Search Results (9)

Drawing a parallel between the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, the article explores what can be learned from these crises using two axes of analysis. First, such events show some noteworthy structural analogies, being both typified by nonlinear dynamics. They exhibit latency periods and tipping points: at the beginning, things go slowly, but once a critical threshold is exceeded, suddenly escalate quickly; as a result, when we respond to them will make the difference. Second, it is crucial how complex crises are framed. It would be deceptive to concentrate only on their contingent aspects. Both cases should instead be seen as the symptom of a broader imbalance, i.e., a ‘crisis of modernity’. Consequently, the article investigates their possible common roots: not only their socioeconomic determinants, but also worldview assumptions, particularly a long-lasting dualism that contributed to generate an overall sense of separateness. It argues that this situation cannot be addressed through some superficial changes. Rather, it urges us to move toward some deeper shifts, regarding both our way of thinking and behaving. Full article

Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have continued to grow persistently since 1750. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) entered into force in 1994 to stabilize GHG emissions. Since then, the increasingly harmful impacts of global climate change and repeated scientific warnings about future risks have not been enough to change the emissions trend and enforce policy actions. This paper synthesizes the climate change challenges and the insofar insufficient mitigation responses via an integrated literature review. The fossil industry, mainstream economic thinking, national rather than international interests, and political strive for short-term interests present key barriers to climate mitigation. A continuation of such trends is reflected in the Dice model, leading to a 3.5 °C temperature increase by 2100. Despite receiving the Nobel Prize for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis via the Dice model, increases in global mean temperatures overshooting the 1.5 °C to 2 °C Paris targets imply an intensified disruption in the human–climate system. Past and present policy delays and climate disruption pave the way for solar radiation management (SRM) geoengineering solutions with largely unknown and potentially dangerous side effects. This paper argues against SRM geoengineering and evaluates critical mitigation solutions leading to a decrease in global temperatures without overshooting the Paris targets. The essential drivers and barriers are discussed through a unified approach to tipping points in the human–climate system. The scientific literature presents many economically and technologically viable solutions and the policy and measures required to implement them. The present paper identifies the main barriers to integrating them in a globally cooperative way, presenting an efficient, long-term, and ethical policy approach to climate change. Full article

Manipulation is an important technique of Chinese martial arts, and it is the primary content of martial arts in people’s talking about boxing techniques. In Chinese martial arts, the main martial arts methods like “ hit, throw, take, stab” , except for “kick”, require corresponding manipulation to achieve. Tips to learn the secrets of the practical manipulation application from “the Twenty Tactic Songs” in the book Preparation for Martial Arts Methods are up to ten types. As a concept, manipulation has a very rich and complicated information thinking way in literature, painting, dance, the military, and other fields, which opens a broad space for the theoretical study of manipulation. The research takes manipulation in Chinese martial arts as the breakthrough point and its information thinking as the main research object, and interprets the information thinking of manipulation in martial arts theoretically through the methods of literature materials, expert interviews, information philosophy theory, and logical analysis, etc. Full article

Systems thinking is a mechanism to robustly consider the interconnected world we live in and move away from a ‘siloed’ approach to policy. Similarly, the SDG goals and targets contained in the UN 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development require an integrated approach to diverse human and planetary health challenges. This paper contemplates these efforts and then looks to one of the SDGs considered the least interconnected in SDG analyses: that of ‘life below water’. It examines the Oceans Goal as part of the SDGs and considers in more detail the process of nexus thinking, in particular as it relates to the ocean-climate nexus. This highlights that there are risks in relying on SDG interaction analysis due to skewed results or a failure to accommodate rapid transformation or knowledge gain in certain fields. We suggest that greater recognition of planetary boundary tipping points will enhance the inclusion of oceans in climate considerations, and improve the likelihood of achieving both SDGs 13 and 14. Full article

