Suchergebnisse

A recent Horizons study conducted jointly with two Dominican NGOs assessed the impact of two environmental-structural models in reducing HIV-related risk among female sex workers in the Dominican Republic and compared their cost-effectiveness. In the two cities studied, there were improvements from pre- to post-intervention in the key outcome variables, however the type and level of these changes varied by intervention approach. Based on our findings, program planners and policymakers involved in the study in the Dominican Republic agree that the integrated solidarity and policy model in conjunction with ongoing peer education and community mobilization activities is an appropriate, cost-effective, and ethical intervention package. The current dialogue is now focused on how to scale up this successful pilot experience in a way that continues to respect all members of the sex work community and to be effective in curbing the HIV epidemic.

This book provides a new all-round perspective on the life and work of Edgar Zilsel (1891-1944) as a philosopher, historian, and sociologist. He was close to the Vienna Circle and has been hitherto almost exclusively referred to in terms of the so-called "Zilsel thesis" on the origins of modern science. Much beyond this "thesis", Zilsel's brilliant work provides original insights on a broad number of topics, ranging from the philosophy of probability and statistics to the concept of "genius", from the issues of scientific laws and theories to the sociological background of science and philosophy, and to the political analysis of the problems of his time. Praised by Herbert Feigl as an "outstanding brilliant mind", Zilsel, being as a Social-Democrat of Jewish origins, mostly led a life of hardship marked by emigration and coming to a sudden and tragic end by suicide in 1944. The impossibility of an academic career has hindered the reception of Zilsel's scientific work for a long time. This volume is a contribution to its late reception, providing new insights especially into his work during his years in Vienna; moreover, it shows the heuristic value of Zilsel's ideas for future Scholar research - in philosophy, history, and sociology.

The crisis of borders and prisons can be seen starkly in statistics. In 2011 some 1,500 migrants died trying to enter Europe, and the United States deported nearly 400,000 and imprisoned some 2.3 million people-more than at any other time in history. International borders are increasingly militarized places embedded within domestic policing and imprisonment and entwined with expanding prison-industrial complexes. Beyond Walls and Cages offers scholarly and activist perspectives on these issues and explores how the international community can move toward a more humane future. Working at a range of geographic scales and locations, contributors examine concrete and ideological connections among prisons, migration policing and detention, border fortification, and militarization. They challenge the idea that prisons and borders create safety, security, and order, showing that they can be forms of coercive mobility that separate loved ones, disempower communities, and increase shared harms of poverty. Walls and cages can also fortify wealth and power inequalities, racism, and gender and sexual oppression. As governments increasingly rely on criminalization and violent measures of exclusion and containment, strategies for achieving change are essential. Beyond Walls and Cages develops abolitionist, no borders, and decolonial analyses and methods for social change, showing how seemingly disconnected forms of state violence are interconnected. Creating a more just and free world-whether in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, the Morocco-Spain region, South Africa, Montana, or Philadelphia-requires that people who are most affected become central to building alternatives to global crosscurrents of criminalization and militarization. Contributors: Olga Aksyutina, Stokely Baksh, Cynthia Bejarano, Anne Bonds, Borderlands Autonomist, Collective, Andrew Burridge,

Cite: Academy of Science of South Africa, (ASSAf), (2016). Proceedings of the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) Conference on Science Advice. [Online] Available at: DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/assaf.2016/0005 ; Welcome Remarks: Prof Daya Reddy - Keynote Speaker: Prof Sir Peter Gluckman - Keynote Speaker: Prof Jos van der Meer - Topic 1 – Science Advice Ecosystem - Dr Flavia Schlegel - Prof Howard Alper - Dr Khotso Mokhele - Prof Thomas Zeltner - Dr Tolu Oni - Topic 2 – Science Advice in Times of Disasters/ Emergencies - Prof Oyewale Tomori - Prof Coleen Vogel - Prof Ram Babu Singh - Prof Bernard Slippers - Prof Virginia Murray - Topic 3 – Science Advice in the International Arena with a Special Focus on Synthetic Biology - Prof Francisco Gonzalo Bolivar-Zapata - Prof Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker - Prof Rees Kassen - Proceedings of the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) Conference on Science Advice - Prof Keymanthri Moodley - Country Readiness for Science Advice - Dr Orakanoke Phanraksa - Prof Mahouton Norbert Hounkonnou - Prof Kurt Lambeck - Dr Margaret Hamburg - Prof Jacqueline McGlade - Topic 5 – Interplay between Science Advice, Politics and the Media - Ms Linda Nordling - Mr David Mair - Prof Charles Weijer - Prof Sameh Soror - Prof Bruce Alberts - Discussion - Closing: Prof Daya Reddy and Prof Jörg Hacker ; InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) Conference on Science Advice

