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Developing countries are facing a great challenge to collect, treat and dispose their waste in a more sustainable way. Today, most of the produced waste ends up on landfills, where they pose a great threat to the environment and human health. Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana, faces the same issues as other cities in developing countries; waste management is run poorly and most waste ends up on the cities largest landfill, Dompoase, which will be full in a few years time. Issues such as low financial resources, bad urban planning and a growing population aggravate the implementation of a more sustainable development. Since most solid waste in developing countries is organic, composting is a good option towards a more sustainable waste management. There are numerous amounts of articles stating that decentralized composting is the best option for developed countries. Decentralized compost facilities are less costly to install and maintain, they require less technology and decrease the cost of waste transportation. Transportation poses a large expense when it comes to waste management in developing countries. There is an advantage in integrating a more sustainable waste management in to the existing waste infrastructure since cities often are densely built up and there is a shortage of land. Therefore this thesis has investigated the possibilities of having waste sorting stations and decentralized compost facilities at public dumping sites in the Bantama area, one of ten sub--‐metros in Kumasi. Based on literature and observations during field visits in the Bantama area, a classification scheme was developed. The classification scheme was designed to simplify identification and differentiation of the sites. It contains thirteen criteria to consider when planning for organic waste sorting stations and decentralized compost facilities. Suitable sites for sorting stations and decentralized compost facilities were selected by a SQL analyzes in a Geographic Information System (GIS). The analyzes was based on the classification scheme. The result shows that of twenty--‐one public dumpingsites, seven were suitable as sorting stations and two sites were suitable for a decentralized compost facility. The expectation is that in due time and with infrastructure improvements, more than only seven communal sites can become sorting stations. When it comes to sites for composting the result reveals an issue in many cities there is just not enough land to build as many decentralized facilities as would be necessary to recycle all organic waste. However, due to the advantages of having decentralized facilities, the recommendation is that Kumasi should start with a decentralized approach and as finance and technological skills exists the organic waste management can extend to also include larger facilities. Further this thesis shows the advantage of having decentralized composting when it comes totransportation costs. A transport analyzes was done in a GIS, which showed the difference intransportation distances between having decentralized and centralized composting. The result showed that waste recycled close to its source, i.e. having decentralized waste management, is transported shorter distance compared to having centralized composting and thus saving on cost for transportation.
Graham Busby, Maximiliano E. Korstanje, Charlie Mansfield
This study selects novels from French and Spanish language traditions, which may not be available to English-speakers, in order to determine if specific aspects throw light on our understanding of Madrid as a destination. Marc Lambron's L'Impromptu de Madrid and Antonio Munoz Molina’s Mysteries of Madrid are taken as proof of the influence the narrative can exert on social daily life and consumption. Narrative foregrounds the fictions which are at stake in imagining the city as destination and also provides a vehicle for presenting the much broader social forces that converge in the author at the time of imagining and writing.
This paper is focused on the role of main social activities, as creating and sharing personal content. The reason is connected to the raise up, in last ten years, of User Generated Content as a system to allow people to be active on the Web3. In the first paragraph I analyze the Web-population through recent surveys, showing different ways to classify generations. I comment the Jenkins’ “convergence culture” [2006], the push and pull media definition of Negroponte [1995] and the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants [Prensky 2001]. The second paragraph deals with use and consumption of digital media between young and adults from the computer use to mobile-phone and portable gaming device. In particular the mobile-phone seems to be an important medium to be online in every place and every time: it allows people to take and share photos, video, text and so on. This brings us to the third paragraph where I discuss mobility and applications: following Anderson [2010] the desktop is replaced with the webtop or web-applications that do not require a browser to be used. This is particularly evident for recent mobile devices as iPhone and iPad. Convergence and mobility allow people to share content in every time: yet ten years ago people used to share digital information (file-sharing) as video, music and text, by illegal channels such as Napster, without knowing who uploaded that on the Web. The Web 1.0 phase was characterized by an “anonymous dimension”. Instead, the current Web allows people to share information about their own life, publishing on social media, freely, their own photo, video, text, with real name and surname (life-sharing). At the center of the Web is the “ego”, the user. In the fifth chapter I analyze three social media that are currently catching up people’s attention Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – and I try to explain how they make possible to users to share culture and frame of their life. At the end I spent some words about piracy and privacy issue that social media bring up.
