1,384 research outputs found
Description by author Alex Irvine of his recent participation in the San Diego C
No full textDescription by author Alex Irvine of his recent participation in the San Diego Comic-Con, one of the largest conferences of comic/media/book producers and consumers. Irvine was there to promote his new fiction book, One King, One Soldier, published by Del Rey
Chronicles of the Cariboo: Dunlevy's Discovery of Gold on the Horsefly:
No full textwritten by Alex P. McInnes.Being a true story of the first discovery of gold in the Cariboo District on the Horsefly River by Peter C. Dunlevey
Infrastructure bottlenecks, private provision, and industrial productivity : a study of Indonesian and Thai cities
No full textThis research project followed an earlier similar project on Nigeria, applying the same methods. A sample of manufacturers was surveyed to document their responses to infrastructure deficiencies in electricity, water, transport, telecommunications, and waste disposal. They found the manufacturers undertook significant expenditures to offset deficiencies in publicly provided infrastructure services, and that changing public policy toward privately supplied infrastructure and changing the pricing of public infrastructure could yield significant savings in social costs. Thailand and Indonesia have made significant strides in following the policies for private sector participation in infrastructure provision. Nigeria, where public infrastructure monopolies still dominate, lags behind, yet stands to benefit most from such policy reform. Government policy toward the industrial organization and pricing of infrastructure sectors can significantly help a developing economy realize the benefits of private sector participation in the provision of infrastructure services.Banks&Banking Reform,Decentralization,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Municipal Financial Management,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Urban Services to the Poor,Urban Services to the Poor,Public Sector Economics&Finance
Sustainability and Bioethics
No full textGreen Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Ethics & Philosophy of Technolog
Multi-Objective Calibration For Agent-Based Models
No full textAgent-based modelling is already proving to be an immensely useful tool for scientific and industrial modelling applications. Whilst the building of such models will always be something between an art and a science, once a detailed model has been built, the process of parameter calibration should be performed as precisely as possible. This task is often made difficult by the proliferation of model parameters with non-linear interactions. In addition to this, these models generate a large number of outputs, and their ‘accuracy’ can be measured by many different, often conflicting, criteria. In this paper we demonstrate the use of multi-objective optimisation tools to calibrate just such an agent-based model. We use an agent-based model of a financial market as an exemplar and calibrate the model using a multi-objective genetic algorithm. The technique is automated and requires no explicit weighting of criteria prior to calibration. The final choice of parameter set can be made after calibration with the additional input of the domain expert
Methodology of Provable Events in Distributed Socio-Technical Systems (UTE / TCR / TLI / GLOW)
No full textA hierarchical publication package for authorship priority claim. Universal Theory of Events (UTE) — ontological foundation defining event as triple e=(A,C,X). Theory of Converging Realities (TCR) — epistemological extension with polyvector convergence model. Theory of Labor Infrastructure (TLI) — domain application for human, algorithmic, and robotic labor. Mathematical Appendix — formal proofs including Stability Phase Boundary theorem, Hoeffding/Bernstein concentration bounds, adversarial breakdown analysis, and K-class extension. GLOW — global infrastructure vision. Bilingual (Russian/English). Author: Song Dal No (Alex Noh, 노송달). December 2025 — February 2026
Development of the Zimbabwe family planning program
No full textFamily planning was introduced in Zimbabwe as a voluntary movement in the 1950s. Volunteers formed a Family Planning Association in the mid-1960s. The government became interested in family planning in the late 1960s after analysis of the 1961 population census. It gave the Family Planning Association an annual grant, allowed contraceptives to be available through Ministry of Health facilities, and allowed nonmedical personnel to initiate and resupply family planning clients with condoms and pills. But before Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980, family planning was viewed with great suspicion by the black majority, so the program's effectiveness was limited to the urban few. A new era began after independence. The new government took over theFamily Planning Association and changed its outlook completely. Through government and international donor support, the family planning program was restructured and expanded. The number of family planning personnel more than doubled in some units. More service delivery points were set up - particularly in rural areas. And the information, education, and communication and evaluation and research units were established. Through a World Bank-assisted project (with grant funding from Norway and Denmark), the Ministry of Health began strengthening its family planning capabilities. These efforts helped increase the contraceptive prevalence rate from about 14 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 1988. But the program's growth is beginning to stall. More effort and resources are needed if the program is to grow or even maintain its present status. Particularly important are the following: designing innovative strategies to reach hard-to-reach populations; giving more emphasis to information, education, and communication, especially for men and youths, using multimedia; involving other sectors in the delivery of family planning services; broadening the mix of contraceptive methods (especially promoting long-term and permanent methods); making use of alternative family planning delivery systems, such as the use of depot holders, volunteers, and government extension workers; establishing a national population policy; and considering cost recovery and other measures for self-sustainment and program growth.Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,ICT Policy and Strategies,Gender and Health,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Adolescent Health
