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This paper aims to identify the current challenges and opportunities faced by the facility managers (FMs) in Doha, Qatar.

Researchers queried 40 FMs about their experience working in Qatar, using interviews and workshops.

Comments gathered followed general patterns. Participants expressed appreciation for their work, but also concern about cultural challenges they faced managing facilities in the region. In general, it was agreed that the low cost of water and energy in Qatar is one of the largest obstacles to conserving resources; however, current consumption is not sustainable.

The sensitive nature of this study made strict demands on the research team to maintain participant anonymity during data collection and reporting. This sensitivity also limited the sample size; a larger sample size for future research would support greater generalizability.

Qatar is taking steps to reduce its per capita carbon footprint and energy use, which is among the highest in the world. However, there appears to be a disconnect between Qatar’s expressed intentions and its actions with respect to facility management. To ensure that Qatar manages resources more efficiently, participants recommended that reduced energy use standards be adopted and legally mandated. This action would address many of the challenges, incentivize increased qualifications and training of FM professionals working in Qatar and encourage improvement of the long-term performance of buildings which are energy drains and heavy contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

Prior to this study, little has been published about current practices of facility management in Doha, Qatar, and the challenges and opportunities that FMs face in this region.

Constrained by requirements of efficiency and economy as well as tight building regulations, Hong Kong's high-density residential architecture is very different from architectural approaches that are typically taught in the architectural studio. This paper reports on a second year architectural studio project taught at The University of Hong Kong that uses the Open Building paradigm to integrate the constraints of a high-density environment, community considerations and building technology in the context of a mixed use programme to be constructed on small individual lots.

Following a series of short introductory exercises, the main studio assignment required groups of students to negotiate the design of individual projects and community areas within a given generic structural frame. Based on their individual design ideas and architectural programme, students developed a structural solution following a kit-of-parts approach. We describe the tasks and rule sets given as the studio framework and discuss students' response to this new type of architectural programme. Based on our experiences, we critically review initial studio settings, final outcomes and observations made during the teaching and learning process with regard to future implementations of similar open building studio projects.

In this chapter, I discuss the development of the cannibal picking up from Jennifer Brown’s (2013) study, Cannibalism in Literature and Film. Brown (2013, p. 7) argued that the cannibal is a sign of ultimate difference who ‘reappears in various guises at times when popular culture needs to express real fears and anxieties’. I argue that the most recent version of the cannibal is gendered female and that this coincides with a postfeminist media culture. I explore how the cannibal is positioned as an ambiguous figure which questions both humanity and monstrosity. I argue that this is complicated by gendering it female as women have traditionally straddled the line between human and less-than human in popular culture. I discuss three films: 301/302 (Park, 1995), The Woman (Torino, Van Den Houten, & McKee, 2011) and Raw (De Forêts & Ducournau, 2016) and explore how they use incest, objectification and dehumanization as well as cannibalism to explore the ambiguities of postfeminist subjecthood. I will argue that by performing acts of cannibalism the female cannibals in these films reclaim their subjectivity both by objectifying others and by identifying with their victims. The cannibalism also presents the opportunity for female-oriented families through shared consumption which ironically embraces patriarchal ideals of feminine feeding roles and challenges the patriarchal basis of the family.

In this chapter, I investigated how challenges (life events) are negotiated within families according to gender roles and their effect on marriage quality, life satisfaction, and psychological resilience in a nonclinical sample of heterosexual couples (N=159), age 23–78 (M=45.4, SD=11.2), with children (n=127) or childfree (n=32). Specifically, I accounted for the individual’s ability to share “hurt feelings” and foster intimacy within the couple, thus strengthening resilience and improving life satisfaction and hypothesized that the impact of negative life events on both relationship quality and life satisfaction could depend on the resilience levels of each partner and their ratio according to gender roles. Results confirmed the hypothesis and showed significant gender differences in the impact of negative life events on relationship quality, life satisfaction, ability to share hurt feelings, fear of intimacy, and resilience levels. Moreover, the ratio of the partner’s individual resilience affected the dependent variables differently by gender, its level interacted with the age of the couple’s first child (range: 2–54, mean: 21.4, SD: 10.4) and strongly depended on the occupation of the parents.

The transition to motherhood has been studied extensively, but primarily among participants in homogenous race/ethnicity relationships. The aim of the current study was to explore the lived experiences of a diverse group of women in biracial and monoracial relationships experiencing the transition to motherhood (e.g., biracial or monoracial motherhood). Informed by the symbolic interaction framework, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate the expectations and experiences of first-time motherhood on a sample of 12 U.S. women. Their diverse stories contained multiple themes including an overarching theme of racial/ethnic differences in appropriate infant care, which surfaces during engagement in family and social support interactions. This analysis emphasizes the need for more diverse portrayals of motherhood. We discuss our findings in light of the literature and implications for future research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of temperature on residential electricity demand in the city of Greater Accra, Ghana. It is believed that the increasing trend of temperatures may significantly affect people’s lives and demand for electricity from the national grid. Given the recurrent electricity crisis in Ghana, this study will investigate both the current and future residential energy demands in the light of temperature fluctuations. This will inform future power generation using renewable energy resources mix to find a sustainable solution to the recurrent energy demand challenges in Ghana. This study will help the Government of Ghana to better understand the temperature dependence of residential energy demand, which in turn will help in developing behavioral modification programs aimed at reducing energy consumption. Monthly data for the temperature and residential electricity consumption for Greater Accra Region from January 2007 to December 2018 obtained from the Ghana Meteorological Service (GMS) and Ghana Grid Company (Gridco), respectively, are used for the analysis.

