two CPTED techniques, access control and activity support, were most common; 3) institutions with higher crime rates tended to have implemented more CPTED measures; and 4) CPTED use appears to be related to less severe campus crimes. Implications are discussed.     

A two-phase algorithm for bin stretching with stretching factor 1.5

Online Bin Stretching is a semi-online variant of bin packing in which the algorithm has to use the same number of bins as an optimal packing, but is allowed to slightly overpack the bins. The goal is to minimize the amount of overpacking, i.e., the maximum size packed into any bin.We give an algorithm for Online Bin Stretching with a stretching factor of 1.5 for any number of bins. We build on previous algorithms and use a two-phase approach. However, our analysis is technically more complicated and uses amortization over the bins with the help of two weight functions.     

找到自己的“最适客户”

每个营销者都梦想发现未经染指或需求未得到充分满足的大规模客户群体,并为其开发正中下怀的产品何乐而不为呢?该公司(姑且称之为“普罗公司”)拥有世界一流的市场研究人员,能够熟练使用人群统计、心理测验和统计分析方面的最新工具。每过两三年,他们就会搬出一项雄心勃勃的调查计划,用来确定具有吸引力的大型客户群体以及大量诱人的“市场空白点”,以便     

The cost of selfishness for maximizing the minimum load on uniformly related machines

Consider the following scheduling game. A set of jobs, each controlled by a selfish agent, are to be assigned to m uniformly related machines. The cost of a job is defined as the total load of the machine that its job is assigned to. A job is interested in minimizing its cost, while the social objective is maximizing the minimum load (the value of the cover) over the machines. This goal is different from the regular makespan minimization goal, which was extensively studied in a game theoretic context. We study the price of anarchy (poa) and the price of stability (pos) for uniformly related machines. The results are expressed in terms of s, which is the maximum speed ratio between any two machines. For uniformly related machines, we prove that the pos is unbounded for s>2, and the poa is unbounded for s≥2. For the remaining cases we show that while the poa grows to infinity as s tends to 2, the pos is at most 2 for any s≤2.     

Education and affinity? pedagogies of sexual citizenship in LGBTIQ youth support videos

ABSTRACT

This article provides an analysis of some of the ways in which educational resources for youth frame identity, sexuality and normativity within broader contexts of support and sexual citizenship. It focuses on online video resources for young people produced in Australia by the LGBTIQ support and curriculum advocacy organisation Safe Schools Coalition Australia and by the Minus18 Foundation. Developed as part of the larger All of Us educational package, these videos are explicitly pedagogical, presenting the viewer with ‘real life’ experiences from a range of young Australians. We consider the work the All of Us videos do in engaging with concepts of sexual citizenship, particularly as they seek to help young people navigate multiple forms of belonging and support. Of special interest is a series of tensions between normalising tendencies and the complexification of identities, communities, intimacies and belongings. While the videos may be perceived to operate within largely normative conceptualisations of sexuality, they explore ways of building affinity, peer support, and alternative ways of being that extend well beyond the logics usually offered by these frameworks.     

Things are not what they seem: Modisane’s recently discovered short story

The unusual form and style of Modisane’s hitherto unpublished short story ‘All Sons of Gaika’ presents the reader with various challenges. It differs in tone and style from his previously published work, and its rather contrived dialogue and somewhat obscure plot are puzzling. Is this some kind of satire, and, if so, what is the target? Thematically, the story seems (at face value) to be another examination of the tensions between tradtion and modernity, and focuses in particular on the issue of lobola (‘bride‐price’). The young couple at the centre of the story are at pains to distance themselves from traditional pieties. To complicate matters, a secret resistance movement is seeking recruits in the area, and our protagonist, Jason, is somehow implicated. Two security policemen are the pantomime villains of the piece, as they seek to either coopt or frame Jason. The hybrid figure of a diviner conducts a cleansing ceremony, and this is the occasion for an excursion into postcolonial metacommentary, drawing on the Prospero‐Caliban topos. The story concludes with a wedding, and comes to an enigmatic conclusion. Is this is a sustained exercise in irony or mockery? How much (or how little) does it revel of the author, writing from exile in London?