The 2006 park city appam spring conference
No full textThe article presents a discussion relating to public policy and management programs in Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, which are compared with similar programs in the U.S. It was inferred that the comparing programs raises important questions as to whether developments within countries and across countries have been successful in creating education and training offerings that are fit for purpose. According to the author, the study of public policy programs indicates that there are several challenges ahead in terms of making good decisions on the form and content of programs that would add value to governments and citizens. Furthermore, the complexity of policy environments has major implications for the design and delivery of education and training programs in policy analysis
Education and earnings inequality in Mexico
No full textEducation attainment levels increased dramatically for Mexico's labor force in the 1980s and early 1990s. In parallel, the country experienced a pronounced increase in earnings inequality from 1984-94, reflected in a higher dispersion of wages and an absolute decline in the real incomes of less educated, poorer Mexicans. This increased wage dispersion presents policymakers with a tradeoff between efficiency considerations (favoring increased spending on higher education) and equity considerations (favoring a more equal distribution of per student spending) in the allocation of fiscal resources to education. The author concludes that the best way to deal with this equity-efficiency tradeoff is to encourage greater private participation in higher education. His main findings are that: a) The accumulation of human capital during 1984-94, as proxied by education attainment, was accompanied by a more equal distribution of education attainment levels over that period and, thus, exerted an equalizing effect on the distribution of incomes. The increased income inequalityobserved over that period appears to be caused by an increased rate of skill-based technological change, whose transmission to Mexico and other developing countries may have been facilitated by the increased openness of their economies. b) The greater dispersion of wager observed in Mexico during the past decade raised the rates of return on investing in higher education, reversing the traditional pattern where primary education exhibits the highest rates of return. c) The social rates of return across levels of schooling were more uniform in 1994 than in 1984, suggesting a more efficient assignment of education spending. At the same time, the distribution of spending on education became more egalitarian, as per student spending in higher education declined markedly compared with per student spending at the primary level. This surprising coincidence in the pattern of spending on education was only possible because Mexico started out with a very distorted resource allocation in education that was both highly inequitable and inefficient. As Mexico's policymakers are on the way to correcting these distortions, the opportunities for avoiding the equity-efficiency tradeoff within Mexico's centralized education framework will become progressively exhausted. d) There is little reason to expect the pace of technological change, which appears mainly responsible for raising wage dispersion and the relative returns on higher education, to abate. Efficiency considerations dictate that Mexico should respond by devoting more resources to higher education. However, the federal budget, which traditionally has financed the lion's share of higher education costs in Mexico, is unable to accommodate additional spending on higher education, while spending cuts elsewhere in the education sector are bound to raise serious equity questions. Thus, to avoid falling behind in terms of human capital accumulation, greater private sector participation is necessary, at least, in terms of cost recovery from the main beneficiaries of higher education.Decentralization,Teaching and Learning,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Curriculum&Instruction,Teaching and Learning,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Gender and Education,Curriculum&Instruction
Beyond recurrent costs: an institutional analysis of the unsustainability of donor-supported reforms in agricultural extension
No full textInternational donors have spent billions of dollars over the past four decades in developing and/or reforming the agricultural extension service delivery arrangements in developing countries. However, many of these reforms, supported through short-term projects, became unsustainable once aid funding had ceased. The unavailability of recurrent funding has predominantly been highlighted in the literature as the key reason for this undesirable outcome, while little has been written about institutional factors. The purpose of this article is to examine the usefulness of taking an institutional perspective in explaining the unsustainability of donor-supported extension reforms and derive lessons for improvement. Using a framework drawn from the school of institutionalism in a Bangladeshi case study, we have found that a reform becomes unsustainable because of poor demands for extension information and advice; missing, weak, incongruent, and perverse institutional frameworks governing the exchange of extension goods (services); and a lack of institutional learning and change during the reform process. Accordingly, we have argued that strategies for sustainable extension reforms should move beyond financial considerations and include such measures as making extension goods (services) more tangible and monetary in nature, commissioning in-depth studies to learn about local institutions, crafting new institutions and/or reforming the weak and perverse institutions prevailing in developing countries. We emphasize the need to address three categories of institutions – regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive – and call for an alignment among them. We further argue that, in order to be sustainable, a reform should take a systemic approach in institutional capacity building and, for this to be possible, adopt a long-term program approach, as opposed to a short-term project approach
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