Evaluating participatory decision processes serves two key purposes: validating the usefulness of specific interventions for stakeholders, interveners and funders of conflict management processes, and improving practice. However, evaluation design remains challenging, partly because when attempting to serve both purposes we may end up serving neither well. In fact, the better we respond to one,...

Mining textual sources of data can be used to design studies and test theories at temporal and spatial scales unheard of in the past. This opens up new opportunities for conflict studies and ethnographic research. We conducted a semi-automated network analysis of the 2003–2010 Sudan Tribune online news articles and modeled ethnic-group conflict in Sudan. We tested whether an ethnic group’s conn...

A daily rhythm that is not in synchrony with the environmental light-dark cycle (as in jetlag and shift work) is known to affect mood and health through an as yet unresolved neural mechanism. Here, we combine Bayesian probabilistic 'cue-conflict' theory with known physiology of the biological clock of the brain, entailing the insight that, for a functional pacemaker, it is sufficient to have tw...

Product development organizations are unwilling to compromise product functionality, unit cost, or time to market in order to create products that have less environmental impact than that required by regulations. Thus, designers may face a conflict between improving product functionality and reducing environmental impact. The design for environment (DfE) tools currently available are inadequate...

This paper provides a summary of the article, "The Environment and Violent Conflict: A Response to Gleditsch's Critique and Some Suggestions for Future Research". Written by Thomas Homer-Dixon and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, the paper serves as a response to Nils Petter Gleditsch's critique of environment, population, and conflict literature in his seminal 1998 article, "Armed...

The recent decision to continue cattle grazing in the VANP has not been uniformly welcomed. There exists significant scientific evidence detailing the environmental impact of grazing. This paper examines whether an opportunity has been missed to resolve the ongoing conflict that accompanies the continuation of grazing in the VANP. The potential of economic instruments in resolving this unique l...

Prior work has suggested that inter-parental conflict likely plays an etiological role in child behavior problems. However, family-level measurement of inter-parental conflict in most traditional child twin studies has made it difficult to tease apart the specific causal mechanisms underlying this association. The Children's Perception of Inter-parental Conflict scale (CPIC) provides a child-sp...