This report is about the fiscal performance of rural local governments in the state of West Bengal. Specifically, our goal is to develop a comprehensive fiscal information system for all rural local governments, and to use these data to valuate the intergovernmental finance structure in the state. The work is of significant policy importance, given the need to implement programs to respond to the constitutional amendments mandating fiscal decentralization, and to support central and state government initiatives to use the Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRIs) as an important part of its poverty alleviation strategy. A more immediate need in West Bengal (and other states as well) is to support the work of the State Finance Commissions to better integrate rural local governments into the intergovernmental fiscal framework. To date, there has not been a comprehensive review of rural local government finance in West Bengal.
Michael Backes, Martin P. Grochulla, CÄtÄlin HriĹŁcu, Matteo Maffei
One of the important challenges when designing and analyzing cryptographic protocols is the enforcement of security properties in the presence of compromised participants. This paper presents a general technique for strengthening cryptographic protocols in order to satisfy authorization policies despite participant compromise. The central idea is to automatically transform the original cryptographic protocols by adding non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs.Each participant proves that the messages sent to the other participants are generated in accordance to the protocol.The zero-knowledge proofs are forwarded to ensure the correct behavior of all participants involved in the protocol, without revealing any secret data.We use an enhanced type system for zero-knowledge to verify that the transformed protocols conform to their authorization policy even if some participants are compromised.Finally, we developed a tool that automatically generates ML implementations of protocols based on zero-knowledge proofs.The protocol transformation, the verification, and the generation of protocol implementations are fully automated.
Research has shown that many social networks come into being hierarchically based on some basic building blocks called communities, within which the social interactions are very intensive, but between which they are very weak. Network community mining algorithms aim at efficiently and effectively discovering all such communities from a given network. Many related methods have been proposed and applied to different areas including social network analysis, gene network analysis and web clustering engine. Most of the existing methods for mining communities are centralized. In this paper, we present a multi-agent based decentralized algorithm, in which a group of autonomous agents work together to mine a network through a proposed self-aggregation and self-organization mechanism. Thanks to its decentralized feature, our method is potentially suitable for dealing with distributed networks, whose global structures are hard to obtain due to their geographical distributions, decentralized controls or huge sizes. The effectiveness of our method has been tested against different benchmark networks.
As its own security risks of existing patent trading platform, on-line patent transaction can not be realized. The security problems are mainly embodied in the confidentiality of transaction information, and security of patent delivery areas. One of the important characteristics of zero-knowledge proof is zero-knowledge, which can enable the verifier to believe that the conclusion is correct without knowing the contents of it. This characteristic can solve the problems of current patent transaction security mentioned above. Based on zero-knowledge proof, through the framework and flow design, this paper builds a secure patent trading platform, which shows a new way of patent trading. What is more, the security and convenience of this trading platform are better than ever before.
This paper focuses on the fiscal decentralization in the Philippines after the 1991Local Government Code. It first examines the intergovernmental fiscal relationshipbetween central and local governments by using fiscal decentralization indicators,and then investigates its impact on local finance. After fiscal decentralization, thelocal expenditure responsibility is expanded while the local fiscal capacity is notstrengthened in the Philippines. Local governments consequently comes to dependheavily on fiscal transfers from the central government, internal revenue allotments(IRAs), which has a substantial influence on local finance. The heavy dependence onIRAs makes local finance unpredictable and unstable. The distribution of IRAs alsoaffects the horizontal balance between provincial governments.
In this troubling and wise book on the European Union (EU), Alexander Somek puts forward a provocative reconstruction and assessment of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and of the policy advocated by the European Commission. The core claim of Individualism is that magistrates and Eurocrats are slowly but steadily driving European polities away from the basic tenets of the democratic Rechtsstaat and into forms of inverted authoritarianism. Through a handful of leading cases and through a myriad of âsoft law initiatives,â the idea of a government of laws and the normative dignity of a constitution authored by the people is being subverted. Indeed, the democratic constitution is in the process of being replaced by a congeries of norms aimed at the pragmatic realization of the ideal of a free market inhabited by apolitical individuals. This is the peculiar European road to Tocquevillian individualism through the mirage of absolute freedom, through liberty unencumbered by political ties and loyalties toward a particular national community. At some points, the reader senses that this is a detail in what the author conceives of as the larger fresco of the history of modernity (or to be more precise, of how modernity has gone awry). Indeed, the logical conclusion of the book (even if not physically at the text's end) is the extremely somber passage in which Somek claims that â[t]he ideas of the French Revolution finally seem to be lost in Europe. The age of modern constitutional law is coming to its conclusionâ (p. 243).1 Striking a very dissonant note, the author thus claims that the usual Kantian optimism about the emergence of a ânewâ and âcosmopolitanâ European order is, at best, delusionary. There is a very dark side to European integration besides the rough and tumble of referenda. This grand argument is rendered powerful by the gusto with which the author moves across disciplinary borders. Indeed, the book is at least three things at the same time, namely: (1) a politico-theoretical assessment of the basis of legitimacy of European constitutional law, as it stands; (2) a constitutional and normative assessment of European policy making, with a special focus and emphasis on the Commission; (3) a critical and original legal-dogmatic reconstruction of some of the leading constitutional cases of the European Court of Justice. The core of the disheartening thesis of Individualism is that the judges sitting in Luxembourg and the Eurocrats mingling in the Bruxellois buildings of the Commission would transform not only the concrete substance of supranational and national fundamental laws (as the standard narrative goes) but also the very structure of social integration in the old Continent. While the Court's rulings and the Commission's enactments have retained the form and appearance of a legal-constitutional discourse,2 the leading judgments of the men in robes and the myriad policy initiatives by the fonctionnaires have mutated the fundamental law of the Union into a dubious body of âdissonantâ law,3 no longer informed by the normativity of the self-government proper to democratic constitutional law but by that of (neoliberal) âapproximation.â The latter would sever the connection between law and critical practical reason by dissolving the very idea of the legal system as a normatively coherent whole and replacing it with the âpragmaticâ reduction of law to a casuistic logic of appropriateness. It would also make political power vanish by negating the political condition and pretending to bring about a full decentralization of sovereignty, which Somek describes with poignant irony in chapter 11. On the one hand, Somek places considerable emphasis on the regulatory inventiveness of the Commission. In chapters 5 and 12, for example, he peers behind the jargon used by the Commission in explaining itself, providing a crucial diagnosis of how individualism is tied to a peculiar form of âcradle to grave,â inexpensive, and paternalistic welfare state (a kind of welfare state on the cheap). Instead of classical and expensive redistributive measures involving personal taxes and personal benefits, the inexpensive European welfare state would seem to be about the zero-cost policing of personal habits. Thus, the obsession with initiatives aimed at rectifying the smoking, drinking, eating, and exercising habits of the population. Add to this the further twist of grounding such initiatives on the need to realize the internal market, and you must agree with the author's sarcasm: âApparently, regulatory difference causes melancholiaâ (p. 250) and justifies the exercise of a liberal priesthood on the side of European institutions (p. 255). But the most intriguing part of the argument is Somek's discordant interpretation of the case law of the European Court of Justice. By a skilled dissection of the leading cases concerning, on the one hand, the division of competences among the Union and the member states and, on the other, citizenship in the Unionâor, to be more precise, the free movement of workers relabeled as the free movement of citizens by the Court itselfâSomek reveals the extent to which the Court has radically altered the relationship between economics, society, and law on the old Continent. Rulings concerning the powers of the Union and, very significantly, the key Tobacco Advertising decision,4 have, he claims, consecrated a radical shift in the understanding of what the âinternal marketâ is about. While seeming to ârein inâ the power of the Union, the Court, in truth, has abandoned any attempt at limiting the societal sphere of the single market and the radiating normative force of economic freedoms. In particular, the Court has reversed its old limiting jurisprudence according to which the Union's competence was to be determined by the âcenter of gravityâ approach or, what is the same thing, by pinpointing the regulatory interest of a measure and determining whether it was about creation of the internal market or achievement of a socioeconomic objective (the latter being reserved to member states). From Tobacco Advertising onward, the âinternal marketâ has trumped other interestsâthat