The Public Inquiry of the UK on Large scale loss of life and Public Concerns and Its Implications

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Young-shin OH ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr.Agnes Ogada

Purpose: The objective of the study was to investigate the duplicity in regulation and its effect on performance of the financial sector in Kenya. The specific objectives were; to review and identify regulation duplication/competition in existing regulatory framework for the financial sector in Kenya; to describe how regulatory effectiveness has been measured in empirical literature; to assess whether the current regulatory structure has affected the performance of the financial sector in Kenya and lastly to suggest potential ways of enhancing regulatory effectiveness in Kenya. Methodology: The paper used a desk study review methodology where relevant empirical literature was reviewed to identify main themes and to extract knowledge gaps. Findings: The study found out that financial sector in Kenya and other developing economies have reported losses on a large scale due to under regulation and regulator duplicity. Some of these have become insolvent, or have had to be taken over or rescued by their governments. A single market regulator clearly has its own advantages over multiple regulators. But it is more suitable for well-developed and mature markets which are smaller in size, like the UK. The study also found out that Kenya’s economy and political arena are not mature enough to handle a single financial market regulator. In this light it can be asserted that even mature economies such as the United States still have multiple regulators. Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: Adherence to principles of open government, including transparency and participation in the regulatory process to ensure that regulation serves the public interest and is informed by the legitimate needs of those interested in and affected by regulation. Governments should ensure that regulations are comprehensible and clear and that parties can easily understand their rights and obligations. Organizations should create personalized technology systems that create a demand adaptation of ICT at every level of the organizational operations


Author(s):  
Marco Bastos ◽  
Dan Mercea

In this article, we review our study of 13 493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted during the UK European Union membership referendum debate and disappeared from the platform after the ballot. We discuss the methodological challenges and lessons learned from a study that emerged in a period of increasing weaponization of social media and mounting concerns about information warfare. We address the challenges and shortcomings involved in bot detection, the extent to which disinformation campaigns on social media are effective, valid metrics for user exposure, activation and engagement in the context of disinformation campaigns, unsupervised and supervised posting protocols, along with infrastructure and ethical issues associated with social sciences research based on large-scale social media data. We argue for improving researchers' access to data associated with contentious issues and suggest that social media platforms should offer public application programming interfaces to allow researchers access to content generated on their networks. We conclude with reflections on the relevance of this research agenda to public policy. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations'.


Subject Privatisation moves. Significance The UK Labour Party reaffirmed its objective of renationalising several privatised utilities and taking over projects funded by public-private partnerships at its September 24-27 annual party conference. The plan to shift back to public ownership has proved contentious with business as indicative of hostility to the private sector but popular with the public which associates privatisation with higher prices and poorer service quality. Impacts Renationalisation would be likely to use up much of a future Labour government’s political capital. The political cost would be regarded by Labour’s current leadership and its supporters as a price worth paying to honour a defining pledge. While renationalisation would be symbolic, the fortunes of such a government would depend more on its handling of the economy.


Author(s):  
Kerina Jones ◽  
Sharon Heys ◽  
Helen Daniels

IntroductionMany jurisdictions have programmes for the large-scale reuse of health and administrative data that would benefit from greater cross-centre working. The Advancing Cross centre Research Networks (ACoRN) project considered barriers and drivers for joint working and information sharing using the UK Farr Institute as a case study, and applicable widely. Objectives and ApproachACoRN collected information from researchers, analysts, academics and the public to gauge the acceptability of sharing data across institutions and jurisdictions. It considered international researcher experiences and evidence from a variety of cross centre projects to reveal barriers and potential solutions to joint working. It reviewed the legal and regulatory provisions that surround data sharing and cross-centre working, including issues of information governance to provide the context and backdrop. The emerging issues were grouped into five themes and used to propose a set of recommendations. ResultsThe five themes identified were: organisational structures and legal entities; people and culture; information governance; technology and infrastructure; and finance and strategic planning. Recommendations within these included: standardised terms and conditions including agreements and contractual templates; performance indicators for frequency of dataset sharing; communities of practice and virtual teams to develop cooperation; standardised policies and procedures to underpin data sharing; an accredited quality seal for organisations sharing data; a dashboard for data availability and sharing; and adequate resource to move towards greater uniformity and to drive data sharing initiatives. Conclusion/ImplicationsThe challenges posed by cross-centre information sharing are considerable but the public benefits associated with the greater use of health and administrative data are inestimable, particularly as novel and emerging data become increasingly available. The proposed recommendations will assist in achieving the benefits of cross-centre working.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Lyddon

Coastal flooding is rated as the second highest risk of civil emergency in the UK, and can cause damage to coastal and estuarine infrastructure, communities, ecosystems, and even loss of life. Hydrodynamic, numerical modelling tools are used to identify regions susceptible to coastal flooding under current and future climate conditions. Modelling procedures and data inputs can lead to a range of uncertainties that need to be quantified for the simulations to be meaningful. Reported public scepticism of coastal hazard forecasting and flood warning accuracy may be due in some part to the way that flood dynamics and uncertainties in the computer model simulations of flood hazard are communicated to the end-users. The briefing explores key uncertainties in flooding predictions, and how these can be better communicated to the public and stakeholders. Improved communication can help to increase awareness and encourage behaviour change to build trust in warnings and forecasts.


