Aesthetics and Affordances in a Favourite Place: On the Interactional Use of Environments for Restoration

Research indicates that nature offers many physical and mental health benefits, including restoration - or recovery from mental fatigue. However, questions remain about what exactly in one's environment is experienced as restorative and why. Bridging environmental aesthetics, environmental psychology and cultural studies, this study establishes a connection between landscape and mindscape as seen, for instance, in the ways in which an orderly environment is interpreted as an orderly state of mind and vice versa. Using data drawn from a qualitative survey targeting expatriate Finns, the article mobilises content analysis to interpret the results and concludes that a 'favourite place' is aesthetically appealing, enables actions that are experienced as restorative and is as much an interpretation of a space as a physical place.

Lethal State

For years, American states have tinkered with the machinery of death, seeking to align capital punishment with evolving social standards and public will. Against this backdrop, North Carolina had long stood out as a prolific executioner with harsh mandatory sentencing statutes. But as the state sought to remake its image as modern and business-progressive in the early twentieth century, the question of execution preoccupied lawmakers, reformers, and state boosters alike. In this book, Seth Kotch recounts the history of the death penalty, including lynching, in North Carolina from its colonial origins to the present. He tracks the attempts to reform and sanitize the administration of death in a state as dedicated to its image as it was to rigid racial hierarchies. Through this lens, Lethal State helps explain not only Americans' deep and growing uncertainty about the death penalty but also their commitment to it. Kotch argues that Jim Crow justice continued to reign in the guise of a modernizing, orderly state and offers essential insight into the relationship between race, violence, and power in North Carolina. The history of capital punishment in North Carolina, as in other states wrestling with similar issues, emerges as one of state-building through lethal punishment.

Weibull Model Based on the Maximum Entropy Principle and its Applications on Elements Grade Distribution

The distribution of metallogenic elements grade is an effective index for the quantitatively economical evaluation of mineral resources. We have defined the information entropy as a measure of randomness of metallogenic elements grade distribution, assumed its primary distribution is in an extremely random situation, and deduced the density function of the primary distribution based on maximum entropy principle. Considering the fact that elements concentration goes from a non-orderly state to an orderly one in the ore-forming process, we added restraint parameters to the primary distribution model, got a two-parameter Weibull distribution model with embedded fractal features, and then fitted metallogenic element's grade distribution of Ag-Cu-Pb-Zn from a mine in China. The results show that the Weibull model is more effective than a lognormal model to describe elements distribution, and should be applied more broadly than common lognormal models in geology discipline.

Identification and Analysis of Dynamic Factor of Evolution of the Project Organization

This paper states the definition of evolutionary dynamic of project organization, finds out the dynamic factors of evolution of the project organization basing on talks, questionnaires and analysis, constructs the diagram of dynamic factors, basing on which a three-dimension graph of the interaction between dynamic factors is constructed, and a model about the interaction process between dynamic factors basing on Haken Model is built and a analysis about the process is made. The author concludes it’s an effective way to make the organization change from criticality to orderly state faster and the evolution of the organization by means of designing dynamic factors rationally, dynamic construction of the relationship of competition and cooperation and enhancing the rational actions the behavior subjects.

Comment: Energy Accounting: The Case of Farm Machinery in Maryland

Prior to the 1970s, energy accounting was the primary domain of physical scientists or engineers. The world of thermodynamics, rigorous concepts of energy ratios and entropy, seemed safe within their laboratories where, for example, the relative energy efficiency of solid and liquid fuels was assessed for powering an industrial heating system. This apparent orderly state of affairs—measurement primarily in controlled laboratory conditions—seemed to change abruptly in 1973 with the OPEC oil embargo. Energy accounting became the chore, if not the mission, of a myriad of scientists, engineers, businessmen, bureaucrats, and politicians. Understandably, the journals and other periodicals of our profession now abound with proposals on how to measure energy and how to employ these measures in making decisions and developing government policies.