Published as: Jorge Martinez and Paul Smoke. Introduction in <em>Local Government Finance: The Challenges of the 21st Century. </em>United Cities and Local Governments' Second Global Report on Decentralization and Local Democracy, Barcelona 2010.Edward Elgar, 2011. (c) United Cities and Local Governments. Published by <a href="http://www.e-elgar.co.uk/">Edward Elgar</a>. Posted with the permission of the publisher for personal use only.
Claudia Dziobek, Miguel Alves, Majdeline El Rayess, Carlos Alberto Gutierrez Mangas · 5 authors
A useful but little known feature of the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY) is the information on the structure of governments. Institutional tables, included in the GFSY, provide detail on the central, state, and local levels of governments, social security, and extrabudgetary units. We refer to the main levels of government as GL1, GL2, and GL3 in ascending order of institutional coverage. We present maps of the various levels of government for 74 countries to illustrate the usefulness of this database and make it more accessible to users. The maps provide information about how centralized or decentralized government finances and employment are and their size relative to the overall economy. Government map data facilitate the monitoring of fiscal policy and fiscal rules.
Anna Sagan, Dimitra Panteli, W Borkowski, M Dmowski · 31 authors
Since the successful transition to a freely elected parliament and a market economy after 1989, Poland is now a stable democracy and is well represented within political and economic organizations in Europe and worldwide. The strongly centralized health system based on the Semashko model was replaced with a decentralized system of mandatory health insurance, complemented with financing from state and territorial self-government budgets. There is a clear separation of health care financing and provision: the National Health Fund (NFZ) the sole payer in the system is in charge of health care financing and contracts with public and non-public health care providers. The Ministry of Health is the key policy-maker and regulator in the system and is supported by a number of advisory bodies, some of them recently established. Health insurance contributions, borne entirely by employees, are collected by intermediary institutions and are pooled by the NFZ and distributed between the 16 regional NFZ branches. In 2009, Poland spent 7.4% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health. Around 70% of health expenditure came from public sources and over 83.5% of this expenditure can be attributed to the (near) universal health insurance. The relatively high share of private expenditure is mostly represented by out-of-pocket (OOP) payments, mainly in the form of co-payments and informal payments. Voluntary health insurance (VHI) does not play an important role and is largely limited to medical subscription packages offered by employers. Compulsory health insurance covers 98% of the population and guarantees access to a broad range of health services. However, the limited financial resources of the NFZ mean that broad entitlements guaranteed on paper are not always available. Health care financing is overall at most proportional: while financing from health care contributions is proportional and budgetary subsidies to system funding are progressive, high OOP expenditures, particularly in areas such as pharmaceuticals, are highly regressive. The health status of the Polish population has improved substantially, with average life expectancy at birth reaching 80.2 years for women and 71.6 years for men in 2009. However, there is still a vast gap in life expectancy between Poland and the western European Union (EU) countries and between life expectancy overall and the expected number of years without illness or disability. Given its modest financial, human and material health care resources and the corresponding outcomes, the overall financial efficiency of the Polish system is satisfactory. Both allocative and technical efficiency leave room for improvement. Several measures, such as prioritizing primary care and adopting new payment mechanisms such as diagnosis-related groups (DRGs), have been introduced in recent years but need to be expanded to other areas and intensified. Additionally, numerous initiatives to enhance quality control and build the required expertise and evidence base for the system are also in place. These could improve general satisfaction with the system, which is not particularly high. Limited resources, a general aversion to cost-sharing stemming from a long experience with broad public coverage and shortages in health workforce need to be addressed before better outcomes can be achieved by the system. Increased cooperation between various bodies within the health and social care sectors would also contribute in this direction. The HiT profiles are country-based reports that provide a detailed description of a health system and of policy initiatives in progress or under development. HiTs examine different approaches to the organization, financing and delivery of health services, and the role of the main actors in health systems; they describe the institutional framework, process, content and implementation of health and health care policies; and highlight challenges and areas that require more in-depth analysis.
