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What motivates a political party to develop overseas development volunteering projects for members? How do such activities affect individual volunteers and the party, more broadly? To address these questions, this paper analyses the UK Conservative Party's international development volunteering projects. Our data comprise 38 interviews with former volunteers and participant observation of one volunteering project in Rwanda in 2017 by one author. This predominantly self-reported data are supplemented with publicly available sources. We draw on employer-supported and state-supported volunteering literature to develop a framework for analysing drivers and effects of party-supported volunteering. We argue that political parties are under-researched sending communities, and that development volunteering constitutes a strategic resource that can be invoked to legitimise engagement with, and authority in, international development as part of the everyday political identity of Party members. As such, how volunteering is used to signal authority in a policy area warrants further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

REDD+ is a forest conservation and carbon trading scheme seeking to incentivise a reduction in emissions through payments. This article draws on Foucault's governmentality concept and Dean's analytics of government framework to analyse the REDD+ negotiations under the UNFCCC. It argues that negotiators perceived forest inhabitants as malleable subjects whose conduct can and should be "improved" through disciplinary techniques instantiated in forest monitoring practices. Forest inhabitants are not powerless or passive recipients of discipline, but these techniques foster a conduct that only values carbon at the expense of other ecological and cultural values and, further, encourage conservation purely based on cost-benefit reasoning. The article also interrogates the negotiations of safeguards meant to ensure that REDD+ does no social or ecological harm. It argues that the safeguards appear to allow forest inhabitants to decide on REDD+ implementation and governance, and protect their existing forest governance practices should they elect to do so. However, the safeguards are formulated in a voluntary manner, casting doubts on their ability to offer suitable protection. The article concludes by reflecting on the current demand for carbon credits from REDD+ projects and the implications this has for the disciplinary techniques and the conduct they foster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the rationale for and impacts of Conservative Party overseas volunteering projects from 2007 to 2017. Using interview data and participant observation, we uncover aims of project founders and explore impacts of volunteering on Party members and policy. We make three substantial contributions. The first focuses on the survival of Conservative Party modernisation strategies launched under David Cameron. Support for development, particularly Party pledges to spend 0.7% of UK gross national income on aid, are poorly explained by existing research. We argue that a focus on volunteering helps explain the survival of this commitment. Second, we argue that volunteering experience may support sustained Party policy change by enhancing 'issue ownership'. Our final contribution is providing the first analysis of political parties as development-volunteer sending communities. Through new data and distinctive contributions, we demonstrate that understanding Party-supported volunteering promotes improved explanations of Party modernisation persistence and policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Accident statistics assembled by the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI) have shown that buses are overrepresented when it comes to accidents on icy and snowy roads. For a better understanding of the problem, the performance of modern summer and winter tyres on winter road conditions had to be assessed. The objective of this work has been to go beyond standard road grip studies, and instead investigate how the driver''s possibility to deal with one challenging situation depends on the tyres and tyre configuration. This paper describes a novel methodology where measurements with different tyres on ice in VTI''s tyre test facility, enabled a simulator study for evaluating the impact of different tyre characteristics when driving in conditions with strong side wind on a slippery road. The main results of the study are: to deal with strong side wind, good front wheel grip is most important, and while non-studded winter tyres provided little or no improvement over summer tyres, studded winter tyres significantly reduced the risk to run off the road. Furthermore, it is very difficult for the drivers to judge, beforehand, whether a vehicle with a particular tyre configuration will perform good or bad. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper refines the two-regime transient theory developed by Romano et al. [Romano L, Bruzelius F, Jacobson B. Unsteady-state brush theory. Vehicle Syst Dyn. 2020;59:11–29. DOI: .] to include the effect of combined slip. A nonlinear system is derived that describes the non-steady generation of tyre forces and considers the coupling between the longitudinal and lateral characteristics. The proposed formulation accounts for both the carcass and the bristle dynamics, and represents a generalisation of the single contact point models. A formal analysis is conducted to investigate the effect of the tyre carcass anisotropy on the properties of the system. It is concluded that a fundamental role is played by the ratio between the longitudinal and lateral relaxation lengths. In particular, it is demonstrated that the maximum slip that guarantees (partial) adhesion conditions does not coincide with the stationary value and decreases considerably for highly anisotropic tyres. The dissipative nature of the model is also analysed using elementary tools borrowed from the classic theory for nonlinear systems. A comparison is performed against the single contact point models, showing a good agreement especially towards the full-nonlinear one. Furthermore, compared to the single contact point models, the two-regime appears to be able to better replicate the exact dynamics of the tyre forces predicted by the complete brush theory. Finally, the transient model is partially validated against experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on a single electron transistor (SET) where the electronic levels of a single π-conjugated molecule control the electron transport properties. The molecule can be in several distinct charged states from +3 to -4. The experiment closely resembles electrochemical measurements allowing us to report on quantitative measurements of the redox potentials (or ionization potentials) of a single molecule in a solid state device. The molecular excitation energies extracted from the SET measurements are strongly correlated with electrochemical data. In contrast, the HOMO–LUMO gap is strongly reduced in a solid state environment, as compared to solution. We suggest that this surprising effect may be caused by image charges generated in the source and drain electrodes. They will result in a strong localization of the charges on the molecule. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A combination of classical Coulomb charging, electronic level spacings, spin, and vibrational modes determines the single-electron transfer reactions through nanoscale systems connected to external electrodes by tunnelling barriers. Coulomb charging effects have been shown to dominate such transport in semiconductor quantum dots, metallic and semiconducting nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, and single molecules. Recently, transport has been shown to be also influenced by spin-through the Kondo effect-for both nanotubes and single molecules, as well as by vibrational fine structure. Here we describe a single-electron transistor where the electronic levels of a single p-conjugated molecule in several distinct charged states control the transport properties. The molecular electronic levels extracted from the single-electron-transistor measurements are strongly perturbed compared to those of the molecule in solution, leading to a very significant reduction of the gap between the highest occupied molecular orbital and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital. We suggest, and verify by simple model calculations, that this surprising effect could be caused by image charges generated in the source and drain electrodes resulting in a strong localization of the charges on the molecule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates an approach for predicting rut formation in asphalt concrete (AC) layers. The approach is based on a linear viscoelastic model for predicting permanent vertical strain in AC layers subjected to a moving load. The input data are tyre pressure, loading speed, lateral wandering of loading wheel, shear modulus and phase angle of AC layer. The analytical approach takes into consideration the change in material characteristics in respect of temperature and changes in the air void content of AC layers due to repeated loading. The approach is verified by a full-scale accelerated loading test at different temperatures. The approach has shown good agreement as regards the prediction of flow rutting in AC layers. In addition, the approach is capable of calculating rutting profiles including the upheaval, which is important for estimating rut depth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]