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Climate change, deforestation and hydropower dams are contributing to environmental change in the Lower Mekong River region, the combined effects of which are felt by many rural Cambodians. How people perceive and manage the effects of environmental change will influence future adaptation strategies. The objective of this research was to investigate whether the use of a low-cost, explicitly spatial method (participatory mapping) can help identify locally relevant opportunities and challenges to climate change adaptation in small, flood-prone communities. Four villages along the banks of the Mekong River in Kratie Province, Cambodia, were the subject of this research. To identify perceived environmental hazards and adaptive responses, eight workshops were conducted using focus-group interviews and participatory mapping. The communities’ responses highlight the evolving nature of environmental hazards, as droughts increase in perceived importance while the patterns of wet season flooding were also perceived to be changing. The attribution of the drivers of these hazards was strongly skewed towards local factors such as deforestation and less towards regional or global drivers affecting the hydrology of the Mekong and climate patterns. Combining participatory mapping with focus-group interviews allowed a greater depth of understanding of the vulnerabilities and opportunities available to communities than reliance on a single qualitative method. The study highlights the potential for a bottom-up transfer of information to strengthen existing climate change policies and tailor adaptation plans to local conditions.

Stress and the military go hand-in-hand, particularly in combat environments. While some personality traits or types weaken relationships between stress and performance, others, such as psychopathy, may strengthen them. In the present chapter, we consider the ramifications of individuals with high levels of psychopathy or psychopathic tendencies in the military with regard to both their own stress and performance and that of those around them. We discuss different reactions to psychological and physical stress, as well as the implications of psychopathic tendencies as they relate to current military issues, including gender, leadership, teamwork, turnover, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide. By juxtaposing relevant research findings on stress and psychopathy, we conclude that psychopathic tendencies should have neither uniformly negative nor positive effects on stress and performance in the military. Rather, effects on such individuals and the peripheral others with whom they interact will likely vary greatly depending on numerous factors.

The chapter examines to what extent research from social cognitive neuroscience can inform ethical leadership. We evaluate the contribution of brain research to the understanding of ethical leaders as moral persons as well the understanding of their role as moral managers. The areas of social cognitive neuroscience that mirror these two aspects of ethical leadership comprise research relating to understanding oneself, understanding others, and the relationship between the self and others. Within these, we deem it relevant for ethical leadership to incorporate research findings about self-reflection, self-regulation, theory of mind, empathy, trust, and fairness. The chapter highlights social cognitive neuroscience research in these areas and discusses its actual and potential contributions to ethical leadership. The chapter thereby engages also with the broader discussion on the neuroscience of leadership. We suggest new avenues for future research in the field of leadership ethics and responsibility.

This chapter honors the opportunity I have had to learn with David Maines over the past 35 years. I connect my research on communication and disability, specifically among individuals who are blind and visually impaired, to Maines' discussion of narratives incorporating Rawlins' exploration of similarity and difference. I discuss narratives of disability as difference using three examples: A short story written by H. G. Wells; the American with Disabilities Act; and interviews conducted with elite blind goalball athletes. I conclude with 10 lessons learned about disability and difference including that the goal of my research is to help us all perceive disability as a difference that matters, but not as a difference that disables.

Fractional slot permanent magnet (PM) brushless machines having concentrated non‐overlapping windings have been the subject of research over last few years. They have already been employed in the commercial hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) due to high‐torque density, high efficiency, low‐torque ripple, good flux‐weakening and fault‐tolerance performance. The purpose of this paper is to overview recent development and research challenges in such machines in terms of various structural and design features for electric vehicle (EV)/HEV applications.

In the paper, fractional slot PM brushless machines are overviewed according to the following main and sub‐topics: first, machine topologies: slot and pole number combinations, all and alternate teeth wound (double‐ and single‐layer windings), unequal tooth structure, modular stator, interior magnet rotor; second, machine parameters and control performance: winding inductances, flux‐weakening capability, fault‐tolerant performance; and third, parasitic effects: cogging torque, iron loss, rotor eddy current loss, unbalanced magnetic force, acoustic noise and vibration.

Many fractional slot PM machine topologies exist. Owing to rich mmf harmonics, fractional slot PM brushless machines exhibit relatively high rotor eddy current loss, potentially high unbalanced magnetic force and acoustic noise and vibration, while the reluctance torque component is relatively low or even negligible when an interior PM rotor is employed.

