scholarly journals Challenges of Researching Showering Routines: From the Individual to the Socio-Material

Urban Science ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Karen Simpson ◽  
Chad Staddon ◽  
Sarah Ward
Keyword(s):  
Life Stage ◽  
Material Model ◽  
High Water ◽  
Water Saving ◽  
Data Types ◽  
Domestic Water ◽  
Water Users ◽  
Scottish Government ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk

In the UK, water supplies are under pressure from climate, population and lifestyle change. Showering is the largest component of domestic water consumption. Young adults are high water-users at a transitional life-stage, when practices are dynamic, and habits shaped. This paper presents the methodology, early findings and reflections on challenges of working with different data types and scales, to explore real-world water-saving through a mixed-methods approach, focusing on showering patterns of first year university students in campus accommodation at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Combining household meter, logged water-fixture micro-component, personal-use questionnaire, user diary and stakeholder focus group data with the Scottish Government Individual-Social-Material model, typical showering demand reduction interventions were evaluated and insights into alternative interventions were generated. Results indicate Estates’ routine equipment maintenance and database management affect data quality and consistency. Despite these issues a profile of daily student water use was derived (equivalent to 114 litres per person per day) but with high variability between different households (from 83 to 151 litres per person per day). Average shower durations (self-reported 10–12 minutes) were higher than reported UK norms, although frequency was similar to the UK daily shower norm. Average measured shower volumes (51 litres in one house) were not excessive, indicating shower fixtures provided a contribution to water saving.

scholarly journals Time of use tariffs: implications for water efficiency

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Cole ◽  
Kelvin O'Halloran ◽  
Rodney A. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Water Source ◽  
High Water ◽  
Water Utilities ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Water Efficiency ◽  
Domestic Water ◽  
Network Modelling ◽  
Water Abstraction ◽  
Water Users ◽  
Annual Peak

Water utilities undertake long term planning for water source security, often with forecast cycles of 20–30 years. Whilst this planning is generally involved with investigations of source water abstraction security and the need to build dams or to increase the recharge rate of groundwater aquifers, planning for water efficiency gains occurs at annual intervals. Most water utilities in Australia are heavily engaged in water efficiency initiatives with rebate schemes for domestic water-efficient devices being ubiquitous across the industry. Wide Bay Water Corporation (WBWC) also engages in these activities but is increasingly interested in the concept of Time of Use Tariffs (TOUTs) to target high water users in order to reduce their demand on the system. In 2006, WBWC introduced smart metering technology across the city which captures hourly use data. Interrogation of this data has led to the ability to identify water use patterns for every domestic and commercial water customer and to design specific interventions to encourage water efficiency, such as a TOUT for domestic customers. A TOUT has been developed that imposes a penalty on all individual consumption greater than 600 L in any hourly interval of any day in the year. The tariff was designed to reduce both the annual peak hour and peak day demand. The ability to reduce both of these infrastructure design parameters may have the potential to deliver substantial savings in infrastructure planning and deployment. This paper details the design process of this tariff, examines the infrastructure savings potential derived by network modelling and explores the regulatory framework hurdles to be overcome in order to implement such tariffs in the water industry.

Treadle pump: A low cost irrigation option for marginal farmers

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (03) ◽  
Author(s):  
ATIQUR RAHMAN ◽  
ASHUTOSH UPADHYAYA ◽  
BP BHATT
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Water Productivity ◽  
High Water ◽  
Water Saving ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Human Power ◽  
Dry Spells ◽  
Supplementary Irrigation ◽  
Land Holdings

The population of marginal farmers in India is bound to increase due to continued division of farm holdings. Characteristically, marginal farmers are having more family labours but the production and productivity of their land holdings is low. The foremost reason behind this is the erratic rainfall and lack of assure supplementary irrigation during long dry spells. This paper presents the scope and applicability of a diaphragm based treadle pump in Bihar where groundwater is abundant and available at shallow depths round the year. Therefore, this pump could be very useful for marginal farmers in improving production and productivity of their tiny piece of land, as it uses human power and can be operated by male and female of age group 32- 45 years and lifts water from a depth ranging from 0- 30 feet. The water saving technologies such as bucket kit drum kit etc. could be used with this pump to irrigate the crops with high water productivity.

