Vacations offer a break from daily stressors but at the same time introduce challenges away from home. While the positive aspects of vacationing, especially individual benefits, are well documented, the challenges couples face and their psychological mechanisms and outcomes remain unexplored. This study investigated the effects challenges and challenge resolution might have on shared experiences and on relationship quality. We collected data from 100 romantic couples at major tourist destinations in the Netherlands in Spring 2024. Random intercept regression models showed that novelty is positively associated with positive emotions, passionate love, and feelings of connection with partner; and that challenges would take away some of these benefits. Interestingly, challenges were associated with self-expansion, a major predictor of long-term love and passion, especially when partially resolved. Positive emotions mediated some of these relationships. These findings highlight the importance and value of studying challenges and challenge resolution on vacations for relationship and experience quality.
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Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is constantly gaining ground, both at domestic and international level. New forms of dispute settlement with a mix of public and private components are emerging in fields where this was not the case until recent times, as some contributions to this Zoom-out have attempted to demonstrate. In the field of investment law we have witnessed a somehow opposite trend. Traditionally, disputes in this field have been settled by means of arbitral tribunals established mostly on the basis of bilateral or multilateral investment agreements (IAs) under a variety of arbitration facilities, which are collectively referred to as investor-to-State dispute settlement (ISDS). Traditional ISDS presents many characteristics of ADR, starting from the strong role that private parties play in it (for example when it comes to the appointment of arbitrators). The practice has shown that the system has clear advantages but also undeniable disadvantages. The prevailing opinion in recent years has been that the latter considerably outweigh the former, resulting in what has been termed the backlash against investment arbitration in a volume appeared a few years ago. In this contribution, how-ever, I will not dwell on the details of the crisis that has affected investment arbitration, nor will I engage in a discussion of whether that backlash is entirely justified. My focus will be much more modest. One of the most tangible consequences of this growing dissatisfaction towards investment arbitration is the launch on the part of the EU of a court-like system to settle investment disputes –the now famous investment court system (ICS) –as a replacement to old-fashioned ISDS. The ICS now features in all EU IAs, and has become the standard position of the EU when it comes to dispute settlement in this field. Recently, the ICS has also received the green light of the European Court of Justice (ECJ),raising doubts as to whether traditional ISDS has conclusively been sent to oblivion, at least in the EU. From a political and policy perspective, it is undoubtful that there is a strong stance on the part of the EU and of its Member States against traditional ISDS. This article, however, will focus exclusively on the legal dimension, by examining whether the ECJ’s decision should be read as meaning that investment arbitration is incompatible with the EU legal system. While itis clear that Opinion 1/17 means that the ICS is compatible with EU law, it remains to be seen whether the Court’s finding allows an a contrario reading. Namely, whether it entails the incompatibility with EU law of traditional ISDS. The analysis will start with a brief summary of the events and developments that preceded the creation of the ICS and eventually led to the current situation (Section 2), followed by an examination of the relevant parts of Opinion 1/17 (Section 3). This part will be followed by an appraisal of the possible legal implications of the decision (Section 4). Some conclusions will be offered in the closing section (Section 5) in the attempt to look beyond the boundaries of EU law. Part of topic "The blurring distinction between public and private in international dispute resolution"
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In manufacturing of organic electronics, inkjet printing as an alternative technique for depositing materials is becoming increasingly important. Aside to the ink formulations challenges, improving the resolution of the printed patterns is a major goal. In this study we will discuss a newly developed technique to selectively modify the substrate surface energy using plasma treatment as a means to achieve this goal. First, we look at the effects of the μPlasma treatment on the surface energy for a selection of plastic films. Second, we investigated the effects of the μPlasma treatment on the wetting behaviour of inkjet printed droplets to determine the resolution of the μPlasma printing technique. We found that the surface energy for all tested films increased significantly reaching a maximum after 3-5 repetitions. Subsequently the surface energy decreased in the following 8-10 days after treatment, finally stabilizing at a surface energy roughly halfway between the surface energy of the untreated film and the maximum obtained surface energy. When μPlasma printing lines, an improved wetting abillity of inkjet printed materials on the plasma treated areas was found. The minimal achieved μPlasma printed line was found to be 1 mm wide. For future application it is important to increase the resolution of the plasma print process. This is crucial for combining plasma treatment with inkjet print technology as a means to obtain higher print resolutions.