This thesis explored the history of military simulations and linked it to the current challenges of interoperability. The research illustrated the challenge of interoperability in integrating different networks, databases, standards, and interfaces and how it results in U.S. Army organizations constantly spending time and money to create and implement irreproducible Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) integrating architectures to accomplish comparable tasks. Although the U.S. Army has made advancements in interoperability, it has struggled with this challenge since the early 1990s. These improvements have been inadequate due to evolving and growing needs of the user coupled with the technical complexities of interoperating legacy systems with emergent systems arising from advances in technology. To better understand the impact of the continued evolution of simulations, this paper mapped Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs with Tolk's Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model (LCIM). This mapping illustrated a common relationship in both the Hierarchy of Needs and the LCIM model depicting that each level increases with complexity and the proceeding lower level must first be achieved prior to reaching the next. Understanding the continuum of complexity of interoperability, as requirements or needs, helped to determine why the previous funding and technical efforts have been inadequate in mitigating the interoperability challenges within U.S. Army simulations. As the U.S. Army's simulation programs continue to evolve while the military and contractor personnel turnover rate remains near constant, a method of capturing and passing on the tacit knowledge from one personnel staffing life cycle to the next must be developed in order to economically and quickly reproduce complex simulation events. This thesis explored a potential solution to this challenge, the Executable Architecture Systems Engineering (EASE) research project managed by the U.S. Army's Simulation and Training Technology Center in the Army Research Laboratory within the Research, Development and Engineering Command. However, there are two main drawbacks to EASE; it is still in the prototype stage and has not been fully tested and evaluated as a simulation tool within the community of practice. In order to determine if EASE has the potential to reduce the micro as well as macro interoperability, an EASE experiment was conducted as part of this thesis. The following three alternative hypothesis were developed, tested, and accepted as a result of the research for this thesis:Ha1 = Expert stakeholders believe the EASE prototype does have potential as a U.S. Army technical solution to help mitigate the M(&)S interoperability challenge. Ha2 = Expert stakeholders believe the EASE prototype does have potential as a U.S. Army managerial solution to help mitigate the M(&)S interoperability challenge. Ha3 = Expert stakeholders believe the EASE prototype does have potential as a U.S. Army knowledge management solution to help mitigate the M(&)S interoperability challenge. To conduct this experiment, eleven participants representing ten different organizations across the three M(&)S Domains were selected to test EASE using a modified Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) approach developed by Davis. Indexes were created from the participants' responses to include both the quality of participants and research questions. The Cronbach Alpha Test for reliability was used to test the reliability of the adapted TAM. The Wilcoxon Signed Ranked test provided the statistical analysis that formed the basis of the research; that determined the EASE project has the potential to help mitigate the interoperability challenges in the U.S. Army's M(&)S domains. ; 2013-05-01 ; M.S. ; Engineering and Computer Science, Industrial Engr and Mgmt Sys ; Masters ; This record was generated from author submitted information.

Abstract
So far, interest in policy and political sciences has mostly centered around the varieties of policy advisory systems (PASs) and knowledge regimes in consolidated democracies rather than in consolidated autocracies, which largely remain as black boxes. Drawing on a hybrid literature review, this article aims to fill this gap. It reviews selected articles published between 1992 and February 2023 in the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge Social Science Citation Index database to not only to reveal the current state of empirical and theoretical knowledge and persistent knowledge gaps but also to offer an integration of the literature that leads to a preliminary conceptual framework in this emerging topic. In doing so, it contributes to the body of knowledge on this topic in three main ways. First, it provides a comprehensive review of PASs in consolidated autocracies to identify the central features of policy knowledge production within and across autocracies. Second, it proposes "the vicious circle of authoritarian PAS and knowledge regime" as a conceptual approach. In doing so, it takes a modest step toward a holistic conceptualization and synthesis of this literature to date. Third, it establishes connections between fragmented literature studies; identifies theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and methodological gaps; and proposes suggestions concerning promising paths for future research.

