The empirical relationship between carbon emission and energy use of BRICS nations

In literature, there has been a large number of empirical research to examine the impact of CO2 emission on economic activity popularly known as the Environmental Kuznets curve having an inverted U shape relationship. The increasing environmental problem and environmental degradation are global phenomena due to increasing economic activities. In order to verify this relationship empirically in the context of BRICS nations, the present study intends to investigate the importance of energy use in the estimation of carbon emission while controlling GDP, industry value added and trade openness using Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and Fixed Effect (FE) Models. Our findings have confirmed that the relationship between CO2 emission and GDP confirmed inverted U‐shaped of the EKC. The direction of the relationship between squared LNIVA and LNCO2P further reinforce the inverted U‐shaped EKC. The relationship between LNEU and CO2P also satisfied the inverted U‐shape of the EKC. This may be due to the practice of energy efficiency and energy conservation measures in industrial sectors in BRICS nations. However, BRICS nations should also emphasize renewables and policies need to be aligned accordingly to keep CO2 emission at a lower level so that global warming could be kept to below 1.50°C, which is the target given by Paris Agreements.     

Moving Forward: Response to “Studying Eyewitness Investigations in the Field”

Field studies of eyewitness identification are richly confounded. Determining which confounds undermine interpretation is important. The blind administration confound in the Illinois study is said to undermine it’s value for understanding the relative utility of simultaneous and sequential lineups. Most criticisms of the Illinois study focus on filler identifications, and related inferences about the importance of the blind confound. We find no convincing evidence supporting this line of attack and wonder at filler identifications as the major line of criticism. More debilitating problems impede using the Illinois study to address the simultaneous versus sequential lineup controversy: inability to estimate guilt independent of identification evidence, lack of protocol compliance monitoring, and assessment of lineups quality. Moving forward requires removing these limitations.     

When a man debates a woman: Trump vs. Clinton in the first mixed gender presidential debates

Televised political debates have attracted intensive research interest. Here we examined the effect of mixed-gender televised political debates on the candidates’ multimodal gender communicative accountability structure. The 2016 election campaign in the United States introduced for the first time a new factor into the presidential political contest: gender. This study is grounded in a theoretical and analytical framework that maps gender accountability structures of verbal/nonverbal communication patterns. We analyzed the televised debates during the 2016 US presidential campaign with the candidates: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The findings indicated that during mixed-gender debates, contenders present conduct that correspond to their gender communicative structures, primarily nonverbal patterns. Trump mainly expressed masculine-communicative patterns, while Clinton displayed mostly feminine-communicative patterns. The theoretical and analytical framework highlights the effect of gender on political communication. The novel perspective delineates and explains the implications of multimodal gender communicative accountability structure of contenders in mixed-gender political debates.     

Museums for peace: agents and instruments of peace education

Although museums for peace claim peace education to be a primary mission, their definitions of ‘peace’ and their aims and practices for peace education vary widely. In this article, we draw from the field of critical museology and the knowledge construction perspective to understand the role of museums for peace in the service of peace education. From the constructivist viewpoint, the museums’ narratives are not objective or historical truths. Rather they are the museum designers’ constructed interpretations of the events, people, and places that are memorialized. The museums’ exhibits, narratives, and programs reflect a wide range of definitions of peace including some which conflict and contradict each other. The variations in defining peace contribute to differences in how the museums view and exercise their role in educating for peace. From this analysis, we observe how contemporary museums for peace can play a significant role in peace education by raising awareness about multiple definitions of peace and by enabling audiences to reflect on, discuss and participate in deliberated paths toward personal peace and cultures of peace.     

The new face of developing country debt

Developing country debt has been a major preoccupation for development policy makers and practitioners since the debt crisis of 1982. It is a major obstacle to economic and social progress in developing countries. After the resolution of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and the debt relief initiatives for low-income countries of 1997–2006 concerns about developing country debt seem to have receded. However, there are a growing number of problems that warrant concern, including the accumulation of domestic debt, short-term debt and private non-guaranteed debt, and increasing recourse by low-income countries to international capital markets. At the same time developing countries have strengthened their capacity to oversee and analyse their debt portfolios. Nonetheless, significant weaknesses remain in debt management capacity at the national level. Moreover, the activities of ‘vulture funds’ and the lack of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism reveal major shortcomings in the international institutional architecture that need to be addressed urgently.     

Secrecy,Security and Digital Literacy in an Era of Meta-Data: Why the Canadian Westminster Model Falls Short

The purpose of this article is to undertake a critical assessment of the governance of Canada's national security apparatus and, more specifically, the growing digitization and data-driven dimensions of such an apparatus. Over the previous decade, since 9/11, the advent of electronic government (e-government) and its emphasis on horizontality and interoperability became intertwined with the security apparatus of the public sector: the recent Snowden affair in the US has once again brought such discussions to the forefront. It is within such a context that the rise of ‘big data’ (or meta-data) as an identifiable term denotes a confluence of forces and contradictory tensions between openness and secrecy for the public sector both operationally and democratically. We examine Canada's Westminster insularity in this regard, how Canadian reforms meant to augment oversight and review capacities of security agencies have been stunted in recent years, and why such stalled actions matter to the privacy and safety of Canadian citizens. Conversely, a case for more openness and governance innovation is put forth premised on two main and inter-related directions: more political oversight and public dialogue on the one hand, and a greater emphasis on privacy as a responsibility on the other hand. Together these directions emphasize a more activist and participative civil culture that is central to ensuring societal resilience in an increasingly virtual and complex security environment.     

Local economies and national economic evaluations

Underlying the phenomena of economic voting are voters’ perceptions of economic conditions. But from where do these evaluations originate? This work examines the effects of three types of factors influential to the formation of national economic evaluations: predispositions (such as age, gender, income, partisanship), information and attentiveness, and objective local economic conditions (local unemployment rates). Our findings fit with earlier work, broadly confirming the influential role each set of factors plays in shaping national economic perceptions. We then extend the literature - demonstrating that the impact of the local economic environment is conditional on attention to media, political information and education. Using a combined dataset of the 2006 Canadian Election Studies with neighbourhood level economic indicators drawn from Canadian Census data (2006), our findings show that, in developing perceptions of the national economy, more attentive, more informed and more educated individuals are less influenced by local economic conditions than their less attentive, less informed and less educated counterparts. These findings contribute to our understanding of how local economic conditions influence the formation of national economic evaluations.