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In media audience research we tend to assume that media are engaged with when they are used, however ‘light’ such engagement might be. Once ‘passive media use’ was banned as a reference to media use, being a media audience member became synonymous with being a meaning producer. In audience research however I find that media are not always the object of meaning making in daily life and that media texts can be hardly meaningful. Thinking about media and engagement, there is a threefold challenge in relation to audience research. The coming into being of platform media and hence of new forms of media production on a micro level that come out of and are woven into practices of media use, suggests that we need to redraft the repertoire of terms used in audience research (and maybe start calling it something else). Material and immaterial media production, the unpaid labour on the part of otherwise audience members should for instance be taken into account. Then, secondly, there is the continuing challenge to further develop heuristically strong ways of linking media use and meaning making, and most of all to do justice, thirdly, to those moments and ways in which audiences truly engage with media texts without identifying them with those texts.
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Adopted on the fifteenth anniversary of resolution 1325, Security Council resolution 2242 has recognized for the first time the substantial link between climate change and the “Women, Peace and Security” (WPS) framework. Despite this landmark resolution, the intersections of environmental factors, conflict and violence against women remain largely absent from the Security Council's WPS agenda. Competition over natural resources is generally understood as a driver of conflict. The risk of insecurity and conflict are further increased by environmental degradation and climate change. It is therefore clear that the environment and natural resources must be integrated into the WPS agenda. This should necessarily include a discussion of indigenous rights to land and the gender-related dimensions of environmental factors. Indigenous women are disproportionately affected by environmental degradation, caused by resource extraction and increasingly compounded by climatic changes. This in turn exacerbates other vulnerabilities, including sexual and gender-based violence and other forms of marginalization. This article argues, by reference to the situation in West Papua, that unfettered resource extraction not only amplifies vulnerabilities and exacerbates preexisting inequalities stemming from colonial times, it also gives rise to gendered consequences flowing from the damage wreaked on the natural environment and thus poses a danger to international peace and security. As such, the Security Council's failure to recognize the continuous struggle of women in indigenous and rural communities against extractive economies and climate change impact as a security risk forms a serious lacuna within its WPS agenda. Originally published by Oxford University Press in Global Studies Quarterly, Volume 1, Issue 3, September 2021, ksab018, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksab018
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This paper investigates the prospective application of arbitration by Transnational Private Regulation (TPR). It builds on the study of TPR developed by Fabrizio Cafaggi et al. TPR addresses the ever-increasing transfer of regulatory power from national to global levels, and from public to private regulators. TPR entails private regulatory co-operation be-yond the jurisdictional boundaries of States through voluntary standards. The regimes of TPR are built by a variety of actors, such as companies, NGOs, independent experts, and epistemic communities. Examples of TPR can be found in food safety, forestry management, trade, and derivatives, among other fields. More specifically, they concern private actors engaging in transnational coordination of standard setting such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) that was developed to foster responsible management of the world’s forests. There are four main characteristics of TPR: legitimacy, quality, effectiveness, and enforcement. I will describe those four characteristics in brief here. First, the legitimacy of TPR is built around consent through voluntary entry, participation, and exit of regulated entities. Important to this contribution is that the legitimacy of TPR goes beyond its legal dimension, measured by purely legal standards. Hence, the legitimacy of TPR is largely determined by standards developed by social and economic institutions relevant to specific TPR regimes. The role of those institutions in standard settings is higher in private TPR regimes than private-public TPR regimes, where some forms of compliance are mandatory. Second, the quality of TPR corresponds to the ex ante and ex post evaluation cycle of regulatory processes. It is also linked with the transparency of TPR. Third, the effectiveness of TPR is measured according to the extent to which the objectives of TPR (or selected TPR regimes) are met. And finally, enforcement of TPRis understood as ‘ensuring compliance with commitments’. Enforcement of TPR can take place through courts, administrative agencies, and private dispute resolution—including the arbitration at the core of this contribution. Cafaggi’s study identified rather selective use of arbitration in TPR, but also recommended changes to make arbitration law more adaptable to TPR. Furthermore, the study recommended that more specialized dispute resolution institutions are created to exclusively serve TPR. Against this background, I shift the main focus of analysis from TPR to arbitration. Whereas Cafaggi argued that arbitration may be suitable for TPR as a means of private enforcement, in this paper I go even further, arguing that arbitration as a means of informal, out-of-court dispute resolution is well suited to strengthen the normativity of TPR. This is so because private arbitration actors (including, inter alia, arbitrators and arbitral institutions) are already equipped with the tools necessary to facilitate cross-border TPR, which is done through