Bridging Silos

How communities can collaborate across systems and sectors to address environmental health disparities; with case studies from Rochester, New York; Duluth, Minnesota; and Southern California. Low-income and marginalized urban communities often suffer disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards, leaving residents vulnerable to associated health problems. Community groups, academics, environmental justice advocates, government agencies, and others have worked to address these issues, building coalitions at the local level to change the policies and systems that create environmental health inequities. In Bridging Silos, Katrina Smith Korfmacher examines ways that communities can collaborate across systems and sectors to address environmental health disparities, with in-depth studies of three efforts to address long-standing environmental health issues: childhood lead poisoning in Rochester, New York; unhealthy built environments in Duluth, Minnesota; and pollution related to commercial ports and international trade in Southern California. All three efforts were locally initiated, driven by local stakeholders, and each addressed issues long known to the community by reframing an old problem in a new way. These local efforts leveraged resources to impact community change by focusing on inequities in environmental health, bringing diverse kinds of knowledge to bear, and forging new connections among existing community, academic, and government groups. Korfmacher explains how the once integrated environmental and public health management systems had become separated into self-contained “silos,” and compares current efforts to bridge these separations to the development of ecosystem management in the 1990s. Community groups, government agencies, academic institutions, and private institutions each have a role to play, but collaborating effectively requires stakeholders to appreciate their partners' diverse incentives, capacities, and constraints.

How communities can collaborate across systems and sectors to address environmental health disparities; with case studies from Rochester, New York; Duluth, Minnesota; and Southern California. Low-income and marginalized urban communities often suffer disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards, leaving residents vulnerable to associated health problems. Community groups, academics, environmental justice advocates, government agencies, and others have worked to address these issues, building coalitions at the local level to change the policies and systems that create environmental health inequities. In Bridging Silos, Katrina Smith Korfmacher examines ways that communities can collaborate across systems and sectors to address environmental health disparities, with in-depth studies of three efforts to address long-standing environmental health issues: childhood lead poisoning in Rochester, New York; unhealthy built environments in Duluth, Minnesota; and pollution related to commercial ports and international trade in Southern California. All three efforts were locally initiated, driven by local stakeholders, and each addressed issues long known to the community by reframing an old problem in a new way. These local efforts leveraged resources to impact community change by focusing on inequities in environmental health, bringing diverse kinds of knowledge to bear, and forging new connections among existing community, academic, and government groups. Korfmacher explains how the once integrated environmental and public health management systems had become separated into self-contained “silos,” and compares current efforts to bridge these separations to the development of ecosystem management in the 1990s. Community groups, government agencies, academic institutions, and private institutions each have a role to play, but collaborating effectively requires stakeholders to appreciate their partners' diverse incentives, capacities, and constraints.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO license. This book comprehensively covers topics in knowledge management and competence in strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, as well as knowledge capture and storage. Presented in accessible “chunks,” it includes more than 120 topics that are essential to high-performance organizations. The extensive use of quotes by respected experts juxtaposed with relevant research to counterpoint or lend weight to key concepts; “cheat sheets” that simplify access and reference to individual articles; as well as the grouping of many of these topics under recurrent themes make this book unique. In addition, it provides scalable tried-and-tested tools, method and approaches for improved organizational effectiveness. The research included is particularly useful to knowledge workers engaged in executive leadership; research, analysis and advice; and corporate management and administration. It is a valuable resource for those working in the public, private and third sectors, both in industrialized and developing countries.

This unique handbook presents both the theory and application of biomass combustion and co-firing, from basic principles to industrial combustion and environmental impact, in a clear and comprehensive manner. It offers a solid grounding on biomass combustion, and advice on improving combustion systems.Written by leading international academics and industrial experts, and prepared under the auspices of the IEA Bioenergy Implementing Agreement, the handbook is an essential resource for anyone interested in biomass combustion and co-firing technologies varying from domestic woodstoves to utility-scale power generation. The book covers subjects including biomass fuel pre-treatment and logistics, modelling the combustion process and ash-related issues, as well as featuring an overview of the current R&D needs regarding biomass combustion.

Crafting Customer Experience Strategy: Lessons from Asia looks at how Customer Experience Management can be vital in providing a competitive advantage for businesses. This is essential reading for marketing scholars and practitioners looking for insights into improving their customers' experiences.

The big data era is upon us: data are being generated, analyzed, and used at an unprecedented scale, and data-driven decision making is sweeping through all aspects of society. Since the value of data explodes when it can be linked and fused with other data, addressing the big data integration (BDI) challenge is critical to realizing the promise of big data. BDI differs from traditional data integration along the dimensions of volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. First, not only can data sources contain a huge volume of data, but also the number of data sources is now in the millions. Second, because of the rate at which newly collected data are made available, many of the data sources are very dynamic, and the number of data sources is also rapidly exploding. Third, data sources are extremely heterogeneous in their structure and content, exhibiting considerable variety even for substantially similar entities. Fourth, the data sources are of widely differing qualities, with significant differences in the coverage, accuracy and timeliness of data provided. This book explores the progress that has been made by the data integration community on the topics of schema alignment, record linkage and data fusion in addressing these novel challenges faced by big data integration. Each of these topics is covered in a systematic way: first starting with a quick tour of the topic in the context of traditional data integration, followed by a detailed, example-driven exposition of recent innovative techniques that have been proposed to address the BDI challenges of volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. Finally, it presents merging topics and opportunities that are specific to BDI, identifying promising directions for the data integration community.

Why have the major post-9/11 US military interventions turned into quagmires? Despite huge power imbalances in the United States' favor, significant capacity-building efforts, and repeated tactical victories by what many observers call the world's best military, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned intractable. The US government's fixation on zero-sum, decisive victory in these conflicts is a key reason why military operations to overthrow two developing-world regimes failed to successfully achieve favorable and durable outcomes. In Zero-Sum Victory, retired US Army colonel Christopher D. Kolenda identifies three interrelated problems that have emerged from the government's insistence on zero-sum victory. First, the US government has no organized way to measure successful outcomes other than a decisive military victory, and thus, selects strategies that overestimate the possibility of such an outcome. Second, the United States is slow to recognize and modify or abandon losing strategies; in both cases, US officials believe their strategies are working, even as the situation deteriorates. Third, once the United States decides to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries and disconnects in strategy undermine the prospects for a successful transition or negotiated outcome. Relying on historic examples and personal experience, Kolenda draws thought-provoking and actionable conclusions about the utility of American military power in the contemporary world—insights that serve as a starting point for future scholarship as well as for important national security reforms.

This book integrates new thinking on the image, marketing, and branding of places at all levels, from town squares to cities and countries, and of the products and peoples associated with them, thereby bridging the ‘country’ and ‘place’ silos in place-related research and practice. Insightful contributions from top scholars reflect fresh theorizing and provide a critical appraisal of conventional wisdom by juxtaposing intriguing contexts, questioning commonplace practices, and challenging methodologies and theoretical assumptions.