Yogendra Singh, the sociologist and the Professor emeritus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) passed away in May this year. Professor Singh's demise is not only a loss to the sociology fraternity, but also to the scholarship on and more importantly, to the tradition of critical studies in India. The article remembers Yogendra Singh and reflects on his career as a teacher, an academic and institution builder. Yogendra Singh was not simply a professor of JNU, but he collaborated with his colleagues in the late sixties in making possible the school of social sciences of JNU. The paper remembers him as a fine human being careful with his words and committed to the society he made the subject of his study. His sociology taught him to be critical about his ascriptive ancestry. In spite of being born in a zamindar family in Uttar Pradesh, Singh made caste, hierarchy and privileges an object of his critical analysis. The paper looks at Professor Singh's contribution to different domains of sociology and Indian society, particularly modernizing India, Indian tradition, caste, class and hierarchies. He is also remembered for his works on historical roots of Indian sociology and institutions of science and critical learning.

AbstractGridlock is a term to describe the breakdown in cooperation of countries in international institutions to address policy problems that span borders; it refers both to deadlock in existing organisations and the difficulty of countries to come to new agreements as issues arise. Global science mega‐projects and their communities have seemingly been remarkably effective in evolving complex processes and mechanisms to enable collaboration. Previous research into CERN has focused on recounting the stories of CERN's scientific feats and technical innovations. This research has investigated the reasons behind these triumphs from a social sciences' perspective to see why it is an exemplar of organisational success. The CERN communities' governance and leadership regimes are examined. Extensive field work has added insights into two themes that emerge from the literature: the primacy of the state and the employment of combined routes through and beyond gridlock. Through exercising consensual governance with its Member States to manage multi‐polarity and using a light leadership approach with collaborative partners and international staff, CERN consistently achieves outstanding results. This research contributes to the global gridlock debate by being part of the examination of pathways and mechanisms in successful international collaborations.

Der Sammelband Metamorphosen von Kultur und Geschlecht, herausgegeben von Andreas Langenohl und Anna Schober, nimmt Inszenierungen von Geschlecht in Politik, Wissenschaft, bildender Kunst und Populärkultur in den Blick. Gezeigt wird, wie Geschlechterdifferenz in wissenschaftlichen, politischen und künstlerisch-ästhetischen Kontexten 'als Kultur' öffentlich problematisiert, aber auch zelebriert wird und wie sich diese Prozesse im Laufe des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts veränderten. Anhand von Untersuchungen zu Genealogien, Praktiken sowie Imaginationen von Geschlecht werden verschiedene Prozesse der Bedeutungsschaffung als miteinander verschränkt betrachtet und vor dem Hintergrund kategorialer Grenzziehungen kritisch diskutiert. Die vielfältigen, disziplinübergreifenden Analysegegenstände und -methoden machen die Lektüre dabei besonders gewinnbringend und rücken die Schnittstelle zwischen wissenschaftstheoretischen Diskursen und politischer wie ästhetischer Praxis von Geschlecht in den Vordergrund. ; The volume Metamorphosen von Kultur und Geschlecht, edited by Andreas Langenohl and Anna Schober, focuses on performances of gender in politics, science, fine arts, and popular culture. Through several recent examples, it shows how gender differences are publicly problematized as well as celebrated within social, political, and artistic-aesthetic contexts and how these processes changed in the 20th and 21th centuries. Drawing from studies on genealogies, practices, and the imagining of gender, different processes of meaning production are observed in their entanglement and critically discussed in the context of categorical demarcations. The various cross-disciplinary methods and objects of analysis make the reading of this volume particularly rewarding and highlight the intersections between discourses on the theory of science and political as well as aesthetic practices of gender.

Political science and public policy scholars have long emphasised the importance of understanding institutional change and policy entrepreneurship. This review article is a response to this call in the context of reform in macroeconomic bureaucracies. Adopting a 'systematic' approach to reviewing the literature, this paper investigates when, why and how institutional reform in key monetary and fiscal macroeconomic bureaucracies (i.e. central banks, treasuries, and ministries of finance) takes place. It reviews 29 selected articles on reforms in these bureaucracies published in Thomson & Reuters Web of Knowledge's Social Science Citation Index, JSTOR, Sage and Wiley databases from 1980 to 2015. It shows that the current state of knowledge about institutional change in key macroeconomic bureaucracies is characterised by a lack of sufficient bridge-building among variants of institutional approaches as well as between institutional theory and public policy theory, resulting in persistent knowledge gaps. Against this background, the present review contributes to the body of knowledge on this topic in two main areas. First, it reviews the literature systematically to provide an overview of the key theoretical and empirical characteristics of when, how and why institutional reform takes place in these bureaucracies. Second, it identifies gaps and future avenues of research to stimulate progress in this important area of study.