is, any measure that removes a sufficiently serious obstacle to an economic freedom is held by the Court to fall within the competence of the Union, even if its regulatory center of gravity lies in an area of national competence, such as protection of health, promotion of education, or combating tax fraud. As a result, the ECJ has abandoned the so-called liberal market paradigmâwhich regarded economic integration as a way to achieve wider political goalsâand replaced it with a supposedly holistic market understanding that looks upon the four economic freedoms5 as the ultimate objective to which the organization of all of society must be subordinated. Thus, all socioeconomic norms are consequently viewed with suspicion as potential obstacles to economic freedoms.6 Once envisaged as a means of realizing openly political goals, economic freedoms have become the core of the material constitution of the Union. They are now at the heart of the conception of politics and society as enshrined in positive European constitutional law, a conception that, while well known in European constitutional history, is somewhat at odds with the one endorsed by postwar national constitutions. Meanwhile, the line of cases led by MartĂnez Sala7 and Baumbast8 threatens to redefine the very understanding of European citizenship. On the face of it, these cases might seem to have replaced the âmarketâ denizen of Community law with a âpoliticalâ European citizen by extending the number of holders of the Community right to free movement beyond the rank and file of workers to the general class of nationals of a member states and, perhaps, even more widely to permanent residents of a member state. However, such rulings have far less benevolent implications, because the practical effect of this kind of rights discourse is to expand the possibilities for the ECJ to review any national law on the ground that it violates economic freedoms. The upshot of the Commission's regulatory activities and the courtsâ deregulatory activities is a full recalibration of Community law, which is softened, regarding the strong parties in socioeconomic relations even as it is hardened into abrasive forms of âliberal paternalismâ that ânudgeâ9 us for our own good and purported freedom. The overall political result is the decadence of citizenship, which becomes a hollow category, inadvertently supersededâby what, we cannot be sure. The weak pulse of European constitutional and ordinary politics only amplifies the consequences of these developments. The complex blend of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism that lies behind the institutional structure of the Union is, indeed, an impediment to the interconnection of national political debates. Consequently, both the Court and the Commission lack democratic reference points by which to orientate their decisions. As a result, the active citizen is being superseded by the oxymoronic âindividualisticâ citizen (chapters 10 and 12), who is persuaded that it is in her own interest to become a docile subject delegating all power to rulers. It is because politics has vanished from the picture that political strife can be presented as a distraction or a threat, from which the really free individual has to be liberated by proper men in the know, or, put differently, by the selected few capable of handling and, above all, managing the restless many. All these major transformations would account forâamong other thingsâthe infatuation with a range of new and fanciful political idioms: no longer government, but âgovernance.â No longer capitalists, but âstakeholders.â No longer democratic confrontation, but arcadic âpartnerships.â Somek takes considerable pains to show that, while the terms may be new, this is not uncharted territory but, rather, a political involution toward a mixed constitution of sorts, guided by the neoliberal mirage of absolute individualistic freedom. The form of law is kept but put to the service of a rather Lenin-inspired regulatory politics, limited to the administration of things (chapters 10 and 13). Both the legal-dogmatic reconstruction of the ECJ's case law and the normative assessment of the EU's legitimacy seem more than âdisturbingly plausible,â to quote a blurb printed on the book's cover. However, what seems to be absent from the train of reasoning of Individualism, unfortunately, is a proper consideration of the temporal dimension of European integration. A question that might be raised is whether the âpost-constitutionalâ and âindividualisticâ drives that Somek describes are intrinsic to European integration, or whether they result from a mutation caused by political and judicial decisions. The point is not only of historical interest but is extremely salient in pragmatic terms. Indeed, the reader is left pondering whether European Union and Community law are doomedâis European law, indeed, postconstitutional in character?âor whether they can be redeemed and their normative promise realized. And if they can be, what is to be done to extricate the Union from its present fix? In that regard, the author seems to point in conflicting directions (in the affirmative, on pages 31, 241, or 267, and, in the negative, on pages 121 and 123). One can only guess that somebody who devotes time and effort to write a brilliant book about European integration is likely to find some promise in a federal Continental union. Be that as it may, it seems to me that Somek's thesis needs to be tested by going further back in time. It was in the early and mid-â80s when a major turn in the perception of the relationship between politics, economics, and law took place both at the national and at the supranational level.10 This event consisted in the massive albeit slow transformation of the understanding of both national and constitutional law. At the European level, the rulings in Cassis de Dijon11 (certainly following the opening in Dassonville);12 the policy decisions reflected in the White Paper on the Completion of the Internal Market of June 1985;13 and the constitutional option for the Single European Act14 were conducive to the rise of what Somek labels âmarket holismâ and âhollowâ European citizenship. This turn of events is also reflected in the substantive shifts from the common to the single market15 and from the understanding of economic freedoms as a way of operationalizing the principle of nondiscrimination (and thus reconcilable with autonomous national socioeconomic policies) to their characterization as realizations of European citizenship. Individually, each of these shifts may be supported by reasonable arguments; however, as a whole, they provided cover for âprivatizingâ our understanding of freedom, and for the recharacterization of national welfare and tax norms as obstacles to economic freedoms. If this is correct, we could claim that it was these decisions that changed the structural and substantive genetic code of the Union and of its law. These decisions, and not some intrinsic features of Community law, are to blame for the progressive erosion of the socioeconomic preconditions for meaningful national socioeconomic policies. Thus, if there is nothing intrinsically rotten in the state of Europe and in its legal order, Individualism perhaps should be read less as a diagnosis of the unavoidable fate of the Union, of its institutions and its laws, than as a dystopic projection of what can go wrong if we keep on treading our present path. Furthermore, it seems to me that Individualism merely suggests, without fully developing, the links between integration through postconstitutional law and the emergence of the so-called governance paradigm. Indeed, the Panglossian description of radically innovative procedures of collective will-formation through governance, such as the Open Method of Coordination,16 which, with little critical research underpinning it, nonetheless attracted wide comment, or the more esoteric mechanism of coordination of economic policies in Euroland through the Eurogroup seem to point in the same directionâthat of overriding constitutional law. To use words that were very popular in policy circles in the â90s, European governance should become the new grammar of European law. In more pedestrian English, this means replacing supposedly quaint or obsolete constitutional law, tainted by its relationship with the nation-state, with a new array of procedures and institutional formations; it will be through that the collective will may be formed. That sounds very similar, indeed, to the âdissonant lawâ that Somek reads into the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice and the policy initiatives of the Commission. Still, it is ultimately uncalled-for to criticize an author for what was not done in a book that is as rich and suggestive as Somek's Individualism.
In this essay a conceptual and theoretical scheme for decentralized integrated health care systems of the northern European kind is developed. With small changes it is also applicable to other countries, e.g. Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Three ideas tie together the scheme: modified fiscal federalism, principalagent thinking and the analysis of discrete structural alternatives from new institutional economics. As a special case it encompasses the ideas of planned markets and public competition developed by von Otter and Saltman. The scheme can be used to analyse driving forces behind reforms and prediction of effects. To illustrate the thinking the recent Norwegian reform is put into context, not only geographically but also theoretically. The geographical context is that of Scandinavia and there is a summary of reforms in the Scandinavian countries over the past 20-30 years. The essay thus serves the double purpose of presenting and evaluating the Norwegian reform in a Scandinavian context and to take part in the neglected discipline of developing a theory of health care reform. The Norwegian January 2002 reform is described in some detail. It is a reversal of the Scandinavian model of decentralization and a move towards more centralism. The hospital system was transferred to the state that established five regions with independent (non-political) boards and each region has a number of daughters (hospitals) that have great autonomy with their own boards and are outside the legal restrictions of the public sector. Basically the idea is to mimic the corporate structure of large private companies. The reform is evaluated based on principal-agent thinking and the analysis of discrete structural alternatives. Overall there is no a priori reason to expect large improvements in efficiency â but on the other hand neither should one expect things to get worse. Many effects depend, however, crucially, on (a) the financing system that will be put in place late 2002 or early 2003, and (b) whether or not the political and management culture change as a result of the reform. In the concluding sections possible implications for Denmark and Sweden are discussed.