informal standards and procedures with origins in the communitarian values and reputational mechanisms used by different communities before the development of modern States. The roots of most private justice regimes—including arbitration—are informed by communitarian values such as collaboration, participation, and personal trust. Those values, together with other core characteristics of arbitration correspond to all core characteristics of TPR, making both systems comparable and complementary. The analytical framework incorporated in this paper follows the four core characteristics of TPR. Hence, the paper is organized into five sections. The first section contains the introduction. In the second section, I analyze the legitimacy of arbitration vis-à-vis the legitimacy of TPR. In the third section, I investigate the accountability of arbitration as a means of quality signaling vis-à-vis TPR. In the fourth section, I focus on the remedies available to arbitrators in a view of TPR’s effectiveness. Finally, in the fifth section, I analyze enforcement through arbitration and its impact on the exclusiveness versus complementarity of TPR regimes. Conclusions follow, including recommendations for future research. Part of topic "The blurring distinction between public and private in international dispute resolution"
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Sign languages have been recognized as indigenous to Europe by the key European institutions. The European Parliament has passed resolutions on sign languages on three occasions (1988, 1998, 2016a). The Council of Europe’s (CoE) Parliamentary Assembly supported a resolution on sign languages in 2003 (Council of Europe, 2005), and the European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML; an organization established under the auspices of the CoE) has supported work on sign language teaching, learning and assessment (Leeson, Van den Bogaerde, Rathmann, & Haug, 2016
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Urban flooding and thermal stress have become key issues formany cities around the world. With the continuing effects of climatechange, these two issues will become more acute and will add to theserious problems already experienced in dense urban areas. Therefore, thesectors of public health and disaster management are in the need of toolsthat can assess the vulnerability to floods and thermal stress. The presentpaper deals with the combination of innovative tools to address thischallenge. Three cities in different climatic regions with various urbancontexts have been selected as the pilot areas to demonstrate these tools.These cities are Tainan (Taiwan), Ayutthaya (Thailand) and Groningen(Netherlands). For these cities, flood maps and heat stress maps weredeveloped and used for the comparison analysis. The flood maps producedindicate vulnerable low-lying areas, whereas thermal stress maps indicateopen, unshaded areas where high Physiological Equivalent Temperature(PET) values (thermal comfort) can be expected. The work to dateindicates the potential of combining two different kinds of maps to identifyand analyse the problem areas. These maps could be further improved andused by urban planners and other stakeholders to assess the resilience andwell-being of cities. The work presented shows that the combined analysisof such maps also has a strong potential to be used for the analysis of otherchallenges in urban dense areas such as air and water pollution, immobilityand noise disturbance.
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Urban flooding and thermal stress have become key issues for many cities around the world. With the continuing effects of climate change, these two issues will become more acute and will add to the serious problems already experienced in dense urban areas. Therefore, the sectors of public health and disaster management are in the need of tools that can assess the vulnerability to floods and thermal stress. The present paper deals with the combination of innovative tools to address this challenge. Three cities in different climatic regions with various urban contexts have been selected as the pilot areas to demonstrate these tools. These cities are Tainan (Taiwan), Ayutthaya (Thailand) and Groningen (Netherlands). For these cities, flood maps and heat stress maps were developed and used for the comparison analysis. The flood maps produced indicate vulnerable low-lying areas, whereas thermal stress maps indicate open, unshaded areas where high Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET) values (thermal comfort) can be expected. The work to date indicates the potential of combining two different kinds of maps to identify and analyse the problem areas. These maps could be further improved and used by urban planners and other stakeholders to assess the resilience and well-being of cities. The work presented shows that the combined analysis of such maps also has a strong potential to be used for the analysis of other challenges in urban dense areas such as air and water pollution, immobility and noise disturbance.
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The article engages with the recent studies on multilevel regulation. The starting point for the argument is that contemporary multilevel regulation—as most other studies of (postnational) rulemaking—is limited in its analysis. The limitation concerns its monocentric approach that, in turn, deepens the social illegitimacy of contemporary multilevel regulation. The monocentric approach means that the study of multilevel regulation originates in the discussions on the foundation of modern States instead of returning to the origins of rules before the nation State was even created, which is where the actual social capital underlying (contemporary) rules can be found, or so I wish to argue. My aim in this article is to reframe the debate. I argue that we have an enormous reservoir of history, practices, and ideas ready to help us think through contemporary (social) legitimacy problems in multilevel regulation: namely all those practices which preceded the capture of law by the modern State system, such as historical alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practices.
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