The presentation draws on a use case from political science to demonstrate integrated scholarly processes for curating and publishing data. Curation activities are distributed across institutional and national websites, repositories, archives and registries. In workflows which prioritise existing research practice and disciplinary standards, the primary role of the repository is to move the data around – to apply standards and protocols that enable the data to be widely and openly accessible. Researchers provide structured metadata using a template based on the Data Documention Initiative , an international standard for describing data that result from observational methods in the social, behavioural, economic and health sciences. DDI metadata are mapped to standards (RDF, RIF-CS) which enable the institutional repository to disseminate and publish the datasets.The implementation supports researchers in comprehensively describing their research methods and data according to a widely-adopted disciplinary standard, and in depositing the data in a trusted national archive. The integrity of the institutional data repository is increased by its direct integration with the rich descriptions of data in the disciplinary archive. Added value for the institution is derived from the reporting capabilities of the repository, which links to enterprise systems to generate statistics about the University's research assets.

This paper reviews ethnographies of neuroscience laboratories in the United States and Europe, organizing them into three main sections: (1) descriptions of the capabilities and limitations of technologies used in neuroimaging laboratories to map "activity" or "function" onto structural models of the brain; (2) discussions of the "distributed" or "extended" mind in neuroscience practice; and (3) the implications of neuroscience research and the power of brain images outside the laboratory. I will try to show the importance of ethnographic work in such settings, and place this body of ethnographic work within its historical framework—such ethnographies largely emerged within the Decade of the Brain, as announced by former President of the United States George H. W. Bush in 1990. The main argument is that neuroscience research and the context within which it is taking place has changed since the 1990's—specifically with the launch of "big science" projects such as the Human Brain Project (HBP) in the European Union and the BRAIN initiative in the United States. There is an opportunity for more research into the institutional and politico-economic context within which neuroscience research is taking place, and for continued engagement between the social and biological sciences.

'Complicated Entanglements: Rethinking Pluralism in the 21st Century' is an interdisciplinary conference that aims to examine the recent resurgence of discourse around multiculturalism in the cultural sphere. This conference brings together major scholars from Anthropology, Art History, Canadian Studies, English, French, Political Science and Sociology as well as artists, community activists, cultural policy makers, and an exciting group of emerging young curators. Our intention, through the conference, related exhibition, international co-publication and creation of a web-based community is to consolidate current work being done on pluralism in the arts, and to foster a collective and on-going forum for debate. While much has been written on multiculturalism in the social sciences, comparatively little has been done in the arts, where artists, writers, filmmakers and performers imagine and define who we are as a nation. Timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act and recent discussions of race, religion and culture around events such as 9/11 and the Bouchard-Taylor commission, this conference could not be more relevant or more timely. ; Complicated Entanglements: Rethinking Pluralism in the 20th Century , conference, ICI Berlin, 4–6 April 2008

The article stresses the question of organisational innovations in the field of SME in CEEC. For the analysis, examples of characteristic phenomena are chosen which mirror the strengths and weaknesses, the opportunities and threats of CEEC in transition economies. Besides various economic images, three fields will be presented in which the EU exercises little direct influence. These three fields cover 1) education, 2) science and research, and 3) SME. They are seen to be essential terrain for initiating national and corporate competitive advantages. Education is the basis of future human resources; science and research open potential sources of development for new products and service. A national culture of SME-carried economy can be seen as an effective structure to implement such innovation. Necessary conditions are seen in helpful political framework programmes which build up economic structures contributing to national wealth by creating SMEs, by the corporate support of individual initiatives of collaborators and by effective corporate competence creating organisational team structures. In conclusion the Department-UNESCO Chair Master Course of Intercultural Management in Bucharest is presented as an adequate tool to initiate as well as to form young people in a way that prepares them to recognize and to support necessary change impulses in social and corporate organisations.

A problem in policymaking for prevention of harm to persons and the environment concerns the probability of harm occurring—that is, the measure of risk involved. Policymakers have almost always sought to calculate the risk involved in proposed courses of action. Their methods have often been irrational and their estimates erroneous. Explicit analysis of risk to society and systematic methods for estimating it emerged with the advent of science as more reliable procedures for prediction and decision‐making. However, as with many other forms of analysis, the assessment of risk has carried its own risk—namely an undue reliance on logical quantitative techniques which fail to address the root causes of public concern and apprehension. Common‐sense assessments of risk tell us more what risks people regard as acceptable and risks arouse anxiety and protest. Carnage from accidents on the nation's highways arouse much less apprehension than nuclear accidents even though actual risk from automobiles is much greater than injury or death from nuclear reactors. The following paper makes the case that the art and science of risk assessment will fall short of social and political realities until the psychological and cultural aspects of risk receive more adequate attention.