Open access
Global Health Care Issues
Healthcare Policy and Management
Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
The Croatian “decentralization package” from mid-2001 has shown how multiple pressures for shifting power to the local level may actually result in relative failure. The central government has ceded the control in particular policy sectors by shifting responsibilities for certain educational, welfare and health services to the counties and municipalities. However, the decentralization initiative was excessively marked as very limited and strongly labeled by the vertical policy dimension, expressing the dominance of top-down incentives of the central government in comparison to bottom-up initiatives stemming from the local government units. The 2001 decentralized package did not substantially increase the portion of local governments finance in total public finance, showing a failure to provide local government units with stronger fiscal capacity. The central government bodies also did not take into account the alternative proposals made by various policy actors ranging from academic institutions, researchers in NGOs, and associations of local government organizations. All these things have contributed to a relatively negligible influence of the horizontal policy dimension on the decentralization outcome. The whole process can therefore be described as centrally controlled decentralization, or decentralization from above.
One of the fundamental tenets of fiscal federalism is that, absent various sorts of externalities, decentralized governments that rely on own-source revenues should be more fiscally efficient than decentralized governments that rely on grant financing. The argument relies in part on the idea that sub-national governments, being closer to the people, are more accountable to its citizens. Accountability to citizens is also important in understanding the presence of corruption in government. This suggests that the financial structure and institutions of decentralized governments can potentially influence the degree and extent of corrupt activity. Financial structures that make governments more accountable should be associated with less corruption (other things equal), while financial structures with less accountability should be associated with more corrupt activities. We develop a simple model in which the use of grants rather than locally raised taxes increases corruption. We then use a panel data set of Mexican states to study the relationship between funding sources for Mexican states and the level of corruption in those states. We find that greater use of own tax revenues lowers corruption while greater use of grants increases corruption. This suggests that expenditure decentralization that is accompanied by revenue decentralization is likely to discourage corruption while expenditure decentralization that is funded by grants tends to encourage corruption. We also find that poverty, a measure of uninformed citizens, leads to greater corruption.
In climate change, as in other areas, recent years have produced a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of transnational institutions, standards, financing arrangements, and programs. As a result, climate governance has become complex, fragmented, and decentralized, operating without central coordination. Most studies of climate governance focus on inter state institutions. In contrast, I map a different realm of climate change governance: the diverse array of transnational schemes. I analyze this emerging system in terms of two theoretical frameworks developed to describe, explain, and evaluate complex governance arrangements—regime complex theory and polycentric governance theory—revealing fruitful avenues for positive and normative research. I conclude by arguing that the benefits of institutional complexity could be increased, and the costs reduced, through nonhierarchical ‘orchestration’ of climate change governance, in which international organizations or other appropriate authorities support and steer transnational schemes that further global public interests.
Imad Fakhri Taha Alshaikhli, Rusydi Hasan Makarin, Siti Khairunnisa Mohd Bakri, Nur Dalilah More Yusoff · 5 authors
Much of the current innovation in advanced materials is occurring at the nanoscale, specifically in manufactured nanomaterials (MNs). MNs display unique attributes and behaviors, and may be biologically and physically unique, making them valuable across a wide range of applications. However, as the number, diversity and complexity of MNs coming to market continue to grow, assessing their health and environmental risks with traditional animal testing approaches is too time- and cost-intensive to be practical, and is undesirable for ethical reasons. New approaches are needed that meet current requirements for regulatory risk assessment while reducing reliance on animal testing and enabling safer-by-design product development strategies to be implemented. The adverse outcome pathway (AOP) framework presents a sound model for the advancement of MN decision making. Yet, there are currently gaps in technical and policy aspects of AOPs that hinder the adoption and use for MN risk assessment and regulatory decision making. This review outlines the current status and next steps for the development and use of the AOP framework in decision making regarding the safety of MNs. Opportunities and challenges are identified concerning the advancement and adoption of AOPs as part of an integrated approach to testing and assessing (IATA) MNs, as are specific actions proposed to advance the development, use and acceptance of the AOP framework and associated testing strategies for MN risk assessment and decision making. The intention of this review is to reflect the views of a diversity of stakeholders including experts, researchers, policymakers, regulators, risk assessors and industry representatives on the current status, needs and requirements to facilitate the future use of AOPs in MN risk assessment. It incorporates the views and feedback of experts that participated in two workshops hosted as part of an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials (WPMN) project titled, "Advancing AOP Development for Nanomaterial Risk Assessment and Categorization", as well as input from several EU-funded nanosafety research consortia.