Options for health financing reform are often portrayed as a choice between general taxation (known as the Beveridge model) and social health insurance (known as the Bismarck model). Ten years of health financing reform in Kyrgyzstan, since the introduction of its compulsory health insurance fund in 1997, provide an excellent example of why it is wrong to reduce health financing policy to a choice between the Beveridge and Bismarck models. Rather than fragment the system according to the insurance status of the population, as many other low- and middle-income countries have done, the Kyrgyz reforms were guided by the objective of having a single system for the entire population. Key features include the role and gradual development of the compulsory health insurance fund as the single purchaser of health-care services for the entire population using output-based payment methods, the complete restructuring of pooling arrangements from the former decentralized budgetary structure to a single national pool, and the establishment of an explicit benefit package. Central to the process was the transformation of the role of general budget revenues - the main source of public funding for health - from directly subsidizing the supply of services to subsidizing the purchase of services on behalf of the entire population by redirecting them into the health insurance fund. Through their approach to health financing policy, and pooling in particular, the Kyrgyz health reformers demonstrated that different sources of funds can be used in an explicitly complementary manner to enable the creation of a unified, universal system.
The fast process of urbanization in Brazil in recent decades has generated great discussions on urban reform, public policy and urban management. With 1988 Federal Constitution, these topics are in the spotlight, articulated by the city council as an equal federal entity and common jurisdiction in matters of urban policy. In this area, the question of housing policy becomes central and strategic for the city, as one of the main problems is the provision of adequate housing to the majority of the population. The Statute of the Cities (Estatuto das Cidades) in 2001, confirms this view. According to the National Housing Plan (Plano Nacional de Habitao) (Ministrio das Cidades, 2004), with the decentralization process, the management of social programs, among them the housing, either by themselves or by joining a federal program becomes responsibility of the state and city councils. It is in this context that new sources of financing are created sponsored by the federal government through Caixa Econmica Federal, benefiting both the state and local governments and also a share of the private sector. Therefore, this article will outline the path of housing policies in Brazil, through a survey of policies, plans and federal government programs, observing the neglect given to the planning of cities and the problems caused by unplanned urban expansion.
This journal has recently adjusted its requirements for research papers, referring to the World Medical Associationâs Helsinki Declaration on Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects.1,2 Many advances in medicine have been attained by research involving patients. Individual patientsâ best interests have sometimes been sacrificed for the benefit of future patientsâ health. Most countries have established legal regulations and procedures, based upon this declaration, along with institutional review boards (IRBs). Such universal requirements do not exist for education research or social science research in general. For this reason, many countries, but not all, have included medical education research in their ethical review procedures, which are designed for medical research. Human subjects here are usually students or residents, but teachers and patients can also be involved. This journal will now require proof of ethical research conduct before publication. This step can be considered to represent an advance in research standards and may be taken up by other journals in the field. Like patients, learners are potentially vulnerable subjects of research, specifically if the investigators simultaneously exercise power as teachers or examiners. The Netherlands is among those countries that do not require ethical approval for medical education research. Dutch IRBs typically respond to submitted requests for review of education projects with statements like âexempt from ethical reviewâ because, firstly, patients are not involved and, secondly, no medical interventions are applied. So far, journals have accepted and published such statements without further question. Researchers often find this a comfortable stance as it avoids the bureaucratic burden of approval that has seriously hampered research elsewhere.3â5 For instance, I saw the recent 3-month stay in the UK of one of my research staff end without the planned interview and questionnaire project carried out, only because of a late and negative response from the IRB. Not that the project was unethical; the application simply lacked the requisite paperwork, despite the fact that extensive written and oral information was supplied. The question here is not whether ethical review in medical education research is justified â of course it is â but whether existing IRB procedures are most suitable for medical education research.6 Dutch researchers find âexempt from ethical approvalâ a comfortable stance as it avoids bureaucratic burden Given the requirements journals will put upon submissions, in terms of providing other proof of ethical conduct of medical education research if institutional review is not possible,1,7 independent ethical review will also become important in those countries without relevant procedures, such as the Netherlands. In a recent survey about experiences with IRBs among clinical course directors in the USA, it was suggested that national guidelines for ethics review would enhance transparency and stimulate inter-institutional research collaboration.8 When suggesting that the Netherlands Association for Medical Education take the lead in devising such guidelines, I began to wonder what ethical review of education research should look like, vis Ă vis the Helsinki Declaration. I concluded that education differs from health care in a number of aspects that might affect how ethics review should take place. Patients usually need care because of ill health. They are often very dependent on doctors and hospitals for their essential wellbeing. Students are also dependent as they must abide by the regulations of an institution and its teachers to pass necessary examinations, but they themselves are responsible for whether or not they enrol in particular courses and for whether they attain their self-chosen goals in life. They are, by far, not as dependent as patients. Next, students determine to a large extent the outcome of educational interventions, much more so than patients can determine the outcome of medical interventions. Personal study effort is a major determinant of academic success; medical treatment successes are determined to a far greater extent by health care providers. Students determine the outcome of educational interventions far more than patients can determine the outcome of medical interventions Medical research may involve risks of harm to a patientâs health, which, in some cases, may be serious and irreversible. This type of research requires the utmost caution. Harm in education research may be defined as the risk that less than optimal education is provided, resulting in less acquiral of knowledge and skills, and harm to academic progress. Harm to progress can be serious. I have witnessed a financial claim by a medical student who argued that an examiner had caused loss of income as a result of failing this student on tests and thus extending the required course length. The claim was not sustained and in this case no research was involved, but an educational experiment could be envisioned to carry a risk for such potential harm. In other cases, harm may imply psychological stress and discomfort. Still, this type of harm does not compare with potential physical harm resulting from medical experiments. Potential harm resulting from educational experiments does not compare with potential harm from medical experiments Furthermore, there is no clear distinction between administration and research purposes in data collection on student progress and programme quality. Schools collect data on student progress and the quality of educational processes as part of their core business. This type of data collecting is usually not subject to ethical approval, as registering test results and, to a lesser extent, registering studentsâ opinions of education are unavoidable. Enrolment in education must represent the subjectâs tacit approval that his or her personal data are registered. These data serve both students and educational quality. Reports based on aggregated data of student progress and educational quality can be considered to serve a necessary research aim; indeed, not using these data to improve education could be considered unethical. The necessity of gaining ethical approval or informed consent to use these data as part of research results for publication in a journal is questionable if harm to students is clearly not at stake. Researchers now sometimes label investigations as âevaluationâ in order to avoid the burden and delay incurred by a review procedure, but this does not seem a proper way to go. Rather, clear specifications of the types of data collection and uses that require ethical approval should guide researchers in their ethical conduct. Education is a process that cannot easily be stopped. Programmes must be offered to enrolled students and schools should continue to aim to deliver high-quality curricula. Many medical schools evaluate and try to improve their curricula, either gradually or by instigating large innovations all at once. Viewed from a research perspective, an educational method can be considered an intervention, just as a medical treatment is an intervention. At variance with medicine, medical education is only at a very early stage in the development of evidence-based practice. Education research â still â offers only little evidence to support a claim that one method is superior to another, despite the growing medical education literature.9,10 One reason for this is that students themselves determine to a large extent the effect of education.11 The counterside of the coin is that institutions can change their educational methods if they feel the need to do this, with limited risk for damage to the curriculum or harm to students. Letâs now compare curriculum development with education research. Consider a complete overhaul of the medical curriculum for a new student cohort, say, from a traditional to a problem-based learning (PBL) format. Does this âexperimentâ require ethical approval? Not likely. Not even when national examination results are compared with those of the previous cohort and published in support of the new development. This holds true if the results of students from two medical schools with such different curricula are compared. Next, consider a complete overhaul of the second year of a curriculum for only part of a student cohort. Students could be randomly assigned to either a PBL or a traditional programme, and their scores on national examinations could be compared. Would this âexperimentâ require ethical approval? Most likely it would in most countries. But what is the difference in terms of potential harm to students? Probably none. In general, schools and curricula differ in their educational methods and it is often hard to claim that students are better off with one school or method than another. Twenty years of external review of the eight medical schools in the Netherlands have not raised any serious conclusions that one school is clearly superior to another. Of course, checklists were used and the scores calculated showed differences on points, but no sound basis has ever emerged in support of real qualitative differences in outcome. This example shows how close educational development is to education research. The difference may only be that one instance is considered research, as it has a systematic project description, labels a new method as an intervention, formulates outcome measures and analyses data. What actually happens with students â the basis for ethical review â may be the same in the other instance. This PBL example may not sound very experimental because the format of PBL has been researched extensively, but such research has usually happened only after PBL has been introduced into a curriculum, not before. In other words, is it logical to require ethical approval when methods are compared within cohorts, but not to do so with scientifically less sound approaches, such as historical or inter-institutional comparisons? Providing a completely new educational method to a new cohort without any comparison does not require ethical approval, but it is day-to-day practice in many schools. Why require ethical approval when methods are compared within cohorts, but not historically or inter-institutionally? One important element of ethical research conduct concerns the obligation to provide subjects with the option not to be involved in the investigation, so that potential candidates are asked to give their informed consent to participation and provided with options for withdrawal. In education research in a field setting, participation in research often equals participation in education. For example, introducing a new knowledge test â in fact, most knowledge tests in educational settings can be considered as ânewâ instruments if test items have not been used before â cannot include an option for non-participation when a pass/fail decision must be based on such a test. Informed consent can be sought, but often there is no alternative available. In conclusion, education research should be carried out ethically and the journals that publish such studies have a responsibility to stimulate ethical research conduct. This includes the proper protection of the interests of any human subjects. However, the criteria with which we may evaluate the ethical conduct of education research are not necessarily equivalent to those required in medical research involving patients. Ethical research requires the maintenance of a reasonable balance, between yin and yang, so to speak, or between the risks of harm to subjects and the expected scientific yield of the investigation. This balance may well differ between medical and education research.12 I believe it would help to formulate specific criteria with which we can evaluate the ethics of medical education research. Pugsley and Dornan cite a helpful list of 10 ethical questions for research involving students, formulated by Cardiff University.7 This might represent a starting point for the development of such criteria and could result in a review procedure that both upholds ethical research standards and stimulates, rather than discourages, teachers and students to engage in medical education research.