This study used monthly time series data from 2007 to 2018. Data on monthly electricity demand and temperature are obtained from the Ghana Grid Company and GMS. The theoretical framework for residential electricity consumption, the log-linear demand equation and time series regression approaches was used for this study. To demonstrate certain desirable properties and to produce good estimators in this study, an analysis technique of ordinary least squares measurement was also applied.

This study showed an impact on residential electricity requirements in the selected regions of Greater Accra owing to temperature change. The analysis suggests a substantial positive response to an increase in temperature demand for residential electricity and thus indicates a growth of the region’s demand for electricity in the future because of temperature changes. As this analysis projects, the growth in the electricity demand seems too small for concern, perhaps because of the incoherence of the mechanisms used to regulate the temperature by the residents. However, two points should be considered when drawing any conclusions even in the case of Greater Accra alone. First, the growth in the demand for electricity shown in the present study is the growth of demand due only to increasing temperatures that do not consider changes in all the other factors driving the growth of demand. The electricity demand will in the future increase beyond what is induced by temperature, due to increasing demand, population and mechanization and other socioeconomic factors. Second, power consumption understated genuine electricity demand, owing to the massive shedding of loads (Dumsor) which occurred in Ghana from 2012 to 2015 in the analysis period that also applies in the Greater Accra region. Given both of these factors, the growth in demand for electricity is set to increase in response to climate change, which draws on the authorities to prepare more critically on capacity building which loads balancing. The results also revealed that monthly total residential electricity consumption, particularly the monthly peak electricity consumption in the city of Accra is highly sensitive to temperature. Therefore, the rise in temperature under different climate change scenarios would have a high impact on residential electricity consumption. This study reveals that the monthly total residential electricity demand in Greater Accra will increase by up to 3.1%.

The research data was largely restricted to only one region in Ghana because of the inconsistencies in the data from the other regions. The only climate variable use was temperature because it was proven in the literature that it was the most dominant variable that affects electricity demand, so it was not out of place to use only this variable. The research, however, can be extended to capture the entire regions of the country if sponsorship and accurate data can be obtained.

The government as the policy and law-making authority has to play the most influential role to ensure adaptation at all levels toward the impact of climate change for residential consumers. It is the main responsibility of the government to arrange enough supports to help residential consumers adapt to climate change and try to make consumers self-sufficient by modification of certain behaviors rather than supply dependent. Government bodies need to carefully define their climate adaptation supports and incentive programs to influence residential-level consumption practices and demand management. Here, energy policies and investments need to be more strategic. The most critical problem is to identify the appropriate adaptation policies that favor the most vulnerable sectors such as the residential sector.

To evaluate both mitigation and adaptation policies, it is important to estimate the effect of climate change on energy usage around the world. Existing empirical figures, however, are concentrated in Western nations, especially the USA. To predict how electricity usage will shift in the city of Greater Accra, Ghana, the authors used regular household electricity consumption data.

The motivation for this paper and in particular the empirical analysis for Ghana is originality for the literature. This paper demonstrates an adequate understanding of the relevant literature in modern times.

The study evaluated the introduction of naltrexone in an Australian prison system for imprisoned male heroin users. Treatment outcomes were analysed for two sub‐samples taken from an unsuccessful randomised controlled trial. The first sample comprised 68 participants who were randomly allocated to naltrexone treatment. The second sample comprised 47 participants who commenced opioid pharmacotherapy during the study period. Thirteen per cent of subjects started naltrexone, with only 7% retained in treatment at six months. Six‐month retention was significantly lower in naltrexone compared to methadone (p = 0.0007). Poor patient acceptability and retention did not support oral naltrexone maintenance in this treatment group.

This paper aims to investigate how narrative is constructed to create connections with fat readers, how books function to envision spaces of fat liberation for young readers and to highlight the incredible importance of providing bigger mirrors (Bishop, 1990) for fat representation in children’s literature.

This paper analyzes and reflects on two texts that contain counternarratives of fatness: The (Other) F Word: A celebration of the fat and fierce edited by Angie Manfredi (2019) and Big by Vashti Harrison (2023) to interrogate how these two narratives intentionally disrupt anti-fat bias.

Body size and fatness are identities that need to be included in diversity efforts within education. Books like The (Other) F Word: A celebration of the fat and fierce (Manfredi, 2019) and Big (Harrison, 2023) offer positive representations of fatness, disrupt biases around body size and provide spaces that allow fat students to find joy, hope, connection and, more than anything, imagine a way toward liberation.

This paper highlights the need to include more narratives of positive fat representation within children’s literature and calls for educators to interrogate their own anti-fat biases and practices.

There is a lack of research on fat representation specifically within children and young adult literature. This paper provides an analysis of two pieces of literature with fat representation that brings attention to the need for this type of future research.