4,766 research outputs found
Does the amount of participation matter? Public comments, agency responses and the time to finalize a regulation
No full textThe notice and comment rulemaking process is a fundamental part of how agencies write regulations. While this process is starting to receive more empirical attention, the question of how the number of comments that an agency receives affects its decision-making process has received little examination. This paper uses Boolean analysis to examine nine rules from two agencies at the Department of Health and Human Services and evaluates the impact of a high volume of comments on agency changes to proposed rules and the time an agency takes to finalize a proposed rule. These nine cases suggest that agencies are most likely to change their proposals when they receive a high volume of comments on highly complex rules that are not very politically salient. Highly complex rules are also likely to take a long time to finalize when there are many public comments however it is often other factors that cause a long delay between proposed and final rules.Peer reviewedThe final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11077-007-9051-
The Role of Procedural Controls in OSHA's Ergonomics Rulemaking
No full textFew, if any, regulations over the past decade have received the publicity or engendered the controversy of OSHA’s ergonomics regulation. Some may see the ergonomics rule as the paradigmatic instance of procedural hurdles holding up and eventually destroying a regulation. The purpose of this article is to examine the role that procedure played in the ergonomics rulemaking. To draw lessons from the ergonomics rulemaking I have conducted analyses of the four publicly available versions and conducted interviews with seven high ranking officials at OSHA and the Small Business Administration. I find that of the procedural hurdles faced by OSHA, the notice and comment requirement had the largest impact on the final rule. OMB review and requirements to conduct a cost benefit analysis served largely as a fire alarm to political overseers and the required small business panel had largely symbolic effects. The more traditional control of Congressional budgetary oversight had the greatest effect by delaying the rule for three years which eventually doomed OSHA’s attempts to regulate.Peer reviewe
An Evaluation of the Bush Administration Reforms to the Regulatory Process
No full textThe Bush Administration has implemented more reforms to the regulatory process than any of its predecessors. These reforms are often stereotyped as anti-regulatory. This article examines the reforms as a whole and asks which interests have been empowered by the Bush Administration regulatory reforms. I believe this method is a more effective way of assessing the impact of the reforms. I find that in addition to adding potential costs to the regulatory process, the reforms are likely to empower powerful interest groups and the presidency. Whether the impact of these reforms is pro-regulation or anti-regulation will depend on how a future administration more dedicated to regulatory protections uses them. I also lay out a research agenda to better empirically assess the impact of these regulatory reforms.Peer reviewed"Issue published online: 11 APR 2007. Article first published online: 11 APR 2007"--Publisher website
Defragmenting the Regulatory Process
No full textThe regulatory process is often criticized for being cumbersome and slow, much like a computer whose hard drive is fragmented by files no longer used or useful. Like such a computer, the regulatory process contains many requirement of dubious utility. These include the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Regulatory Flexibility Act, the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, and numerous executive orders. While other parts of the regulatory process such as notice and comment and cost-benefit analysis have received much more academic attention, these other parts of the process deserve examination as well. This paper argues that such an examination will reveal that these statutes and executive orders add little of value to the regulatory process while consuming agency resources. An improved requirement for cost-benefit analysis with distributional analysis could easily replace virtually all of these requirements and improve regulations while reducing the time needed to promulgate regulations.Peer reviewe
Transforming Power Relationships: Leadership, Risk, and Hope. IHS Political Science Series No. 135, May 2013
No full textChronic communal conflicts resemble the prisoner’s dilemma. Both communities prefer peace to war. But neither trusts the other, viewing the other’s gain as its own loss, so
potentially shared interests often go unrealized.
Achieving positive-sum outcomes from apparently zero-sum struggles requires a kind of riskembracing leadership. To succeed leaders must: a) see power relations as potentially
positive-sum; b) strengthen negotiating adversaries instead of weakening them; and c) demonstrate hope for a positive future and take great personal risks to achieve it.