Traditionally, the geography of money has been a topic of only marginal or peripheral interest to economists. To be sure, economists have long studied banking, the operation of national financial and monetary systems, international capital movements and the like; but in typical economics fashion, the spatial frames and contexts within which banking, financial systems and capital markets operate have not of themselves been of interest and have typically been considered as exogenous and pre-given. Even geographers tended largely to ignore the spatialities of finance. Admittedly, in the 1970s and 1980s, there were some studies of regional banking structures, urban mortgage markets, regional credit availability and regional interest rate differentials; but the studies that appeared hardly added up to a substantial or coherent body of theoretical or empirical research. During the 1990s, however, the relationship between money and space began to attract increasing attention, with a succession of books and papers by economists and geographers (for example, Cohen, 1998; Corbridge et al., 1994; Dow, 1990; Eichengreen and Flandreau, 1996; Laulajainen, 1998; Leyshon and Thrift, 1997; Martin, 1999; O'Brien, 1990, 1992; Porteous, 1995). Ironically, this flurry of publication occurred at the very time that developments in the world of finance were leading some of the new commentators to argue that if geography had once been of relevance for understanding money, it was rapidly becoming irrelevant. O'Brien (1990, 1992) in particular claimed that various processes, especially technological advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), the wave of financial deregulation that had begun in the 1980s in the USA and UK and a new trend of financial innovation, were together facilitatingâindeed promotingâaccelerating financial integration at a global scale, rendering geography and location of rapidly declining significance for financial firms, financial flows and access to financial products and services. The globalization of money, it was contended, was annihilating space. Not only was financial globalization undermining national economic sovereignty (Cohen, 1998), by going global banks were free to locate wherever they chose, and money having become electronic, and hence hyper-fungible and hyper-mobile, could now move anywhere almost instantaneously. In this brave new world of global finance, money had escaped space. Geographers on the whole have been much more cautious in pronouncing what O'Brien called the âend of geographyâ with respect to finance. While they acknowledge that distance may have become irrelevant in financial transactions and operations, they have argued that location and place remain of crucial importance (see Leyshon, 1995, 1997, 1998; Martin, 1994, 1999). The spatial concentration of banks, investment houses and other financial institutions in the major national (and global) financial centres has not dramatically lessened: indeed in many respects it has increased, as has the financial specializations of those centres and the competition between them. The outsourcing and offshoring of certain financial functions and services (such as call centres), themselves developments facilitated by ICT and related âglobalizationâ processes, have been highly geographical in their locational dynamics and impacts. Global and national financial centres may be linked together in worldwide networks of financial flows and transactions that ignore national borders, but in so doing they also function as the portals through which monetary fluctuations, perturbations and shocks originating elsewhere are transmitted down through their domestic financial systems and economies, with highly geographically differentiated effects on the economies of different regions and cities (Tobin, 1984). In the other direction, local and regional economic imbalances within nations can trigger off inflationary pressures and house price bubbles that then not only disturb national domestic monetary conditions and management, but through the global interconnections that link financial institutions in world markets can even trigger off global monetary instabilities. And while the banking and financial systems of individual countries have become increasingly and inextricably interconnected, most retain a local or regional dimension in their organization and operation. How these local circuits of money relate to and are entwined with global circuits has major implications for the propagation and impact of financial shocks and perturbations. In short, contrary to what some argued, money remains highly geographical, even in today's globalized world. This special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society brings together a number of papers on this issue, ranging from the geographical organization of financial centres in pre-industrial Europe to the geographical dimensions of today's global âcredit crunchâ. The four papers in this issue that deal with the geographies of finance each offer a different perspective on the spatiality of financial markets and financial transactions. By taking an historical perspective and by using mid-18th century data that precede the Industrial Revolution, Flandreau et al. (2009) explore the spatial linkages of financial transactions across Europe, circa 1750. The central unit of observation is the city, so that in effect the paper is really about the monetary geography of European cities and in particular about the extent to which âlocalâ or own-city currencies circulated âabroadâ, that is in other cities. The mapping of the monetary geography of Europe in the paper of Flandreau et al. is inspired by three interdisciplinary approaches. The first concerns the role of states. History shows that before the ascent of the nation state, there was an intricate and almost seamless web of financial relations across Europe. With the rise of nation states, however, the monetary and financial space of Europe was progressively nationalized and compartmentalized into sovereign territories. The second approach upon which the paper builds is economic geography. The description of intra-city linkages across the Europe of the mid-18th century clearly point to the relevance of agglomeration forces. The main financial centre at that time was the city of Amsterdam, though other financial hubs or agglomerations in the European network of currency transactions are also clearly discernible. In southern Europe, the city of Genoa was for instance very important and likewise the city of Hamburg in Northern Europe. But in the hierarchy of financial centres, Amsterdam dominated, with London and Paris also being very important. A third and final approach that can be used to understand the network of financial connection across European cities is (of course) economic history. Here, the authors argue that their main result can be interpreted through the lens of modern or new institutional economic history. Whatever the analytical approach used, however, the main finding of the paper is that in pre-modern Europe, that is prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was already a dense and quite distinct spatial urban network of financial connections in Europe. Local currencies or bills of exchange circulated widely outside their own locality or city. At the same time, not all cities or bills of exchange were equally widespread: the monetary geography of Europe in those days was one in which a few cities dominated, much like in the modern monetary geography of Europe. In the literature on âmoney and spaceâ, the geographical role or relevance of financial intermediation and banks in particular is emphasized. The claim by O'Brien (1992) that geography has become irrelevant in the modern financial system applies most to public capital markets. When it comes to the supply of and demand for bank loans, however, even casual observation suggests that proximity still matters. At the same time, in many countries the banking sector has seen structural change at an unprecedented scale in the last few decades. Banking has gone âglobalâ and this has been accompanied by a very substantial (spatial) concentration of banking. This leads to important questions about the interrelationship between global banking and local credit markets. This interrelationship is at the heart of the paper by Alessandrini et al. (2009). Using O'Brien (1992) as a point of departure, Alessandrini et al. seek to establish if and how distance still matters in the case of the Italian credit and banking market. Distance is a multi-faceted concept and the authors come up with two ways to define distance, namely âoperationalâ and âfunctional distanceâ, that are subsequently used in their empirical analysis. Three findings stand out. First, geography (still) matters when it comes to the Italian credit market and the way in which firms and banks interact (locally). Second, the impact of distance on the interrelationship between global banking and local credit markets is not unambiguous. This then leads to the third finding or probably more accurately an agenda for future research: geography matters when it comes to local banking structures, and banksâ own territorial strategies, as well as the relevance of the banksâ headquarters for regional development. In these first two papers on the geographies of finance, financial centres play a key role. In his paper, WĂłjcik (2009) takes the location of financial centres as given and tries to find out whether (non-financial) firms that are located in financial centres are more likely to go public than similar firms that are located in the financial periphery. Going public means taking the firm to the stock market via a so-called âinitial public