This is the first overview paper which systematically reviews the recent development and research challenges in fractional‐slot PM machines. It summarizes their various structural and design features for EV/HEV applications.

WE write on the eve of an Annual Meeting of the Library Association. We expect many interesting things from it, for although it is not the first meeting under the new constitution, it is the first in which all the sections will be actively engaged. From a membership of eight hundred in 1927 we are, in 1930, within measurable distance of a membership of three thousand; and, although we have not reached that figure by a few hundreds—and those few will be the most difficult to obtain quickly—this is a really memorable achievement. There are certain necessary results of the Association's expansion. In the former days it was possible for every member, if he desired, to attend all the meetings; today parallel meetings are necessary in order to represent all interests, and members must make a selection amongst the good things offered. Large meetings are not entirely desirable; discussion of any effective sort is impossible in them; and the speakers are usually those who always speak, and who possess more nerve than the rest of us. This does not mean that they are not worth a hearing. Nevertheless, seeing that at least 1,000 will be at Cambridge, small sectional meetings in which no one who has anything to say need be afraid of saying it, are an ideal to which we are forced by the growth of our numbers.

This essay offers a subjective literary exploration of personal events relevant to understanding an assault on academic freedom in a two-year college. The critically qualitative inquiry focuses on two events: (a) the questioning by faculty of dual credit policies and (b) an administratively engineered disciplinary action that functioned to have a chilling effect on free speech and to, thereby, quell academic freedom. The dual credit story comes in the form of an embedded narrative essay previously published as a Facebook note. That embedded essay presents the tale of the author and a colleague, the advisor for their community college newspaper, exercising their academic freedom to critically engage a community college administration’s violations of Illinois State dual credit laws. The embedded essay serves also to reveal an administrative response to the professors’ decision to report the violation of state law to the Higher Learning Commission and the Illinois Community College Board. Following that, the essay provides a qualitative examination of the administrative response and explains how the response served to quell academic freedom.

The Ba River catchment and delta on the island of Viti Levu, Fiji, supports a wealth of livelihoods and is populated by diverse communities who are living with an increased frequency and intensity of hydro-meteorological hazards (floods, cyclones and droughts). Participatory mapping as part of focus group discussions is a tool that can be used to elucidate communities’ understanding of the differing impacts of multiple hazards, as well as the strategies used to prepare and respond to different hazards. In this chapter, the authors present the results of qualitative research undertaken with members of three communities along the Ba River, from the Nausori highlands to the coastal mangroves, with a particular focus on recent floods (2009, 2012) and Tropical Cyclone Winston (2016). The communities draw on a wide range of livelihood strategies from fishing and agriculture to tourism and outside work. Natural hazard events vary in their impact on these livelihood strategies across the landscape and seascape, so that community members can adjust their activities accordingly. The temporal ‘signatures’ of ongoing impacts are also variable across communities and resources. The results suggest that taking a broad, landscape (and seascape) approach to understanding how communities draw livelihoods is valuable in informing effective and inclusive adaptation strategies for environmental change. Furthermore, documenting how the landscape is used in a mapped output may be a valuable tool for future social impact assessment for resource extraction activities.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new optimal design for integral slot permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) to shape the air-gap magnetic field in sinusoidal and to reduce the cogging torque, simultaneously.

For obtaining this new optimal design, the influence of different magnetizations of permanent magnets (PMs), including radial, parallel and halbach magnetization is investigated on the performance of one typical PMSM by using the conformal mapping (CM) method. To reduce the cogging torque even more, the technique of slot opening shift is also implemented on the stator slots of analyzed PMSM without reduction in the main performance, including the air-gap magnetic field, the average torque and back-electromotive force (back-EMF).

Finally, an optimal configuration including the Hat-type magnet poles with halbach magnetization on the rotor and shifted slot openings on the stator is obtained through the CM method, which shows the main reduction in cogging torque and the harmonic content of air-gap magnetic field.

The obtained optimal design is completely practical and is validated by comparing with the corresponding results obtained through finite element method.

This paper presents a new optimal design for integral slot PMSMs, which can include different design considerations, such as the reduction of cogging torque and the total harmonic distortion of air-gap magnetic field by using the CM method.