Key beliefs influencing young drivers’ engagement with social interactive technology on their smartphones: A qualitative study

Objective: The main aim of this study was to identify young drivers’ underlying beliefs (i.e., behavioral, normative, and control) regarding initiating, monitoring/reading, and responding to social interactive technology (i.e., functions on a Smartphone that allow the user to communicate with other people).

Method: This qualitative study was a beliefs elicitation study in accordance with the theory of planned behavior and sought to elicit young drivers’ behavioral (i.e., advantages, disadvantages), normative (i.e., who approves, who disapproves), and control beliefs (i.e., barriers, facilitators) that underpin social interactive technology use while driving. Young drivers (N = 26) aged 17 to 25 years took part in an interview or focus group discussion.

Results: Though differences emerged between the 3 behaviors of initiating, monitoring/reading, and responding for each of the behavioral, normative, and control belief categories, the strongest distinction was within the behavioral beliefs category (e.g., communicating with the person that they were on the way to meet was an advantage of initiating; being able to determine whether to respond was an advantage of monitoring/reading; and communicating with important people was an advantage of responding). Normative beliefs were similar for initiating and responding behaviors (e.g., friends and peers more likely to approve than other groups) and differences emerged for monitoring/reading (e.g., parents were more likely to approve of this behavior than initiating and responding). For control beliefs, there were differences between the beliefs regarding facilitators of these behaviors (e.g., familiar roads and conditions facilitated initiating; having audible notifications of an incoming communication facilitated monitoring/reading; and receiving a communication of immediate importance facilitated responding); however, the control beliefs that presented barriers were consistent across the 3 behaviors (e.g., difficult traffic/road conditions).

Conclusion: The current study provides an important addition to the extant literature and supports emerging research that suggests that initiating, monitoring/reading, and responding may indeed be distinct behaviors with different underlying motivations.     

基于熵权灰靶生态系统服务价值模型的土地利用规划环境影响评价——以晋城市为例

生态系统服务功能价值法是土地利用规划环境影响评价中应用较为广泛的方法之一,然而其存在不同研究区域之间可比性较弱的问题,为增强可比性,本次研究引入灰靶理论及熵权理论,构建了熵权灰靶生态系统服务价值模型,并将其应用于山西省晋城市之中.结果表明,在规划目标年,晋城市下辖各区县中,城区、高平市、阳城县、泽州县、陵川县及沁水县的靶心度分别为0.3354、0.3913、0.4962、0.5020、0.5521及1.0000,进而基于上述结果,对晋城市下辖各区县提出了差异化的土地利用意见建议.本次研究成果从理论研究与实际工作方面都对晋城市及其它地区土地利用规划环境影响评价提供了一定的参考.     

关于饮用水水源保护在广西环境保护“十三五”规划中的战略思考

在对广西当前环境形势以及"十二五"时期饮用水水源地保护问题识别的基础上,结合广西全面建设小康环境新要求,提出了"十三五"饮用水水源保护规划体系以及规划目标的设想,并从保护红线、面源治理、点源治理、环境监测、信息公开5个方面给出了基本的策略建议,可为制定广西"十三五"环境保护规划目标和重点任务提供参考。     

基于博弈论的环保数据质量影响因素分析研究

污染源产排污数据是一切环保工作的基础,确保真实可信具有十分重要的意义.为此,分析了影响污染源产排污数据质量的主要因素:受经济利益驱动的自身因素;受政绩利益驱动的管理因素和受地方保护驱动的政府因素等.在新环保法未得到充分贯彻,排污单位、环保主管部门和地方政府三者违法成本均低于守法成本的条件下,以博奕论为分析工具讨论了三种影响因素产生负面作用的必然性,并根据分析结果针对性地提出了提高数据质量的应对策略.     

