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In this paper we explore the role of scientific and technical education in addressing security issues on the African continent. We adopt a definition of "security" that emphasises the well-being of the citizen rather than that of the state, and that encompasses both military and non-military threats. Security and development are interlinked, and this paper will emphasise the need for an effective African technical infrastructure to address these twin issues. To this end, we argue for the establishment of a pan-African network of mathematical institutes, relying on open-source software and educational tools as well as improved communication links throughout the continent. We emphasise the crucial role played by free and open-source tools in improving communication links on the continent. As a case study, we analyse the recently founded African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in South Africa. This unique project is characterised by three main characteristics: a commitment to pan-African cooperation, innovative, project-based teaching methods, and exclusive reliance on open-source software and educational material. We analyse to what extent it can serve as a model for future capacity building initiatives. Finally, we outline the proposed African Mathematical Institute Network, or AMI-Net. This network of interconnected institutes will help to build the scientific and technical knowledge base necessary for sustained African development. We offer suggestions for the implementation of the project, and show how it can contribute to the overall security infrastructure.

Community mobilisation interventions have been used to promote health in many low-income and middle-income settings. They frequently involve collective action to address shared determinants of ill-health, which often requires high levels of participation to be effective. However, the non-excludable nature of benefits produced often generates participation dilemmas: community members have an individual interest in abstaining from collective action and free riding on others' contributions, but no benefit is produced if nobody participates. For example, marches, rallies or other awareness-raising activities to change entrenched social norms affect the social environment shared by community members whether they participate or not. This creates a temptation to let other community members invest time and effort. Collective action theory provides a rich, principled framework for analysing such participation dilemmas. Over the past 50 years, political scientists, economists, sociologists and psychologists have proposed a plethora of incentive mechanisms to solve participation dilemmas: selective incentives, intrinsic benefits, social incentives, outsize stakes, intermediate goals, interdependency and critical mass theory. We discuss how such incentive mechanisms might be used by global health researchers to produce new questions about how community mobilisation works and conclude with theoretical predictions to be explored in future quantitative or qualitative research.

This book applies various theoretical tools to explore the advantages and disadvantages of performance management systems, the ways in which they can be improved, and the strategies through which they can be designed and integrated into the policy making process. By providing both theoretical insights and practical applications, it offers a unique perspective. Using four methods of research that have been rarely applied in the performance management literature: formal (game-theoretical) modelling, operational management, new institutionalism, and cross country statistical comparisons based on international data sets, the book illuminates different aspects of performance management systems in the public sector. It offers an integrative theoretical framework for explaining and designing such systems and their integration into the policy making process, and will open up new avenues of research, expose scholars and students to new methodological tools and equip public officials, politicians and citizens with practical methods for improving the performance of the public sector.

AbstractIn this work, we estimate urban evaporative consumptive use (urban ECU) in three cities in a semiarid region experiencing water scarcity: El Paso, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the United States and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, in Mexico. Urban ECU includes vegetation and bare soil evapotranspiration (ET) and evaporation from open water, water supply infrastructure losses, and building evaporative coolers. Three independent methods were used to estimate urban ECU from individual ECU components and from utility accounting data. The three methods produced urban ECU estimates that varied by an average of 24%. Most of the disagreement was attributed to potential overestimation of vegetation and bare soil ET. Vegetation and bare soil ET account for up to 90% of total urban ECU. Urban ECU accounts for up to 60% of total annual water demand. Per capita ECU from the U.S. cities is, on average, 149 m3/capita/year, compared with 51 m3/capita/year for Ciudad Juárez.