offeringâ (IPO). Using firm-specific data for 32 countries, WĂłjcik shows that there is indeed a strong positive correlation between the location of firms and their IPO activity. Firms that are located in financial centres are more likely to go public. Given the high degree of (international) capital mobility and the current technological possibilities for both investors and firms to inform themselves about each other and the functioning of the stock market, one may wonder why in this case geography still matters. The author points out, for instance, that closeness to financial intermediaries may make it easier for firms to go public and also that the specialized labour that is needed for an IPO process is more readily available in financial centres. In this way, it appears that the geography of financial centres influences the capitalization process (via IPOs) of businesses. All three papers introduced so far suggest, somewhat contrary to what O'Brien (1992) claimed, that even with unhampered capital mobility geography is still relevant for many financial transactions. Even with capital free to move within or between countries, the bulk of financial transactions is or remains spatially bounded and has a distinct geographical footprint. From an international macro-economic perspective, the idea that free international capital mobility does not seem to go along with a de-nationalization of capital flows is known as the FeldsteinâHorioka paradox. More specifically, the paradox here is that with free capital mobility, one would expect that national savings and national investment are no longer positively correlated. Without capital mobility, national investment is inevitably constrained by the amount of national savings. But with capital mobility, this is in principle no longer the case. However, following the seminal study by Feldstein and Horioka (1980), scores of researchers have found that for almost every country national savings and national investment are still strongly correlated. The paper by Kool and Keijzer (2009) throws new light on this issue. Using new (panel) estimations and estimation techniques for a sample of 23 countries for the period 1973â2003, they find that the Feldstein-Horioka (FH) coefficient that measures the relationship between savings and investment has in fact dropped significantly in recent years. Indeed, around the year 2000, the coefficient is no longer significantly different from zero. This suggests that economic and financial integration has increased markedly in recent years. As to the reasons behind the de-coupling between national savings and investment, the authors single out increased trade openness and especially a fall in the so-called âhome equity biasâ. The latter refers to the stylized fact that investors typically have a tendency to underinvest in foreign equity. According to Kool and Keijzer, with this bias getting weaker, the correlation between national savings and investment also has weakened. Since it is only fairly recently that the FH coefficient has fallen so strongly, it remains to be seen if this is merely a temporary phenomenon or if national savings and investment have really started to move independently of one another. The current financial crisis is a first real test in this respect. The spatial dimensions of finance have been highlighted by the current financial crisisâwhere a shock ostensibly emanating from the US housing market was rapidly transmitted into a global recession. In their paper, O'Brien and Keith (2009) argue that the crisis has been facilitated by the âend of geographyâ with ICT and lightly regulated finance enabling ultra-rapid and highly complex flows of financial capital across borders. However, when reviewing the future of finance, O'Brien and Keith suggest that it is likely that the drive towards the âend of geographyâ will be slowed by the crisis; as the level of financial regulation is likely to increase, developments in ICT may help improve the management of information, a feature that has been manifestly lacking in modern global financial markets. In any case, as discussed above, the âend of geographyâ thesis should not be exaggerated: deregulation and ICT may promote and facilitate the movement of money and capital across space, but they do not necessarily result in a âgeography-freeâ world of finance. Furthermore, it can be argued that globalized financial markets have intensified geography by sustaining and, in some cases, intensifying spatial differences in economic prosperity and social welfare. Global capital markets have enabled countries such as the USA and the UK to run persistent balance of payments deficits by facilitating circulation of finance from those countries that have maintained persistent balance of payments surpluses. And within both the USA and UK, the recession that the credit crunch sparked off has been anything but spatially even in its impacts. The notion of the âend of geographyâ is subject to a powerful critique by Dymski. Tellingly, Dymski (2009) argues that O'Brien's argument is a repackaging of efficient markets theoryâa theory that has been left in tatters by the recent behaviour of financial markets. Dymski constructs an alternative counter-narrative where government policy is fundamental to the construction of financial marketsânot only through the regulatory framework but also through the macroeconomic and industrial policies which shape the opportunities for doing business and generating profits. Furthermore, Dymski argues that global finance has not led to the emergence of a âglobal banking customerâ but has instead created a spectrum of different financial customers, which has contributed to the global divisions in income and wealth. Customers from poorer parts of the spectrum are charged higher interest rates, are more likely to suffer from foreclosure and are the first to be deprived of liquidity when crisis strikes. But, of course, the most impoverished, such as many of those in Africa, are completely disconnected from the financial system. According to French et al. (2009), the credit crunch is a âvery geographical crisisâ. They argue that the crisis has arisen from an active use of space at a range of scales and along networks of varying length which connect individuals and institutions to the financial system. Thus, the crisis has been characterized by different geographies of financial flows, wealth effects and impacts. It should also be emphasized that the financial crises has led to an economic crisisâand the geographies of the two crises are likely to be different and will be determined by the mechanisms through which the former is transmitted to the latterâas the decline in world income and trade and the inability of producers and consumers to borrow to invest and consume will have different spatial impacts and amplitudes. The paper by Bieri (2009) also counters the O'Brien position, on the grounds that the globalization of financial markets has led to a change in geography rather than its demise. Bieri contrasts the âoldâ geography characterized by competing nation states with the ânewâ geography comprising globally dispersed creditors and debtors with both strong local and global connections and drivers. Furthermore, such bi-polar processes will continue in the future and global financial markets will become more âcurved and spiky, not flatâ. This will create challenges for regulation and global financial architecture: the Bretton Woods system, which was established after the Second World War in the era of dominant nation states, largely remains in place today. Thus, there is a need to re-evaluate the global financial architecture and balance the need for decentralized local regulation and centralized interventions and coordination. The issue of the relationship between financial liberalization and poverty is analysed by Arestis and Caner (2009). The conventional focus is on the link between financial liberalization and growth and how the latter may influence poverty through âtrickle downâ effects. Arestis and Caner analyse three further channels: the crises channel, the access to credit and financial services channel and the income share of labour channel. They show that although the relationships between financial liberalization and poverty are complex, the former often causes increases in the latter. Although the paper of O'Brien and Keith provides an updated view of the âend of geographyâ thesis, the majority of papers in this issue suggest that to characterize the contemporary global financial landscape in such terms is to capture at best only certain facets of today's monetary reality. There is in fact considerable evidence that âmoney and spaceâ are still closely intertwinedâgeography has evolved and changed but its âendâ is not in sight. This will become even more apparent as the fallout and complex repercussions of the current financial crisis continue to feed through to the real economy throughout the globe: including house repossessions across numerous cities in the USA and UK; major plant closures, job losses and unemployment in many local communities; future major cutbacks in public sector spending programmes, to help reduce the government debt incurred by bailing out failed banks and mortgage lenders; the collapse of the Iceland economy and the need for IMF support; and the contraction of world trade, which is affecting the German and Japanese economies to such an extent that these two countries are forecast to have much deeper recessions than those countries from where the crisis emanated in the first place (IMF, 2009, 10). What recent events demonstrate so clearly is that finance may have gone global but its complex circuits are profoundly spatial in their operation and impact.