Bernard Bashaasha, Margaret Najjingo Mangheni, Ephraim Nkonya
Uganda introduced the decentralization policy in 1997 under the Local Government Act of 1997 that has since undergone four amendments. The policy inherently decentralized service delivery institutions and their governance in order to improve access to services for the rural poor. Based on an analysis of available literature, the paper documents the state of knowledge regarding rural service provision in Uganda under decentralization and identifies knowledge gaps for further investigation. Its focus is on education, health, and agricultural advisory services, as well as the management of natural resources in Uganda. Although enlightening, a review of the broader decentralization literature is beyond the scope of this work. The analysis revealed that results in terms of attaining the objectives of decentralization are mixed. While as anticipated generally decentralization resulted in greater participation and control over service delivery and governance by local communities, local governments are still grappling with a range of challenges, namely, inadequate local financial resources and over-reliance on conditional central government grants; inability to attract and retain sufficient trained and experienced staff; corruption, nepotism, and elite capture. With regard to the specific services, while universal primary education (UPE) policy under the decentralization framework is credited with a dramatic increase in primary school enrollment, public primary education services are still dogged by concerns over financing, equity, quality, and the need for curriculum reform. Some studies show that there has been no improvement in health services with many health status indicators either stagnating or worsening. In general, decentralization of education and health services has not resulted in greater participation of the ordinary people and accountability of service providers to the community. Regarding agricultural extension and advisory services, except for areas serviced by NGOs, the majority of the country does not readily access extension services, because districts have been unable to prioritize the operational expenses. However, there is some evidence that the devolution of responsibility for natural resource management (NRM) has contributed to greater compliance with some NRM requirements in some areas while in other areas forest conditions have declined following decentralization. Generally, evidence on whether decentralization has improved service delivery in Uganda is still inconclusive, and more research is needed.
Claudia Dziobek, Carlos Alberto Gutierrez Mangas, Phebby Kufa
Conventional wisdom postulates that there are benefits from decentralizing government finances but there is little empirical evidence about actual country practices. This paper presents data on fiscal decentralization for about 80 countries over a period of about 20 years (1990 - 2008) from the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY), the only global database with fiscal data for several levels of government. The data show that in many countries, revenue collection remains relatively more centralized than expenditures and that employment tends to be concentrated in lower levels of government. Except for transition economies, the levels of decentralization are relatively stable over the time period. The findings are shown by degree of economic development, constitutional power arrangements, and geographic area, broadly confirming key factors identified in the literature as determining the extent of fiscal decentralization.
The present report provides a review of the financing of Macedonian education as the country comes close to completing the first phase of decentralization. Soon all municipalities will find themselves in the second phase of decentralization, so the natural question is, what has been accomplished and what should be the next steps. Is decentralization complete, and if not, what remains to be done. A more specific technical question concerns the financing of decentralized education in Macedonia, and in particular the functioning of per student allocation formulas, in use since 2006. Properly managed and updated, allocation formulas may be a strong policy instrument of the Government.
This article describes the social, economic, and political processes that have influenced educational reform in two countries of Central Asia since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It compares and contrasts the various educational reform initiatives that have occurred in each country, including legal and policy frameworks, curriculum change, decentralization, privatization, finance, structure, and emphasis of educational systems, and the fit between what is taught in educational institutions and demands of the labor market. A sector-wide framework for education reform is presented to facilitate understanding of the very complex set of processes involved.