Die Entwicklungen im Bereich der Automatisierung hin zu steigender Datendurchgängigkeit in Kombination mit der Verfügbarkeit frei zugänglicher Datenanalyseplattformen
 
und -algorithmen erlauben neue Ansätze zur kontinuierlichen Verbesserung von Produktionsprozessen. Auch etablierte Vorgehensweisen wie Six Sigma können und müssen in diesem Rahmen weitergedacht und angereichert werden. Folglich gilt es, die klassische, hauptsächlich deskriptive Herangehensweise von Six Sigma um relevante Methoden und Algorithmen aus den Bereichen Data Mining, Machine Learning und künstliche Intelligenz zu erweitern. Die klassische Six Sigma Ausbildung bietet für diesen Wandel gute Voraussetzungen, die es auszubauen und anzupassen gilt.
 
The increasing data availability in combination with open source data analysis platforms and algorithms pave the way for new ways of operationalizing continuous improvement tasks in the field of production processes. Even established approaches like Six Sigma need to be enhanced and enriched in this context. Consequently, the classical and more descriptive nature of Six Sigma should consider relevant methods and algorithms out of the field of data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The classical Six Sigma training provides a good basis for this change to broaden the Six Sigma scope and its toolbox.

The paper proposes a structural empirical model capable of examining exchange rate smoothing in the small, open economy of Hungary. The framework assumes the existence of an unobserved and changing implicit exchange rate target. The central bank is assumed to use interest rate policy to obtain this preferred rate in the medium term, while market participants are assumed to form rational expectations about this target and influence exchange rates accordingly. The paper applies unobserved variable method - Kalman filtering - to estimate this implicit exchange rate target, and simultaneously estimate an interest rate rule and an exchange rate equation consistent with this target. The results provide evidence for exchange rate smoothing in Hungary by providing an estimated smooth implicit exchange rate target development and by showing significant interest rate response to the deviation of the exchange rate from this target. The method also provides estimates for the ceteris paribus exchange rate effects of expected and unexpected interest rate changes.

Argues that Michel Foucault's genealogical method intends to reconfigure the relation between intellectual & political life &, thus, to displace four conventional approaches to these issues: (1) historical approaches that conceive of history in terms of progress or a panoply of alternatives to the present; (2) philosophical approaches bound to metaphysics; (3) policy advocacy that offers specific reforms or legislative proposals; & (4) political position taking on various conflicts, events, & policies. These approaches are described as modernist in that they seek to examine systems & point out their contradictions. Foucault's genealogical method pursues another avenue by asking how logics of power have produced the present, which opens a new political space in which it is possible to call the present into question. This space is to be distinguished from Foucault's particular political dispositions in that it has no necessary political entailments, but rather, simply affords a particular kind of discursive space for political thought & judgment. D. Ryfe

Country effects on outcomes for individuals are often analysed using multilevel (hierarchical) models applied to harmonized multi-country data sets such as ESS, EU-SILC, EVS, ISSP, and SHARE. We point out problems with the assessment of country effects that appear not to be widely appreciated, and develop our arguments using Monte Carlo simulation analysis of multilevel linear and logit models. With large sample sizes of individuals within each country but only a small number of countries, analysts can reliably estimate individual-level effects but estimates of parameters summarizing country effects are likely to be unreliable. Multilevel modelling methods are no panacea.

The construction sector is regulated at the national level to ensure a proper technical standard, as well as the coordination of spatial development at
the local and national level. Real estate investments funded from the public budget are carried out in accordance with regulations regarding the design
and execution of construction works, in addition to the clarifications from legislation regarding budget planning, public procurement, and the stages of
development and approval of technical and economic documentation. Real estate investments related to the defence infrastructure, which
also includes investments for the Ministry of National Defence, represent a particular situation due to the obligation to comply with both national
legislative frameworks and departmental regulations, ensuring both operational requirements and coordination of activities at the operational and tactical level. By analysing the regulations applicable to real estate investments of the Ministry of National Defence, the article briefly presents the stages of making the investments, the institutions involved and their responsibilities, as well as some assessments regarding the opportunity to develop a code and a regulation dedicated to military constructions, which could contribute to the efficiency of military operations, thus ensuring the effectiveness and safety of military personnel, as well as saving of resources.