Chapter Generating Functions and Their Applications PART II The Counting Problem EXAMPLES OF GENERATING FUNCTIONS Much of combinatorics is devoted to developing tools for counting\n We have seen that it is often important to count the number of arrangements or patterns but in practice it is impossible to list all of these arrangements\n Hence we need tools to help us in counting\n In the next four chapters we present a number of tools that are useful in counting\n One of the most powerful tools that we shall present is the notion of the generating function\n This chapter is devoted to generating functions Often in combinatorics we seek to count a quantity a k that depends on an input or a parameter say k\n This is true for instance if a k is the number of steps required to perform a computation if the input has size k\n We can formalize the dependence on k by speaking of a sequence of unknown values a a a a k We seek to determine the kth term in this sequence\n Generating functions provide a simple way to encode a sequence such as a a a a k which can readily be decoded to nd the terms of the sequence\n The trick will be to see how to compute the encoding or generating function for the sequence without having the sequence\n Then we can decode to nd a k The method will enable us to determine the unknown quantity a k in an indirect but highly eective manner The method of generating functions that we shall present is an old one\n Its roots are in the work of De Moivre around it was developed by Euler in in connection with partition problems and it was treated extensively in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Laplace primarily in connection with probability theory\n In spite of its long history the method continues to have In an elementary treatment this chapter should be omitted Chapters and are the only chapters that make use of the calculus prerequisites except for assuming a certain level of math widespread application as we shall see\n For a more complete treatment of generat ing functions see Lando !" MacMahon !" Riordan !" Srivastava and Manocha !\t" or Wilf !"\n See also Riordan !\t" Power Series In this chapter we use a fundamental idea from calculus the notion of power series The results about power series we shall need are summarized in this subsection The reader who wants more details including proofs of these results can consult most any calculus book A power series is an innite series of the form P k a k x k Such an innite series always converges for x Either it does not converge for any other value of x or there is a positive number R possibly innite so that it converges for all x with jxj R\n In the latter case the largest such R is called the radius of convergence In the former case we say that is the radius of convergence\n A power series P k a k x k can be thought of as a function of x fx which is dened for those values of x for which the innite sum converges and is computed by calculating that innite sum\n In most of this chapter we shall not be concerned with matters of convergence\n We simply assume that x has been chosen so that P k a k x k converges Power series arise in calculus in the following way\n Suppose that fx is a function which has derivatives of all orders for all x in an interval containing Then fx X k f k k# x k f % f x% f # x % f # x % The power series on the righthand side of converges for some values of x at least for x The power series is called the Maclaurin series expansion for f or the Taylor series expansion for f about x Some of the most famous and useful Maclaurin expansions are the following x X k x k % x% x % x % for jxj e x X k k# x k % x% # x % # x % for jxj sinx X k k k % # x k x # x % # x for jxj ln % x X k k k x k x x % x x % for jxj This assumption can be made more precise by thinking of P k a k x k as simply a formal expression a formal power series rather than as a function and by performing appropriate To show for instance that is a special case of it suces to observe that if fx e x then f k x e x for all k and f k Readers should check for themselves that Equations and are also special cases of One of the reasons that power series are so useful is that they can easily be added multiplied divided composed dierentiated or integrated\n We remind the reader of these properties of power series by formulating several general principles Principle Suppose that fx P k a k x k and gx P k b k x k Then fx%gx fxgx and fxgx can be computed by respectively adding term by term multiplying out or using long division\n !This is true for division only if gx is not zero for the values of x in question\n" Specically fx % gx X k a k % b k x k a % b % a % b x% a % b x % fxgx a X k b k x k % a x X k b k x k % a x X k b k x k % a b % b x% b x % % a xb % b x% b x % % a x b % b x% b x % % fx gx a P k b k x k % a x P k b k x k % a x P k b k x k % a b % b x% b x % % a x b % b x% b x % % a x b % b x% b x % % If the power series for fx and gx both converge for jxj R so do fx % gx and fxgx\n If g then fxgx converges in some interval about For instance using and we have x % e x % x% x % x % % % x% # x % # x % % % % x% % # x % % # x % X k % k# x k Also x e x % x% x % x % % x% # x % # x % % x% # x % % x % x% # x % % x % x% x % % % x% x % Power series are also easy to compute under composition of functions Principle If fx gux and if we know that gu P k a k u k we have fx P k a k !ux" k Thus setting u x in Equation gives us ln % x X k k k x k Principle generalizes to the situation where we have a power series for ux Principle If a power series fx P k a k x k converges for all jxj R with R the derivative and antiderivative of fx can be computed by dierentiating and integrating term by term\n Namely df dx x d dx X k a k x k X k d dx a k x k X k ka k x k and Z x ft dt Z x X k a k t k dt X k Z x a k t k dt X k k % a k x k The power series in and also converge for jxj R For instance since x d dx x we see from and that x X k kx k % x% x % \tx % Generating Functions Suppose that we are interested in computing the kth term in a sequence a k of numbers\n We shall use the convention that a k refers to the sequence and a k written without parentheses to the kth term\n The ordinary generating function for the sequence a k is dened to be Gx X k a k x k a x % a x % a x % If the power series for gu converges for juj S and juxj S whenever jxj R then the The sum is nite if the sequence is nite and innite if the sequence is innite\n In the latter case we will think of x as having been chosen so that the sum in converges Example Suppose that a k n k for k n\n Then the ordinary generating function for the sequence a k is Gx n % n x% n x % % n n x n By the binomial expansion Theorem Gx % x n The advantage of what we have done is that we have expressed Gx in a simple closed form encoded form\n Knowing this simple form for Gx one can now possibly derive a k simply by remembering this closed form for Gx and decoding that is expanding out and searching for the coecient of x k Even more useful is the fact that as we have observed before often we are able to nd Gx without knowing a k and then to solve for a k by expanding out Example Suppose that a k for k Then Gx % x% x % By Equation Gx x provided that jxj Again the reader will note the closed form for Gx Example Often we will know the generating function but not the sequence We will try to recover the sequence from the generating function\n For example suppose that Gx X k a k x k and we know Gx x x What is a k Using Equation we have for jxj Gx x x x % x% x % Hence a k In this chapter and Chapter we study a variety of techniques for expanding out Gx to obtain the desired sequence a k Example Suppose that a k k# for k Then Gx # % # x% # x % # x % By Equation Gx e x for all values of x Example Suppose that Gx x sinx is the ordinary generating function for the sequence a k To nd a k use Equation substitute x for x and multiply by x to nd that Gx x x # x % # x x # x % # x Thus we see that a k is the kth term of the sequence # # Example Suppose that Gx cosx is the ordinary generating function for the sequence a k Since Gx has derivatives of all orders we can expand out in a Maclaurin series by calculating f k for all k and we see that Gx X k k k# x k # x % # x The verication of this is left as an exercise\n An alternative approach is to observe that Gx dsinxdx and so to use Equation Then we see that Gx d dx sinx d dx x # x % # x d dx !x" % d dx # x % d dx # x % # x % # x which agrees with Equation Example If a k the ordinary generating function is given by Gx % x% x % x % x % % x% x % x % x % x % x x x Example If a k # #\t# the ordinary generating function is given by Gx # % # x% # x % x # x % # x % # x % x e x x Example The Number of Labeled Graphs In Section we counted the number Ln e of labeled graphs with n vertices and e edges n e Cn If n is xed and we let a k Ln k k Cn let us consider the generating function G n x C\nn X k a k x k Note that in Section we computed Ln e CCn e\n Hence if r Cn G n x r X k Cr kx k By the binomial expansion Theorem we have G n x % x r % x C\nn which is a simple way to summarize our knowledge of the numbers Ln e\n In particular from we can derive a formula for the number Ln of labeled graphs of n vertices\n For Ln r X k Cr k which is G n Thus taking x in gives us Ln C\nn which is the result we derived in Section Smith Jones Brown Black White Cutting Shaping Gluing Polishing Packaging Figure A board corresponding to a job assignment problem Example Rook Polynomials Job Assignments and Storing Com puter Programs Suppose that B is any nm board such as those in Figures and with certain squares forbidden and others acceptable the acceptable ones being darkened\n Let r k B be the number of ways to choose k acceptable dark ened squares no two of which lie in the same row and no two of which lie in the same column\n We can think of B as part of a chess board\n A rook is a piece that can travel either horizontally or vertically on the board\n Thus one rook is said to be able to take another if the two are in the same row or the same column\n We wish to place k rooks on B in acceptable squares in such a way that no rook can take another\n Thus r k B counts the number of ways k nontaking rooks can be placed in acceptable squares of B The board in Figure arises from a job assignment problem\n The rows correspond to workers the columns to jobs and the i j position is darkened if worker i is suitable for job j\n We wish to determine the number of ways in which each worker can be assigned to one job no more than one worker per job so that a worker only gets a job to which he or she is suited\n It is easy to see that this is equivalent to the problem of computing r B The board in Figure arises from a problem of storing computer programs The i j position is darkened if storage location j has sucient storage capacity for program i\n We wish to assign each program to a storage location with sucient storage capacity at most one program per location\n The number of ways this can be done is again given by r B\n We shall compute r B in these two examples in the text and exercises of Section The expression RxB r B % r Bx % r Bx % is called the rook polynomial for the board B\n The rook polynomial is indeed a squares Locations Programs Figure A board corresponding to a computer storage problem The rook polynomial is just the ordinary generating function for the sequence r B r B r B As with generating functions in general we shall nd methods for computing the rook polynomial without explicitly computing the coecients r k B and then we shall be able to compute these coecients from the polynomial To give some examples consider the two boards B and B of Figure In board B there is one way to place no rooks this will be the case for any board two ways to place one rook use either darkened square one way to place two rooks use both darkened squares and no way to place more than two rooks\n Thus RxB % x% x In board B there is again one way to place no rooks four ways to place one rook use any darkened square two ways to place two rooks use the diagonal squares or the nondiagonal squares and no way to place more than two rooks\n Thus RxB % \tx% x EXERCISES FOR SECTION For each of the following functions nd its Maclaurin expansion by computing the derivatives f k a cosx b e x c sinx d x ! \nx!
