Suchergebnisse

Both China and India are adopting information and communication technologies to facilitate openness and transparency in their governments, and hence reduce corruption. Distinctive from their traditional anticorruption approaches, is the innovative e-government approach an effective solution to corruption in these two large developing countries? This paper addresses the question through comparative in-depth interviews with 44 mid- or senior-level officials in the public sector in these two countries. The first study of its kind, our research shows that civil servants in both countries overall think positively about transparency and technology in reducing corruption. However, to what extent these innovative measures will be effective is conditional on various factors, such as political willingness, income inequality, and infrastructure readiness. What is worth noting is that the Chinese respondents were more positive regarding the role of transparency, whereas the Indian respondents were more positive about the role of technology, which may reflect the different facilitators of corruption and the constraints of anticorruption in China and India.

Abstract
A large program of research has aimed to ground large-scale cultural phenomena in processes taking place within individual minds. For example, investigating whether individual agents equipped with the right social learning strategies can enable cumulative cultural evolution given long enough time horizons. However, this approach often omits the critical group-level processes that mediate between individual agents and multi-generational societies. Here, we argue that interacting groups are a necessary and explanatory level of analysis, linking individual and collective intelligence through two characteristic feedback loops. In the first loop, more sophisticated individual-level social learning mechanisms based on Theory of Mind facilitate group-level complementarity, allowing distributed knowledge to be compositionally recombined in groups; these group-level innovations, in turn, ease the cognitive load on individuals. In the second loop, societal-level processes of cumulative culture provide groups with new cognitive technologies, including shared language and conceptual abstractions, which set in motion new group-level processes to further coordinate, recombine, and innovate. Taken together, these cycles establish group-level interaction as a dual engine of intelligence, catalyzing both individual cognition and cumulative culture.

OBJECTIVES: To investigate whether social trust is associated with more stress symptoms among middle-aged and older adults in six East and Southeast Asia regions during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: This multi-region study used cross-sectional survey data collected in May 2020. Participants were a probability-based internet sample of adults aged 55 or older. RESULTS: Government trust was negatively associated with stress in Singapore and South Korea. Higher levels of health care trust were significantly associated with less stress in Singapore and Taiwan. Trust in neighbors was associated with a higher likelihood of stress in Hong Kong and a lower likelihood in Singapore. Social trust was not associated with stress in Japan or Thailand. DISCUSSION: Findings suggest the level of social trust in relation to stress substantially varied by region. Interventions to strengthen trust during COVID-19 and other major health crises need to be tailored to fit regions' unique circumstances. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12877-022-02847-5.

Abstract. Earthquake size can be described with different magnitudes for different purposes. For example, local magnitude ML is usually adopted to compile an earthquake catalog, and moment magnitude Mw is often prescribed by a ground motion model. Understandably, when inconsistent units are encountered in an earthquake analysis, magnitude conversion needs to be performed beforehand. However, the conversion is not expected at full certainty owing to the model error of empirical relationships. This paper introduces a novel first-order second-moment (FOSM) calculation to estimate the annual rate of earthquake motion (or seismic hazard) on a probabilistic basis, including the consideration of the uncertain magnitude conversion and three other sources of earthquake uncertainties. In addition to the methodology, this novel FOSM application to engineering seismology is demonstrated in this paper with a case study. With a local ground motion model, magnitude conversion relationship and earthquake catalog, the analysis shows that the best-estimate annual rate of peak ground acceleration (PGA) greater than 0.18 g (induced by earthquakes) is 0.002 per year at a site in Taipei, given the uncertainties of magnitude conversion, earthquake size, earthquake location, and motion attenuation.

Public administration education is traditionally known for its emphasis on interaction, discussion and experiential learning, which require effective in-person instructions. With COVID-19 pushing many programmes across the globe to be delivered online rather than in person, how this shift has affected the student experience in public administration programmes has been a pertinent and important consideration. This paper addresses the question through two surveys of 147 students in total, at a graduate-level public policy school in Singapore. Two distinctive waves of data collection allow us to capture a nuanced picture of student perceptions both when online teaching was introduced as an emergency response and when it was planned as a deliberate strategy later on. Our findings suggest that students consistently reported a decline in participation and interaction in an online setting, compared with a face-to-face setting. Our study fills a critical gap in the literature related to online public administration education in Asia, while the immediate constraints it highlights and lessons it offers on maintaining a highly interactive and engaging public administration education are likely to apply for educators elsewhere both during and beyond the COVID-19 era.

AbstractAre young children just random explorers who learn serendipitously? Or are even young children guided by uncertainty‐directed sampling, seeking to explore in a systematic fashion? We study how children between the ages of 4 and 9 search in an explore–exploit task with spatially correlated rewards, where exhaustive exploration is infeasible and not all options can be experienced. By combining behavioral data with a computational model that decomposes search into similarity‐based generalization, uncertainty‐directed exploration, and random exploration, we map out developmental trajectories of generalization and exploration. The behavioral data show strong developmental differences in children's capability to exploit environmental structure, with performance and adaptiveness of sampling decisions increasing with age. Through model‐based analyses, we disentangle different forms of exploration, finding signature of both uncertainty‐directed and random exploration. The amount of random exploration strongly decreases as children get older, supporting the notion of a developmental "cooling off" process that modulates the randomness in sampling. However, even at the youngest age range, children do not solely rely on random exploration. Even as random exploration begins to taper off, children are actively seeking out options with high uncertainty in a goal‐directed fashion, and using inductive inferences to generalize their experience to novel options. Our findings provide critical insights into the behavioral and computational principles underlying the developmental trajectory of learning and exploration.