Such leadership is exemplified by Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk in the South African democratic transition. To illuminate the strategic dilemmas Mandela and de Klerk faced, we examine the work of Robert Axelrod, Thomas Schelling, and Josep Colomer, who highlight important dimensions of the problem but underplay the role of risk-embracing leadership. Finally we discuss leadership successes and failures in the Northern Ireland settlement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
A First- and Second-Order Motion Energy Analysis of Peripheral Motion Illusions Leads to Further Evidence of “Feature Blur” in Peripheral Vision
No full textAnatomical and physiological differences between the central and peripheral visual systems are well documented. Recent findings have suggested that vision in the periphery is not just a scaled version of foveal vision, but rather is relatively poor at representing spatial and temporal phase and other visual features. Shapiro, Lu, Huang, Knight, and Ennis (2010) have recently examined a motion stimulus (the “curveball illusion”) in which the shift from foveal to peripheral viewing results in a dramatic spatial/temporal discontinuity. Here, we apply a similar analysis to a range of other spatial/temporal configurations that create perceptual conflict between foveal and peripheral vision.To elucidate how the differences between foveal and peripheral vision affect super-threshold vision, we created a series of complex visual displays that contain opposing sources of motion information. The displays (referred to as the peripheral escalator illusion, peripheral acceleration and deceleration illusions, rotating reversals illusion, and disappearing squares illusion) create dramatically different perceptions when viewed foveally versus peripherally. We compute the first-order and second-order directional motion energy available in the displays using a three-dimensional Fourier analysis in the (x, y, t) space. The peripheral escalator, acceleration and deceleration illusions and rotating reversals illusion all show a similar trend: in the fovea, the first-order motion energy and second-order motion energy can be perceptually separated from each other; in the periphery, the perception seems to correspond to a combination of the multiple sources of motion information. The disappearing squares illusion shows that the ability to assemble the features of Kanisza squares becomes slower in the periphery.The results lead us to hypothesize “feature blur” in the periphery (i.e., the peripheral visual system combines features that the foveal visual system can separate). Feature blur is of general importance because humans are frequently bringing the information in the periphery to the fovea and vice versa
Turbulence Modeling for Oscillatory Pipe Flow
No full textOscillating pipe flows, with zero mean velocity, are common in engineering systems and particularly in Stirling-based engines and heat pumps, e.g. pulse-tube cryogenic coolers. These flows are particularly challenging to model because their flow state depends on both the Reynolds number and the dimensionless frequency or Womerlsey number. A central challenge in modeling these systems is that the Reynolds number varies greatly within the cycle, often crossing from laminar to turbulent flow regimes. Indeed, flows that have super-critical Reynolds numbers may pass between states a total of four times; two laminar-turbulent transitions and two turbulent-laminar transitions. Contrary to a steady flow in which the transition between the laminar and the turbulent regimes is affected only by the Reynolds number, for oscillating flow the transition is affected by a combination of Reos and a dimensionless frequency-based number such as Womersley (Wo). The objective of this work is to develop and validate a computational method that solves the incompressible oscillating flow equations for different combinations of Reos and Wo
Marc Shapiro, Bukowski: On Film.
No full textMarc Shapiro’s latest writing feat aims to shed light on the complicated relationship between the iconic American author Charles Bukowski and the American movie industry. Shapiro is known to the American readership through his numerous celebrity biographies of artists, authors, musicians, and even politicians. Driven by his own admiration for Bukowski, he coins the term “Bukowskiphile” to describe himself in the opening pages of the book. Shapiro draws information from a wide variety of sour..
The separation of monocular and binocular contrast
No full textThe contrast asynchrony is a stimulus configuration that illustrates the visual system's separable responses to luminance and luminance contrast information (Shapiro, 2008; Shapiro et al., 2004). When two disks, whose luminances modulate in phase with each other, are each surrounded by a disk, one light and one dark, observers can see both the in-phase brightness signals and the antiphase contrast signals and can separate the two. Here we present the results of experiments in which observers viewed a similar stimulus dichoptically. We report that no asynchrony is perceived when one eye is presented with modulating disks and the other eye is presented with the black and white surround rings, nor is an asynchrony perceived in gradient versions of the contrast asynchrony. We also explore the "window shade illusion" (Shapiro, Charles, & Shear-Heyman, 2005) dichoptically and find that when a modulating disk is presented to one eye and a horizontally split black/white annulus is presented to the other, observers perceive a "shading" motion up and down the disk. This shading can be seen in either direction in the binocular condition, but it is almost always seen as moving towards low contrast in the monocular condition. These findings indicate the presence of separable retinal and cortical networks for contrast processing at different temporal and spatial scales
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