In 1957, in his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes recommended mapping the multiple terrains in which various myths and ideologies were spoken (149). This paper follows in those footsteps by examining a pattern of discourse in American films after the events of September 11, 2001. An analysis of three recent films (and a comparison to a film from an earlier era) will reveal that the timbre of our discourse has modulated toward reliance upon (and valorization of) patriarchal authority, and away from reason. The author's fundamental theoretical assumption is that the relationship between American society and its cultural production is interactive, reciprocal, and mutually informing; films not only reflect society, but help to shape it. Since films are the result of conscious acts of representation and not some automatic process of reflection, films should be taken seriously as ideologically driven acts of speech. Million Dollar Baby won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2004, as well as Oscars for director Clint Eastwood and lead actress Hilary Swank. The religious right criticized the film for its apparent endorsement of euthanasia, but may have missed the point. Million Dollar Baby is actually a film about then-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration's doctrine of preemptive war. The film stars Hilary Swank as Maggie, a bootstrapping, working poor waitress determined to make it as a professional boxer. Clint Eastwood stars as gym owner and boxing coach Frankie Dunn, who reluctantly takes Maggie under his wing. The narration by Morgan Freeman's character, Scrap, obscures the dynamics of the story. Maggie is the million dollar baby of the title, but whose baby is she? She is Frankie's. Indeed, the relationship between Frankie and Maggie becomes familial. Frankie has a grown daughter who returns his letters to her unopened and unread. The origin of the rift between Frankie and his daughter is unexplained by the film; the audience is not told what happened, and all we see are after-effects. Getting only one side of the story encourages us to sympathize with Frankie (at least he is trying to get it right, we reason). Before long, Maggie slips into the role of surrogate daughter. Maggie calls Frankie âBoss,â but âDaddyâ would be more appropriate. Her relations with her own family are frustrating and are an early clue about the film's conservative ideology. When Maggie wins enough money as a boxer, she buys her mother a house. Instead of being grateful, her mother (Margo Martindale) complains that the acquisition of a home is going to upset her welfare scam. Maggie's family also includes her sister Mardell (Riki Lindhome), an unwed mother, and her brother JD (Marcus Chait), soon to be released from jail. Now, whose stereotypes are these? Maggie's mother and siblings are cartoons of welfare-state parasites, the kind of sly poor folk whom conservatives theorize are sapping our nation of its vigor. Maggie's family is portrayed without a shred of sympathy. We do not feel for their poverty, ignorance, or lack of options; instead, the one-dimensional scripting encourages us to see them as selfish, ungrateful, and criminal. Following the debacle with Maggie's mom is a scene which plays a key part in foreshadowing coming events. Maggie tells Frankie about the time her father euthanized her beloved dog as an act of mercy, and then the pair stop at a diner and have some lemon pie. They bond. Subsequently, Maggie demonstrates her loyalty to Frankie by refusing to abandon him in favor of a more successful manager with better connections. Frankie's key piece of advice to Maggie, which he repeats several times throughout the movie, is this: Always protect yourself. That is the same advice Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration invoked to justify going to war in Iraq: we had to protect ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. Despite the constant reiteration of this advice, Maggie fails to keep her guard up and is clocked by a nasty boxer identified as a former East German prostitute (Trifecta: a figure not only representing two major military enemies of the U.S.A. in the 20th century, but also moral turpitude). After getting sucker-punched by her opponent, Maggie falls, sustaining spinal cord injuries that leave her permanently paralyzed and bedridden. She then requests that Frankie treat her as her father had treated her dog. It is at this point that it becomes clear that the film is about Frankie, and not about Maggie. The balance of the movie is about the difficulty of Frankie's choice. As a Catholic, Frankie thinks mercy killing is a sin. As Maggie's surrogate father, he cannot bear to see her suffer. What, then, to do? Well, thank God our patriarchs are old and wise, and are capable of making the tough decisions. The entire narrative logic of the film endorses the assumption that our elders know what they are doing, and the young do not. Frankie's priest is a younger man, whom Frankie treats mostly with disdain. In a sub-plot of the film, Scrap is called upon to defend Danger, a hapless wannabe boxer who is pummeled by a gym bully. The skilled, older boxer (even when reduced to the status of a janitor) is more than a match for the guileless youth of the bully; in fact, Scrap puts him away with one hand. For her part, Maggie demonstrates that she has finally learned Frankie's lesson about defending herself when she refuses to sign her financial assets over to her parasitic family. In every instance throughout the film, the logic of the narrative supports the idea that the combination of age and male gender confers wisdom. Frankie ultimately decides to end Maggie's suffering. In their last conversation, Frankie tells Maggie that the Gaelic nickname he gave her, Mo Cuishle, means âmy darling, my blood.â Family feeling triumphs over religion and law; Frankie knows that euthanasia is illegal, but he does it because he feels it is right. Insert your own joke about Bush administration policies and scandals here. Scrap's narration turns out to be a letter to Frankie's estranged daughter, explaining that Frankie never came back to the gym after ending Maggie's misery. âNo matter where he is, I thought you should know what kind of man your father really was,â Scrap concludes. The final image of the film is Frankie back at the diner, presumably having some of that lemon pie. The tone is nostalgic and sentimental. It is an odd chord to strike in a film about senseless tragedy and loss, and it only makes sense if we are supposed to identify with Frankie. This is a textbook example of how hegemony is supposed to work under patriarchy; we are presumed to mistake the patriarch's interests and point of view for our own. While democracy and maturity both involve necessary measures of self-determination in order to be free and responsible, patriarchy requires submission to the dictates of the father-figure. In his book Moral Politics, the cognitive linguist George Lakoff delineates paradigmatic differences in the politics of conservatives and progressives. Lakoff asserts that that the two groups both employ the metaphor of the family to conceptualize and articulate their political positions, but differ in the kind of family they theorize. According to Lakoff, conservatives embrace a Strict Parent model of family. In this model, a Strict Parent is deemed necessary because the world is thought to be a dangerous place, and children therefore need to be disciplined in order to survive the Darwinian ordeal of existence. Any leniency toward or indulgence of children is considered a moral lapse, because it fosters weakness that will ultimately endanger the child. In the Strict Parent paradigm, being strong is the same thing as being moral. Since morality and strength are thought to be the same thing, and since success is proof of strength and fitness for survival, success is also considered a sign of morality. Therefore, failure is a sign of weakness and immorality. The people who succeed or fail do so not because of structural inequalities (such as institutional discrimination against race, class, or gender), but because of their personal characters. Strength of character is formed through children learning self-discipline and self-reliance, qualities which are deemed necessary to succeed in life's harsh contest. These qualities are presumably learned through obedience to the authority of the Strict Parent, usually the father. Since the success or failure of children and (by extension) society is dependent on the discipline of the father, the exercise of parental authority is itself considered moral, justified, and paramount; conversely, threats to that authority are seen as immoral, unjustified, and misguided (Lakoff, 67-84). When the Strict Parent is a father, and when the family metaphor is extended to the whole of society and its institutions, Lakoff's Strict Parent model is a good description of the logic of patriarchy. If Lakoff is correct in his assessment of the Strict Parent model, it goes a long way toward explaining the conservative obsession with fathers and fatherhood. It also helps explain the logic behind the 2005 version of War of the Worlds, in which the solution to the problem of invasion is the restoration of patriarchal authority. The narrator of the classic novel The War of the Worlds is an unnamed character much like the author H.G. Wells himself, a writer with some scientific knowledge. Few of the characters in the novel are given names, and most are referred to by their occupation or station, for example, the curate, the artilleryman, etc. A few chapters detail the exploits of the narrator's brother, a medical student, after the arrival of the Martians (Mac Adam, xxvi-xxvii). The hero of the 1953 film version is atomic scientist Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) who wants to get a good look at the Martians as much as he wants to escort his love-object Sylvia to safety. Sylvia (Ann Robinson) is a pretty weak movie heroine, even by 1950s standards: she is weepy and hysterical much of the time, and her skill-set seems mostly comprised of serving coffee, square-dancing, cooking breakfast, and driving a school-bus. Obviously, an update of the story would have to entail some changes; the characters would have to be drawn in such a way that contemporary audiences could recognize them as being realistic. The choices made in changing the story to update it for Steven Spielberg's 2005 version are therefore legitimate topics of criticism. Significantly, instead of replacing Sylvia with a modern woman, the character is simply written out of the 2005 remake. There are no adult women characters for the balance of the movie, or women whose actions matter to the resolution of the problem. Any trace of feminism's impact on our culture is erased. What we are offered instead is the story of a father and his children. In the 2005 version of War of the Worlds, the protagonist is Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), not a scientist but an Everyman. At the start of the film, we see Ray finish his shift as a longshoreman and race home in his vintage Mustang. Ray