Open workshops as sites of innovative socio-economic practices: approaching urban post-growth by assemblage theory

ABSTRACT

Current debates on knowledge-based and creative locational development have come to deal with small urban places of novelty that formerly remained unnoticed. A plethora of new forms of producing and working recently emerged in unplanned and uncoordinated ways, bearing odd names such as FabLabs, Open Worklabs, RealLabs, Open Design Cities, Techshops, Repair Cafés, and more (Smith, A., M. Fressoli, D. Abrol, E. Arond, and A. Ely. 2017. Grassroots Innovation Movements. London: Routledge). Political initiatives have been taken by surprise; at the same time, standard epistemic tools of the social sciences and economics have been rendered unfit. More concise analytical reconstructions are needed to adequately capture the variety and complexity of these “labs”, their heterogeneous causation, their contingent proceedings, their surplus of latency, their peculiar power relations and their local embeddings. Urban social contexts have a strong triggering function as they help to re-configure older, and create new, combinations of heterogeneous social and economic agency. Meanwhile strong elements of grassroots innovation (Smith et al. 2017) have informed the formation of various models of alternative work and production. Taking the phenotype of open workshops as a revealing example, we take assemblage theory to describe the constitutive features of these new types of self-organised work, and the associated places of innovation. A fresh gaze on the complexity and open-endedness of socio-material formations may help to better understand the nature of emerging post-growth economies.     

Ecological scenario planning and the question of the best regime in the political theory of Hans Jonas

In The Imperative of Responsibility, Hans Jonas elevates the practice of ecological scenario planning in political analysis. Not only does he provide an ethical justification for ecological scenario planning, but he also uses it as a means to discern an ethical imperative for the technological age. Jonas engages in regime analysis while keeping before him a vision of the worst-case ecological scenario, a combination that is morally and politically necessary due to the colossal consequences of cumulative human actions. Jonas’s work thus provides a good, even necessary, starting point for examining the relevance of scenario planning for environmental political theory.     

Disasters and ‘conditions of possibility’: rethinking causation through an analysis of earthquakes in Nepal

What causes a disaster's aftermath? Scholars have increasingly turned to historical approaches that link outcomes to pre-disaster sociopolitical dynamics. Disasters lead to ‘critical junctures’ that ‘trigger’ events that unfold in the wake of the initial phenomenon. This paper argues that the ‘critical junctures’ paradigm shares limitations with ‘path dependency’ theory from which it is derived, namely a tendency towards historicism—a functionalist teleology better able to explain continuity than change. As an alternative, this analysis draws on Michel Foucault's understanding of ‘conditions of possibility’ as a way of rethinking agency/causation, moving away from individual subjects, events, or even historical conditions towards, instead, the new, radically destabilised ‘epistemological field’ emerging in the disaster's aftermath. This paper examines a series of devastating earthquakes in Nepal to consider how post-disaster ‘epistemological fields’ present new ‘conditions of possibility’ within which new ideas, actions, and outcomes become thinkable and possible in ways that pre-disaster historical conditions could not have predicted.     

Consequences of ignoring dispersal variation in network models for landscape connectivity

Habitat loss and fragmentation can negatively influence population persistence and biodiversity, but the effects can be mitigated if species successfully disperse between isolated habitat patches. Network models are the primary tool for quantifying landscape connectivity, yet in practice, an overly simplistic view of species dispersal is applied. These models often ignore individual variation in dispersal ability under the assumption that all individuals move the same fixed distance with equal probability. We developed a modeling approach to address this problem. We incorporated dispersal kernels into network models to determine how individual variation in dispersal alters understanding of landscape-level connectivity and implemented our approach on a fragmented grassland landscape in Minnesota. Ignoring dispersal variation consistently overestimated a population's robustness to local extinctions and underestimated its robustness to local habitat loss. Furthermore, a simplified view of dispersal underestimated the amount of habitat substructure for small populations but overestimated habitat substructure for large populations. Our results demonstrate that considering biologically realistic dispersal alters understanding of landscape connectivity in ecological theory and conservation practice.