The following news item is taken in part from the July 22, 2010 issue of The Economist titled “Agents of change,” by Philip Ball. Conventional economic models failed to foresee the financial crisis. Could agent-based modeling (ABM) do better? ABM does not assume that the economy can achieve a settled equilibrium. No order or design is imposed on the economy from the top down. Unlike many models, ABMs are not populated with “representative agents”: identical traders, firms, or households whose individual behavior mirrors the economy as a whole. Rather, an ABM uses a bottom-up approach which assigns particular behavioral rules to each agent. For example, some may believe that prices reflect fundamentals whereas others may rely on empirical observations of past price trends. A link to this article can be found at http://www.economist.com/node/16636121?story_id=16636121. The following news item is taken in part from the August 5, 2010 issue of Nature titled “Link communities reveal multiscale complexity in networks,” by Yong-Yeol Ahn, James P. Bagrow, and Sune Lehmann. Here, we reinvent communities as groups of links rather than nodes and show that this unorthodox approach successfully reconciles the antagonistic organizing principles of overlapping communities and hierarchy. In contrast to the existing literature, which has entirely focused on grouping nodes, link communities naturally incorporate overlap while revealing hierarchical organization. We find relevant link communities in many networks. A link to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09182. The following news item is taken in part from the August 12, 2010 issue of Science titled “Stability of Ecological Communities and the Architecture of Mutualistic and Trophic Networks,” by Elisa Thébault and Colin Fontaine. Research on the relationship between the architecture of ecological networks and community stability has mainly focused on one type of interaction at a time, making difficult any comparison between different network types. We used a theoretical approach to show that the network architecture favoring stability fundamentally differs between trophic and mutualistic networks. A highly connected and nested architecture promotes community stability in mutualistic networks, whereas the stability of trophic networks is enhanced in compartmented and weakly connected architectures. These theoretical predictions are supported by a meta-analysis on the architecture of a large series of real pollination (mutualistic) and herbivory (trophic) networks. We conclude that strong variations in the stability of architectural patterns constrain ecological networks toward different architectures, depending on the type of interaction. A link to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1188321. The following news item is taken in part from the August 5, 2010 issue of arXiv titled “Emergence of Zipf's Law in the Evolution of Communication,” by Bernat Corominas-Murtra, Jordi Fortuny, and Ricard V. Solé. Zipf's law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following an early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and hearer in a communication system, we introduce evolution by means of a variational approach to the problem based on Kullback's Minimum Discrimination of Information Principle. Using a formalism fully embedded in the framework of information theory, we demonstrate that Zipf's law is the only expected outcome of an evolving, communicative system under a rigorous definition of the communicative tension described by Zipf. A link to this article can be found at http://arXiv.org/abs/1008.0938. The following news item is taken in part from the August 26, 2010 issue of Nature titled “The evolution of eusociality,” by Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and Edward O. Wilson. Eusociality, in which some individuals reduce their own lifetime reproductive potential to raise the offspring of others, underlies the most advanced forms of social organization and the ecologically dominant role of social insects and humans. For the past four decades kin selection theory, based on the concept of inclusive fitness, has been the major theoretical attempt to explain the evolution of eusociality. Here, we show the limitations of this approach. We argue that standard natural selection theory in the context of precise models of population structure represents a simpler and superior approach, allows the evaluation of multiple competing hypotheses, and provides an exact framework for interpreting empirical observations. A link to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09205. The following news item is taken in part from the August 27, 2010 issue of Science titled “Optimally Interacting Minds,” by Bahador Bahrami, Karsten Olsen, Peter E. Latham, Andreas Roepstorff, Geraint Rees, and Chris D. Frith. In everyday life, many people believe that two heads are better than one. Our ability to solve problems together appears to be fundamental to the current dominance and future survival of the human species. But are two heads really better than one? We addressed this question in the context of a collective low-level perceptual decision-making task. For two observers of nearly equal visual sensitivity, two heads were definitely better than one, provided they were given the opportunity to communicate freely, even in the absence of any feedback about decision outcomes. But for observers with very different visual sensitivities, two heads were actually worse than the better one. A link