scholarly journals Evaporated Responsibility: The Collapse of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne on 15 October 1970

Author(s):  
Wolfgang Seibel

AbstractOn 15 October 1970, at 11:50AM, part of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne, span 10-11 of 367 feet length, disintegrated and triggered the collapse of the bridge. Thirty-five men were killed in the disaster. The bridge was still under construction, all those killed were workers or engineers employed on the construction site. The investigation of a Royal Commission revealed a mismatch between an ambitious structural design of the bridge plus an unconventional method of erection and a fragmented, conflict-ridden construction management whose detrimental effects remained unchecked by public authorities. Regulatory powers and enforcement competence had been delegated to a QUANGO—a quasi-non-governmental organization—which diluted responsibility structures and decisively weakened the coordination and control capacity of the agency.

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-57
Author(s):  
Eyal Ben-Ari ◽  
Uzi Ben-Shalom

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) routinely rotate ground forces in and out of the Occupied Territories in the West Bank. While these troops are trained for soldiering in high-intensity wars, in the Territories they have long had to carry out a variety of policing activities. These activities often exist in tension with their soldierly training and ethos, both of which center on violent encounters. IDF ground forces have adapted to this situation by maintaining a hierarchy of ‘logics of action’, in which handling potentially hostile encounters takes precedence over other forms of policing. Over time, this hierarchy has been adapted to the changed nature of contemporary conflict, in which soldiering is increasingly exposed to multiple forms of media, monitoring, and juridification. To maintain its public legitimacy and institutional autonomy, the IDF has had to adapt to the changes imposed on it by creating multiple mechanisms of force generation and control of soldierly action.


Author(s):  
Drew Leder

This chapter undertakes a phenomenology of inner-body experience, starting with a focus on visceral interoception. While highly personal, such experience also reveals a level of the lived body that is pre-personal, beyond our understanding and control. In contrast to exteroception, elements of the visceral field can be inaccessible, or surface only indistinctly and intermittently to conscious awareness. Nonetheless, interoception is more than just a series of such sensations. This chapter argues for the “exterior interior”—that is, we interpret inner body experiences through models drawn from the outer world, and interoception itself is bound up with emotion, purpose, and projects. In the West, we tend to valorize the interiority of rational thought; by contrast, experience of the inner body is a kind of “inferior interior,” often overlooked or overridden, yet inside insights—gained from attending to messages from the inner body—may preserve our health and wellbeing.


Author(s):  
Morten Egeberg ◽  
Jarle Trondal

This chapter discusses governance dilemmas that are often overlooked in studies that do not encompass the ecology of organization in public governance. The chapter discusses how coordination structures may counteract each other in multilevel systems of government. The ambition of the chapter is twofold: Firstly, a coordination dilemma is theoretically and empirically illustrated by the seeming incompatibility between a more direct (interconnected) and sectorally specialized implementation structure in the multilevel EU administrative system and trends towards strengthening coordination and control within nation states. Secondly, the chapter discusses organizational arrangements that may enable governance systems to live with the coordination dilemma in practice. This coordination dilemma seems to have been largely ignored in the literature on EU network governance and national ‘joined-up government’ respectively.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 10861-10866
Author(s):  
Constantin F. Caruntu ◽  
Carlos M. Pascal ◽  
Anca Maxim ◽  
Ovidiu Pauca

Author(s):  
Rocco De Nicola ◽  
Michele Loreti

A new area of research, known as Global Computing, is by now well established. It aims at defining new models of computation based on code and data mobility over wide-area networks with highly dynamic topologies, and at providing infrastructures to support coordination and control of components originating from different, possibly untrusted, fault-prone, malicious or selfish sources. In this paper, we present our contribution to the field of Global Computing that is centred on Kernel Language for Agents Interaction and Mobility ( Klaim ). Klaim is an experimental language specifically designed to programme distributed systems consisting of several mobile components that interact through multiple distributed tuple spaces. We present some of the key notions of the language and discuss how its formal semantics can be exploited to reason about qualitative and quantitative aspects of the specified systems.


1995 ◽  
Vol 117 (B) ◽  
pp. 107-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. J. Waldron

Research on walking vehicles and variable configuration wheeled vehicles is reviewed. The central feature of the vehicles discussed is terrain adaptive capability. The principal elements of the technical problems of coordination and control are discussed for each vehicle type. Examples of each vehicle type are discussed and an extensive reference list is provided. Although the article is primarily a review article, it contains a new discussion of the coordination problem of robotic mechanisms.


2011 ◽  
Vol 368-373 ◽  
pp. 3069-3073
Author(s):  
Sheng Hui Chen ◽  
Hui Min Li ◽  
Xin Ma

In order to improve construction site management, we make the architect’ position as the starting point for our research ,analyze the similarities and differences between the project manager and the architect and transform the traditional building construction management system from centralized system into flat -like system. Furthermore, we propose that the implementation of the system must be assisted with the construction of credit system and the establishment and implementation of personal practice insurance system.


2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Urry

Energy forms and their extensive scale are remarkably significant for the ways that societies are organized. This article shows the importance of how societies are ‘energized’ and especially the global growth of ‘fossil fuel societies’. Much social thought remains oblivious to the energy revolution realized over the past two to three centuries which set the ‘West’ onto a distinct trajectory. Energy is troubling for social thought because different energy systems with their ‘lock-ins’ are not subject to simple human intervention and control. Analyses are provided here of different fossil fuel societies, of coal and oil, with the latter enabling the liquid, mobilized 20th century. Consideration is paid to the possibilities of reducing fossil fuel dependence but it is shown how unlikely such a ‘powering down’ will be. The author demonstrates how energy is a massive problem for social theory and for 21st-century societies. Developing post-carbon theory and especially practice is far away but is especially urgent.


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