Sisterhood and After

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaretta Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Cultural Taste

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement explores the individual and collective memories of women at its heart. Spanning at least two generations and four nations, and moving through the tumultuous decades from the 1970s to the present, the narrative is powered by feminist oral history, notably the British Library’s Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. The book mines these precious archives to bring fresh insight into the lives of activists and the campaigns and ideas they mobilised. It navigates still-contested questions of class, race, violence, and upbringing—as well as the intimacies, sexualities and passions that helped fire women’s liberation—and shows why many feminists still regard notions of ‘equality’ or even ‘equal rights’ as insufficient. It casts new light on iconic campaigns and actions in what is sometimes simplified as feminism’s ‘second wave’, and enlivens a narrative too easily framed by ideological abstraction with candid, insightful, sometimes painful personal accounts of national and less well-known women activists. They describe lives shaped not only by structures of race, class, gender, sexuality and physical ability, but by education, age, love and cultural taste. At the same time, they offer extraordinary insights into feminist lifestyles and domestic pleasures, and the crossovers and conflicts between feminists. The work draws on oral history’s strength as creative method, as seen with its conclusion, where readers are urged to enter the archives of feminist memory and use what they find there to shape their own political futures.

Where the Millennials Will Take Us

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Life Stage ◽  
Structure Theory ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Gender Categories ◽  
The Individual ◽  
New Research ◽  
Fourth Wave

In this book Barbara J. Risman uses her gender structure theory to tackle the question about whether today’s young people, Millennials, are pushing forward the gender revolution or backing away from it. In the first part of the book, Risman revises her theoretical argument to differentiate more clearly between culture and material aspects of each level of gender as a social structure. She then uses previous research to explain that today’s young people spend years in a new life stage where they are emerging as adults. The new research presented here offers a typology of how today’s young people wrestle with gender during the years of emerging adulthood. How do they experience gender at the individual level? What are the expectations they face because of their sex? What are their ideological beliefs and organizational constraints based on their gender category? Risman suggests there is great variety within this generation. She identifies four strategies used by young people: true believers in gender difference, innovators who want to push boundaries in feminist directions, straddlers who are simply confused, and rebels who sometimes identify as genderqueer and reject gender categories all together. The final chapter offers a utopian vision that would ease the struggles of all these groups, a fourth wave of feminism that rejects the gender structure itself. Risman envisions a world where the sex ascribed at birth matters has few consequences beyond reproduction.

Punk as Folk: Continuities and Tensions in the UK and Beyond

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pete Dale
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Collective Creativity ◽  
Living Tradition ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk

Numerous claims have been made by a wide range of commentators that punk is somehow “a folk music” of some kind. Doubtless there are several continuities. Indeed, both tend to encourage amateur music-making, both often have affiliations with the Left, and both emerge at least partly from a collective/anti-competitive approach to music-making. However, there are also significant tensions between punk and folk as ideas/ideals and as applied in practice. Most obviously, punk makes claims to a “year zero” creativity (despite inevitably offering re-presentation of at least some existing elements in every instance), whereas folk music is supposed to carry forward a tradition (which, thankfully, is more recognized in recent decades as a subject-to-change “living tradition” than was the case in folk’s more purist periods). Politically, meanwhile, postwar folk has tended more toward a socialist and/or Marxist orientation, both in the US and UK, whereas punk has at least rhetorically claimed to be in favor of “anarchy” (in the UK, in particular). Collective creativity and competitive tendencies also differ between the two (perceived) genre areas. Although the folk scene’s “floor singer” tradition offers a dispersal of expressive opportunity comparable in some ways to the “anyone can do it” idea that gets associated with punk, the creative expectation of the individual within the group differs between the two. Punk has some similarities to folk, then, but there are tensions, too, and these are well worth examining if one is serious about testing out the common claim, in both folk and punk, that “anyone can do it.”

scholarly journals The Impacts of the Geographic Distribution of Manufacturing Plants on Groundwater Withdrawal in China

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1158
Author(s):  
Yanting Zheng ◽  
Huidan Yang ◽  
Jinyuan Huang ◽  
Linjuan Wang ◽  
Aifeng Lv
Keyword(s):  
Manufacturing Industry ◽  
Tap Water ◽  
Demand Management ◽  
Spatial Regression ◽  
High Water ◽  
Groundwater Withdrawal ◽  
Ecological Environment ◽  
Manufacturing Plants ◽  
Water Users ◽  
Water Transmission

The overexploitation of groundwater in China has raised concern, as it has caused a series of environmental and ecological problems. However, far too little attention has been paid to the relationship between groundwater use and the spatial distribution of water users, especially that of manufacturing factories. In this study, a factory scatter index (FSI) was constructed to represent the spatial dispersion degree of manufacturing factories in China. It was found that counties and border areas between neighboring provinces registered the highest FSI increases. Further non-spatial and spatial regression models using 205 provincial-level secondary river basins in China from 2016 showed that the scattered distribution of manufacturing plants played a key role in groundwater withdrawal in China, especially in areas with a fragile ecological environment. The scattered distribution of manufacturing plants raises the cost of tap water transmission, makes monitoring and supervision more difficult, and increases the possibility of surface water pollution, thereby intensifying groundwater withdrawal. A reasonable spatial adjustment of manufacturing industry through planning and management can reduce groundwater withdrawal and realize the protection of groundwater. Our study may provide a basis for water-demand management through spatial adjustment in areas with high water scarcity and a fragile ecological environment.