to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1185718. The following news item is taken in part from the August 19, 2010 issue of Nature titled “Promiscuity and the evolutionary transition to complex societies,” by Charlie K. Cornwallis, Stuart A. West, Katie E. Davis, and Ashleigh S. Griffin. A phylogenetic analysis of breeding behavior in birds shows that cooperation is more likely when promiscuity is low—a circumstance in which helpers can be more certain that they are offering aid to relatives. Intermediate levels of promiscuity favor the ability to distinguish relatives from nonrelatives. At high levels of promiscuity, no form of cooperation is favored. Levels of promiscuity therefore provide an explanation for differences between species in levels of cooperation. A link to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09335. The following news item is taken in part from the August 23, 2010 issue of arXiv titled “Network Complexity of Foodwebs,” by Russell K. Standish. In previous work, I have developed an information theoretic complexity measure of networks. When applied to several real world foodwebs, there is a distinct difference in complexity between the real foodweb, and randomized control networks obtained by shuffling the network links. One hypothesis is that this complexity surplus represents information captured by the evolutionary process that generated the network. In this paper, I test this idea by applying the same complexity measure to several well-known artificial life models that exhibit ecological networks: Tierra, EcoLab, and Webworld. Contrary to what was found in real networks, the artificial life-generated foodwebs had little information difference between itself and randomly shuffled versions. A link to this article can be found at http://arXiv.org/abs/1008.3800. The following news item is taken in part from the August, 2010 issue of PLoS ONE titled “A New Measure of Centrality for Brain Networks,” by Karen E. Joyce, Paul J. Laurienti, Jonathan H. Burdette, and Satoru Hayasaka. Recent developments in network theory have allowed for the study of the structure and function of the human brain in terms of a network of interconnected components. In the work presented here, we propose a new centrality metric called leverage centrality that considers the extent of connectivity of a node relative to the connectivity of its neighbors. The leverage centrality of a node in a network is determined by the extent to which its immediate neighbors rely on that node for information. Degree, betweenness, eigenvector, and leverage centrality were compared using functional brain networks generated from healthy volunteers. We propose that this metric may be able to identify critical nodes that are highly influential within the network. A link to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0012200. The following news item is taken in part from the September 10, 2010 issue of Science titled “Biodiversity Conservation: Challenges Beyond 2010,” by Michael R.W. Rands, William M. Adams, Leon Bennun, Stuart H.M. Butchart, Andrew Clements, David Coomes, Abigail Entwistle, Ian Hodge, Valerie Kapos, Jörn P.W. Scharlemann, William J. Sutherland, and Bhaskar Vira. The continued growth of human populations and of per capita consumption have resulted in unsustainable exploitation of Earth's biological diversity, exacerbated by climate change, ocean acidification, and other anthropogenic environmental impacts. We argue that effective conservation of biodiversity is essential for human survival and the maintenance of ecosystem processes. Despite some conservation successes (especially at local scales) and increasing public and government interest in living sustainably, biodiversity continues to decline. Moving beyond 2010, successful conservation approaches need to be reinforced and adequately financed. However, in addition, more radical changes are required that recognize biodiversity as a global public good, that integrate biodiversity conservation into policies and decision frameworks for resource production and consumption, and that focus on wider institutional and societal changes to enable more effective implementation of policy. A link to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1189138. The following news item is taken in part from the September 6, 2010 issue of arXiv titled “Are large complex economic systems unstable?,” by Sitabhra Sinha. Although classical economic theory is based on the concept of stable equilibrium, real economic systems appear to be always out of equilibrium. Indeed, they share many of the dynamical features of other complex systems, e.g., ecological foodwebs. We focus on the relation between increasing complexity of the economic network and its stability with respect to small perturbations in the dynamical variables associated with the constituent nodes. Inherent delays and multiple time scales suggest that economic systems will be more likely to exhibit instabilities as their complexity is increased even though the speed at which transactions are conducted has increased many fold through technological developments. Analogous to the birth of nonlinear dynamics from Poincare's work on the question of whether the solar system is stable, we suggest that similar theoretical developments may arise from efforts by econophysicists to understand the mechanisms by which instabilities arise in the economy. A link to this article can be found at http://arXiv.org/abs/1009.0972. The following news item is taken in part from the September 3, 2010 issue of Science