"The labour-market policy-mix in Germany is increasingly being decided on
a regional level. This requires additional knowledge about the regional development
which (disaggregated) national forecasts cannot provide.
Therefore, we separately forecast employment for the 176 German labour-
market districts on a monthly basis. We first compare the prediction
accuracy of standard time-series methods: autoregressive integrated
moving averages (ARIMA), exponentially weighted moving averages
(EWMA) and the structural-components approach (SC) in these small spatial
units. Second, we augment the SC model by including autoregressive
elements (SCAR) in order to incorporate the influence of former periods of
the dependent variable on its current value. Due to the importance of spatial
interdependencies in small labour-market units, we further augment
the basic SC model by lagged values of neighbouring districts in a spatial
dynamic panel (SCSAR).
The prediction accuracies of the models are compared using the mean absolute
percentage forecast error (MAPFE) for the simulated out-of-sample
forecast for 2005. Our results show that the SCSAR is superior to the
SCAR and basic SC model. ARIMA and EWMA models perform slightly better
than SCSAR in many of the German labour-market districts. This reflects
that these two moving-average models can better capture the trend
reversal beginning in some regions at the end of 2004. All our models
have a high forecast quality with an average MAPFE lower than 2.2 percent." [authors abstract]

This paper studies the role of asset-market completeness for the properties of optimal policy. A suitable framework for this purpose is the small open economy with complete international asset markets. For in this environment changes in policy represent country-specific risk diversifiable in world markets. Our main finding is that the fundamental public finance principle whereby when taxes on all final goods are available, it is optimal to tax final goods uniformly fails to obtain. In general, uniform taxation is optimal because it amounts to a nondistorting tax on fixed factors of production. In the open economy this principle fails because when households can insure against the risk of a policy reform, initial private asset holdings are contingent on actual policy and thus no longer represent an inelastically supplied source of income. Two further differences between optimal policy in the closed and open economies with complete markets are: (a) In the open economy, optimal consumption and income tax rates are unchanged in response to government purchases shocks. By contrast, in the closed economy tax rates do respond to innovations in public spending. (b) In the open economy, the Friedman rule is optimal only if the Ramsey planner has access to consumption taxes. In the absence of consumption taxes, deviations from the Friedman rule are large. On the other hand, in the closed economy, the availability of either consumption or income taxes suffices to render the Friedman rule optimal.

"This volume is a comprehensive overview of Content Analysis (CA), whose extraordinary potential is operationally flexible, compatible with different techniques, theoretically creative, and multidisciplinary at its core. Also, CA keeps together tradition and innovation: as technology advances, CA can more efficiently perform its typical functions and proves its worth in new fields. The book illustrates the main characteristics, perspectives, plurality of objects, and contexts of use of CA, focusing on the various practical strategies that it entails and on their combinations. The aim is to provide readers with a concrete guide, presenting a research notebook that explores a unique empirical-methodological heritage - such working style is replicable and the goal is to transmit it as clearly as possible"--

Using two new data sources to describe trends in the international relations (IR) discipline since 1980 -- a database of every article published in the 12 leading journals in the field and three surveys of IR faculty at US colleges and universities -- we explore the extent of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological diversity in the American study of IR and the relationship between IR scholarship and the policy-making community in the United States. We find, first, that there is considerable and increasing theoretical diversity. Although US scholars believe and teach their students that the major paradigms -- realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism -- define and divide the discipline, most peer-reviewed research does not advance a theoretical argument from one of these theoretical traditions. There is no evidence, moreover, that realism and its focus on power relations among states dominate, or since 1980 ever has dominated, the literature. Second, although three times as many IR scholars report using qualitative methods as their primary approach, more articles published in the top journals currently employ quantitative tools than any other methodological approach. Third, there exists little epistemological diversity in the field: American IR scholars share a strong and growing commitment to positivism. Finally, there is a disjuncture between what American scholars of IR think about the value of producing policy-relevant work and the actual research they generate: few articles in top journals offer explicit policy advice, but scholars believe that their work is both prescriptive and useful to policymakers. Adapted from the source document.