scholarly journals ‘Rising demand and decreasing resources’: Theorising the ‘cost of austerity’ as a barrier to social worker discretion

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
CIARÁN MURPHY
Keyword(s):  
Social Worker ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Child Protection Services ◽  
Radical Reform ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
Documentary Analysis ◽  
Effective System ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Cost

Abstract The Munro Review of Child Protection asserted that the English child protection system had become overly ‘defensive’, ‘bureaucratised’ and ‘standardised’, meaning that social workers were not employing their discretion in the interests of the individual child. This paper reports on the results of an ethnographic case study of one of England’s statutory child protection teams. The research sought to explore the extent of social worker discretion relative to Munro’s call for ‘radical reform’ and a move towards a more ‘child-centred’ system. Employing an iterative mixed methods design – encompassing documentary analysis, observation, focus group, questionnaire, interview and ‘Critical Realist Grounded Theory’ – the study positioned the UK Government’s prolonged policy of ‘austerity’ as a barrier to social worker discretion. This was because the policy was seen to be contributing to an increased demand for child protection services; and a related sense amongst practitioners that they were afforded insufficient time with the child to garner the requisite knowledge, necessary for discretionary behaviour. Ultimately, despite evidence of progress relative to assertions that social worker discretion had been eroded, the paper concludes that there may still be ‘more to do’ if we are to achieve the ‘child-centred’ and ‘effective’ system that Munro advocated.

Gender perspectives on extended working life policies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Áine Ní Léime ◽  
Wendy Loretto
Keyword(s):  
Working Life ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Population Policies ◽  
Flexible Working ◽  
Working Set ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Pension Age ◽  
Pension Contribution ◽  
The Uk ◽  
State Pension

This chapter documents international policy developments and provides a gender critique of retirement, employment and pension policies in Australia, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, the UK, and the US. It assesses the degree to which the individual country's extended working life policies have adopted the agenda (increasing pension age and introducing flexible working) set out by the OECD and the EU. Policies include raising state pension age, changes in the duration of pension contribution requirements, the move from defined benefits to defined contribution pensions, policies on caring for vulnerable members of the population, policies enabling flexible working and anti-age discrimination measures. An expanded framework is used to assess the degree to which gender and other intersecting issues such as health, caring, class, type of occupation and/or membership of minority communities have (or have not) been taken into account in designing and implementing policies extending working life.

Funding Pensions in Scotland: Would Independence Matter?

2014 ◽  
Vol 227 ◽  
pp. R21-R31
Author(s):  
David Bell ◽  
David Comerford ◽  
David Eiser
Keyword(s):  
Public Debt ◽  
Government Debt ◽  
Bond Market ◽  
Liquidity Premium ◽  
Mortality Experience ◽  
Mortality Risks ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Scottish Government ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Cost

Economic issues will be key determinants of the outcome of the Scottish referendum on independence. Pensions are a key element of the economic case for or against independence. The costs of funding pensions in an independent Scotland would be influenced by mortality risks, the costs of borrowing and the segmentation of costs and risks (i.e. pricing to Scotland's experience rather than pooled across UK experience). We compare the overall costs of providing pensions in an independent Scotland against the resources that are available to cover these costs. Scotland has worse mortality experience than the UK as a whole, and Scottish government debt is likely to attract a liquidity premium relative to UK government debt. An independent Scottish government would have to create a bond market for public debt. The liquidity premium would make pensions cheaper to buy, but taxpayers or the consumers of public services would have to pay the cost.

scholarly journals ‘'Sex Changes'? Paradigm Shifts in ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender’ following the Gender Recognition Act?’

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Whittle ◽  
Lewis Turner
Keyword(s):  
Sex Change ◽  
Gender Recognition ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Gender Variance ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Legal Understanding

Gender transformations are normatively understood as somatic, based on surgical reassignment, where the sexed body is aligned with the gender identity of the individual through genital surgery – hence the common lexicon ‘sex change surgery’. We suggest that the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 challenges what constitutes a ‘sex change’ through the Act's definitions and also the conditions within which legal ‘recognition’ is permitted. The sex/gender distinction, (where sex normatively refers to the sexed body, and gender, to social identity) is demobilised both literally and legally. This paper discusses the history of medico-socio-legal definitions of sex have been developed through decision making processes when courts have been faced with people with gender variance and, in particular, the implications of the Gender Recognition Act for our contemporary legal understanding of sex. We ask, and attempt to answer, has ‘sex’ changed?

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