titled “The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Experiment,” by Damon Centola. How do social networks affect the spread of behavior? A popular hypothesis states that networks with many clustered ties and a high degree of separation will be less effective for behavioral diffusion than networks in which locally redundant ties are rewired to provide shortcuts across the social space. A competing hypothesis argues that when behaviors require social reinforcement, a network with more clustering may be more advantageous, even if the network as a whole has a larger diameter. I investigated the effects of network structure on diffusion by studying the spread of health behavior through artificially structured online communities. Individual adoption was much more likely when participants received social reinforcement from multiple neighbors in the social network. The behavior spread farther and faster across clustered-lattice networks than across corresponding random networks. A link to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1185231. The following news item is taken in part from the September, 2010 issue of Cognitive Science titled “Language Acquisition Meets Language Evolution,” by Nick Chater and Morten H. Christiansen. Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the natural world (N-induction). We argue that, of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier. More broadly, we argue that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the “logical” problem of language acquisition and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology. A link to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01049.x. The following news item is taken in part from the September 8, 2010 issue of Nature titled “Early warning signals of extinction in deteriorating environments,” by John M. Drake and Blaine D. Griffen. Although understanding the causes of population extinction has been a central problem in theoretical biology for decades, the ability to anticipate extinction has remained elusive. Here, we argue that the causes of a population's decline are central to the predictability of its extinction. Specifically, environmental degradation may cause a tipping point in population dynamics, corresponding to a bifurcation in the underlying population growth equations, beyond which decline to extinction is almost certain. A link to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09389. The following news item is taken in part from the September, 2010 issue of SFI Working Papers titled “Self-Stabilizing Decentralized Signal Control of Realistic, Saturated Network Traffic,” by Stefan Lammer and Dirk Helbing. A coordination of vehicle flows is usually reached by a cyclical operation of traffic lights, and by synchronizing these cycles. However, the typical conditions, for which traffic lights are normally optimized for, never occur exactly. Large fluctuations in the number of vehicles arriving during one cycle time may lead to an inefficient usage of green times, which are often either too short or too long. The method we propose here allows for variable adjustments not only of the duration, but also of the order of green phases, while it reaches at least the same intersection throughput capacity as an optimized fixed-time controller. A link to this article can be found at http://www.santafe.edu/research/working-papers/abstract/67d8c997e841b3a 2e253aacad4e2851b/. The following news item is taken in part from the September, 2010 issue of SFI Working Papers titled “Information Driven Self-Organization: The Dynamical System Approach to Autonomous Robot Behavior,” by Nihat Ay, Ralf Der, and Mikhail Prokopenko. In recent years, information theory has come into the focus of researchers interested in the sensorimotor dynamics of both robots and living beings. One root for these approaches is the idea that living beings are information processing systems and that the optimization of these processes should be an evolutionary advantage. Apart from these more principal questions, there is much interest recently in the question how a robot can be equipped with an internal drive for innovation or curiosity that may serve as a drive for an open ended, self-determined development of the robot. The success of these approaches depends essentially on the choice of a convenient measure for the information. This paper studies in some detail the use of the predictive information of the sensorimotor process. A link to this article can be found at http://www.santafe.edu/research/working-papers/abstract/b67e300041 30f486027ea324c080a058/. Winter Meeting on Statistical Physics, Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico, 2011/1/4-7 https://sites.google.com/site/wintermeetingstatphys IWSOS 2011, Fifth International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2011/02/23-25 http://iwsos2011.tm.kit.edu/ IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence—SSCI 2011, Paris, France, 2011/04/11-15 http://www.ieee-ssci.org/ EVOSTAR 2011, Torino, Italy, 2011/4/27-29 http://evostar.org/ International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS 2011), Boston, MA, USA, 2011/06/26-07/01 http://www. necsi.edu/events/iccs2011/ GECCO 2011: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 2011/07/12-16 http://www. sigevo.org/gecco-2011/ IJCAI 2011, The 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Barcelona, Spain, 2011/07/16-22 http://ijcai-11.iiia.csic.es/ ECAL 11: European Conference on Artificial Life, Paris, France, 2011/08/8-12 http://www.ecal11.org/