1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 32-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Shaw

This paper explores ‘expert’ constructions of public concerns about food within a sociological framework. Concerns about potential risks in food have become controversial social and political issues in Britain in recent years. This paper reflects on these wider debates, and on sociological work on food, ‘risk’ and science, which provide the backdrop for qualitative research studying ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ understandings of food risks. The first phase of this exploratory research consisted of a series of ‘key informant’ interviews with a range of ‘experts’ in the arena of food. The interview data serve to ‘map out’ the key issues in current debates about food. However, they also enable insight into the ways different involved ‘experts’ construct accounts of public concerns about food. From the data, several key issues and themes relating to ‘expert’ views of public understandings and concerns about food emerged. These included, a ‘rolling issue’ of food concerns, public questioning of the origins and integrity of food, increased involvement of ‘external people’ in food, the extent of public understandings of microbiological food safety; public understandings of risk in the BSE crisis, and public knowledge and acceptance of genetically-modified food. These data set the scene for further research directly exploring the views of food consumers. The issues and themes from the ‘expert’ accounts are being followed-up by the author through research in progress, which seeks to uncover the range of rich, intuitive understandings of food risks held by a diverse range of people who make up ‘the public’.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha J Lycett ◽  
Joseph Hughes ◽  
Martin P McHugh ◽  
Ana da Silva Filipe ◽  
Rebecca Dewar ◽  
...  

AbstractThe second SARS virus, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in December 2019, and within a month was globally distributed. It was first introduced into Scotland in February 2020 associated with returning travellers and visitors. By March it was circulating in communities across the UK, and to control COVID-19 cases, and prevent overwhelming of the National Health Service (NHS), a ‘lockdown’ was introduced on 23rd March 2020 with a restriction of people’s movements. To augment the public health efforts a large-scale genome epidemiology effort (as part of the COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium) resulted in the sequencing of over 5000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes by 18th August 2020 from Scottish cases, about a quarter of the estimated number of cases at that time. Here we quantify the geographical origins of the first wave introductions into Scotland from abroad and other UK regions, the spread of these SARS-CoV-2 lineages to different regions within Scotland (defined at the level of NHS Health Board) and the effect of lockdown on virus ‘success’. We estimate that approximately 300 introductions seeded lineages in Scotland, with around 25% of these lineages composed of more than five viruses, but by June circulating lineages were reduced to low levels, in line with low numbers of recorded positive cases. Lockdown was, thus, associated with a dramatic reduction in infection numbers and the extinguishing of most virus lineages. Unfortunately since the summer cases have been rising in Scotland in a second wave, with >1000 people testing positive on a daily basis, and hospitalisation of COVID-19 cases on the rise again. Examining the available Scottish genome data from the second wave, and comparing it to the first wave, we find that while some UK lineages have persisted through the summer, the majority of lineages responsible for the second wave are new introductions from outside of Scotland and many from outside of the UK. This indicates that, while lockdown in Scotland is directly linked with the first wave case numbers being brought under control, travel-associated imports (mostly from Europe or other parts of the UK) following the easing of lockdown are responsible for seeding the current epidemic population. This demonstrates that the impact of stringent public health measures can be compromised if following this, movements from regions of high to low prevalence are not minimised.


2019 ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rostislav I. Kapeliushnikov

Using published estimates of inequality for two countries (Russia and USA) the paper demonstrates that inequality measuring still remains in the state of “statistical cacophony”. Under this condition, it seems at least untimely to pass categorical normative judgments and offer radical political advice for governments. Moreover, the mere practice to draw normative conclusions from quantitative data is ethically invalid since ordinary people (non-intellectuals) tend to evaluate wealth and incomes as admissible or inadmissible not on the basis of their size but basing on whether they were obtained under observance or violations of the rules of “fair play”. The paper concludes that a current large-scale ideological campaign of “struggle against inequality” has been unleashed by left-wing intellectuals in order to strengthen even more their discursive power over the public.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley Klaff

I am pleased to publish an open-access online preprint of two articles and a research note that will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism 3, no. 2 (Fall 2020). This preprint is a new and exciting development for the Journal. It has been made possible by the generous donations from sponsors, including BICOM's co-chairman, David Cohen, whose support for the work of the Journal allows for timely scholarly analysis to be put into the public sphere.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea Barbett ◽  
Edward Stupple ◽  
Michael Sweet ◽  
Miles Richardson

The planet is facing an anthropogenic mass extinction of wildlife, which will have a grave impact on the environment and humans. Widespread human action is needed to minimize the negative impact of humans on biodiversity and support the restoration of wildlife. In order to find effective ways to promote pro-nature conservation behaviours to the general population, there is a need to provide a list of behaviours which will have worthwhile ecological impact and are worth encouraging. In a novel collaboration between psychologists and ecologists, 70 experts from practical and academic conservation backgrounds were asked to review and rate 48 conservation related behaviours. According to their judgement, this short paper presents a ranked list of pro-nature conservation behaviours for the public in the UK and similar landscapes. This includes behaviours people can engage in in their homes, their gardens, on their land, and in their roles as citizens.


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