A rationale for an individuals-oriented landscape approach to sustainable land-use planning based on an analysis of bio-geo-physical components as well as the human components of the landscape is presented. A toolbox for analysing individuals’ decision-making and valuations in the landscape is described. The toolbox can provide evidence on the drivers of individuals’ decision-making in the landscape and the decision strategies they apply. This evidence can be used to identify communication needs and to design guidelines for effective communication. The tool for value elicitation separates the instrumental values (means) and end values (goals) of individuals with respect to locations in the landscape. This distinction, and knowledge of the end values in the landscape, are critical for the achievement of policy goals and for spatial planning from a democratic point of view. The individuals-oriented landscape approach has roots in geography and draws on behavioural decision research together with a model for integrating “science and proven experience” that is widely used in public decision-making in the Nordic countries. The approach differs from other scholarly disciplines addressing sustainable land-use planning. It is suitable for application on decision-making problems that include trade-offs between values. An overview of empirical studies is provided in which the individuals-oriented landscape rationale is applied to climate change. Full article

This article approaches cringe comedy through the lens of its affectivity, of the somatic experiences through which it puts its audiences’ bodies, and it uses this as a point of departure to think about the genre’s cultural work. Based on the observation that no cringe comedy makes its viewers cringe for the whole duration of its storytelling, the article suggests that cringe comedies thrive on destabilizing and ambiguating the affective valence of their performances of embarrassment, constantly recalibrating or muddying the distance between viewer and characters. They are marked by tipping points at which schadenfreude and other types of humor tip into cringe, and reversely, at which cringe tips into something else. The article focuses on one of these other affective responses, which it proposes to describe as the sneer. It uses the HBO-series Veep as a case study to explore how cringe and sneer aesthetics are interlaced in an exemplary comedy, and how they fuel this particular comedy’s satiric work. Full article

2020 will go down in history as a tipping point when societies reassessed the fundamental objectives and principles that they had seen their communities develop. As a basis for investigating a broad sense of LifeStyle _by Design, some 20 potentially rich narratives are used as the basis for these empirical analyses. They are our Virtual Living Lab at a time of unparalleled attitudinal and behavioural change and uncertainty. Social sharing is more authentic and trustworthy than traditional forms of mass communications. We explore our narratives in the UK and Japan and draw novel yet consistent, scalable implications for policy makers and public and private institutions alike. We track what people think is important to them and thus lay a foundation for engagement, in contrast to the traditional advertising communications approach of intrusion. Some of the new behaviours may become permanent, but there is a general need to streamline and simplify. People are against the complex, not because they want a simple life but because they want more time to enjoy enriched life experiences. At times of change, especially when uncertainty can bring negative outcomes, it is critical to be able to know what to say and how to say it so that leaders can establish trust and the right tone for the moment. Full article

As the rate of affiliation to Christian identity continues to decline in Aotearoa New Zealand (only 49 percent of the population said they were Christian in the last census), public space has become more receptive to other forms of religiosity. In particular, community rituals around the winter movements of the Matariki (Pleiades) constellation have gained support since the year 2000. For instance, the capital city, Wellington, has replaced a centuries’ old British fireworks festival, Guy Fawkes, with an enlarged version of its Matariki celebrations: an action seen as a tipping point in the incorporation of Māori spiritual values into public life. Interactions between European colonisers and Māori have been characterised for more than 250 years by tensions between the relational thinking of Māori who see human beings as both participating in and constrained by an environment resonant with divine energies, and the quantitative, hierarchical, ‘Great Chain of Being’ model that had long been dominant among Europeans. Now, when the natural environment worldwide is under strain from population and economic pressures, it seems to some both appropriate and vital to look to epistemological and spiritual models that are intimately responsive to the specificities of location. Full article

A highly sensitive fibre bundle-based reflective optical sensor has been designed and fabricated for Tip Clearance measurements in a turbine rig. The sensor offers high spatial and temporal resolution. The sensor probe consists of a single-mode transmitting fibre and two concentric rings of receiving multimode fibres that collect reflected light in a differential detection gain configuration, yielding a highly linear calibration curve for distance measurements. The clearance measurement range is approximately 2 mm around the central point fixed at 3.2 mm from the probe tip, and the sensitivity of the probe is 61.73 mm⁻¹. The fibre bundle has been designed to ensure that the distance security specifications required for the experimental program of the turbine are met. The optical sensor has operated under demanding conditions set by the blade and casing design. The experimental results obtained so far are promising and lead us to think that the optical sensor has great potential for online clearance measurements with high precision. Full article