is late to pick up his kids from his pregnant ex-wife, Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), and her new husband, Tim (David Alan They have in a new which Ray to as a As the it becomes apparent that Ray is not the is a and he is an on his has no in his and no when he tells his kids to order out for Ray does not know how to with his and does not know how to his daughter even her is The narrative of the film mostly on as a father as he to escort his children to the Martians our The key in the film is or not Ray is good under When the Martians it It may as well While the of the film is an invasion which the audience knows is the of the film is to with the of This is through the of of and destruction. The of is the that when the from their of the of the film is on we see it in his the of the is in and the are the of When the and turns its on the feeling the scene much the of on of people from the of and by the of the The is the by the that Tim and Mary house. This no narrative and does to the but is of the that in on September The of is the of you seen this that Ray and his children with the to the These of were all over in the as the to who may or may not have in the If we of this recent version of War of the Worlds as a that is about that then are a of about the film that are is the of the in to their to the invasion is a to up with the to the to do so is by his who you leave who will protect a that both lack of in does to and a military that is the What is so is that his need not in of having to do but in of having to see the to it. This is in to the (and of who is from what is going on her on two when she is from at the and when Ray her he their children two about War on all those young who the military after to in and those of us on the home who have from or about what has going on because of the as when the a under the of to of war to The thing is the film's of in whose Ray and The character is an of two characters from the the and the discourse that of the artilleryman, but his is to that of the in the the protagonist the when the is on the of their in a to Martians (Mac Adam, In the 1953 film, the is to the character of of the and the What is so about the character and his in the 2005 version is the in which the and characters are and the logic to justify his What are the qualities that make a to Ray and is a and his him as events This is an but one which Ray never no is made to to stop a of with the of his is At with the but he is when the the in which the characters are After and after the Martians upon the of about in the under the and a This is the from the but to it is the that the a nation never an over not only from our own but also from the Significantly, this is one that to in and What is his own to a Ray not only because he is and but because fails to the of their and because the the of the Martians and a These for are to right of the to the war does not the of the world may in be dangerous to our own and is the of old who are on The of Tim as in of that with this conservative logic on a In a with and its logic of family for killing is to protect and his child. Always protect it for the In the film's only a and Tim is presumably to with a look at the look at the war look at or or The film's narrative has Ray to in Mary Ann him for is having the to the military he into is the film's last of This is in that it is the time Ray as and his patriarchal authority. had referred to his father as him to him from a after him had to do so in the narrative as in the film, Ray had to his him by his but his to be called if you your kids to for your authority, them to war. The film's is taken from the of the and also in the 1953 version is the For those with the the invasion of is when the are by the to which have of the has to the between and for example The and A is the with the novel and film version of War of the H.G. Wells some to God for on to defend our from While to God is religion is also the of in the in the figure of the The 1950s film a but the of the Spielberg's version of the film is of God or religion the when God is mostly as the of triumphs over the Martians because has has that is to upon the but not the from this as is from the discourse of is the of The of and by are the from right and The version of by does not involve the or the of our better obedience to the will of God the father and to the as the of as by on God in a film to this author's by written after The film in at a film in and released in the on only a of with its on in of The film released on in of and has since of a in some and about the film's on The story two from and who get into a with some the in calls and to the of the but the are not the an and that God wants them to all that which is so that which is good may and They out to do with the of their a in the The of that the leave behind them is by at the and the to piece the events which the audience as a When he finally that the are out the he decides to help them than from the of the the of the a out of who is only as We are told is a and but one with he would not women or children. for the The when the in and it is a himself, he is their long the with their by an of the and their father. They in a in which their is by who patriarchal authority. The act as George Bush with that God is on their and with that their is There are no or characters in the The we is the who is for and in a scene about the of her The film with on the about the and of as if of morality. the of Bush administration policies the who process if you are you are the right While this author through written after it is that the film Obviously, the Bush administration not and patriarchal were in American culture the events of September What, then, are the of this If patriarchal have through American culture for what right has the author to the of films to the of the administration in and right politics in that we the back to of the film of that to the of the which a of the same In the like The and The work is not considered to be The film version of to the of the follows the of the a and by is as a but but usually right. of the of the film or not is in his right a in (and surrogate to him of In the the is to be a and is as not only but The of to the of the is the has and A scientist thinks the will itself but that the be from the by a The of the film the to the right at the right time to the the to the world are by the of religious will is written the are you that man even in his to not for us to but we If God that man should without a then does he us the will to to the of the but it a in American thought and cultural production that we could Following War in order to American from right and and American culture the of What this from into or an that it be seen in an and personal had to be to and of and that were to the not only the of but also the of the We see this in a of culture from the the of and on and in and some of the of Ray and the culture and both the and While upon his to have his way for much of to the of the his is on scientific and his to him in the In his own actions not through but by the authority of and have two for to authority. is to and is not. In a or the of God is and is for In the scientific are to and The differences between two have for both and American political asserts a logic to that of the people in know what they are they know what they are because they are the people in knows simply because he is the father. In the Strict Parent model by Lakoff, the in authority is presumed to have that through strength of as the authority is justified, and on or even of are presumed to be such logic is at with which free and September 11, the American people were from an The world to which they and The events of that our that the world us because we are the good In such a strong who a and may and the of is in a of requires us to for and to make our on not authority. The of as by and American who to should be as to that were in culture that The films under are not but As and we should be A culture that obedience to authority is not a culture that endorses free or kind of If we do not this lesson of the century, we may well be to some
Every regions government must be able increasing their own regional income. The finance of resources in fiscal decentralization era, such as: regional original income, general allocation funds and natural resources revenue sharing and tax revenue sharing This research aims to analyze the fiscal decentralization impact to economic growth at regional district in sub province Semarang. The tool of analisis is regression using panel data with Generalized Least Square (GLS) method and Fixed Effect model. It uses district-level data and supplied by the Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics during 2002 - 2006 The regression result shows that regional income, natural resources revenue sharing and tax revenue sharing, and labor forces have positive impact on economic growth at regional district in sub province Semarang. General allocation funds have negative effect towards economic growth at regional district in sub province Semarang. Fiscal decentralization brings more advantages for regions to manage their own fiscal capacities. The regions governments must be have informational advantages concerning resource allocation with optimal Keywords: Fiscal Decentralization, economic growth, Fixed Effect Model
The ways in which public education is financed and delivered varies greatly throughout the world. Many developing countries have highly centralized government administration of education and other public services. Decentralization is one of the most important phenomena to have affected educational planning in the last years.
Some authors divide the approach of the autonomy into four categories: a group comparesthe autonomy with the right to act discretionary in some circumstances. The right is, in this case possessed by anindividual or by administrative organization. Others use the term as a synonym for independence. According to athird position autonomy is synonymous with decentralization, and a fourth opinion specifies that autonomousentities are those which have exclusive powers: legislative, administrative and judicial proceedings in specificareas. The latter is called political autonomy and it is the opposite of administrative autonomy, which is limitedto the power within the scope of the government. The hereby project seeks to answer to several questions suchas: What are the specific elements of administrative autonomy, and what are its benefits? What elements of theinstitutes declared autonomous allowed demonstrating their independence? What factors contribute to the brakedown of the existence of the concept administrative autonomy? What factors have slowed down the process ofself-governance and the decision within a certain area? What types of interest groups may affect thedevelopment of such a concept?
In June 1795, the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft traveled to Scandinavia to sort out some business matters for her lover, Gilbert Imlay. She was accompanied by her one-year-old daughter, Fanny, and her maid Marguerite, but as she moved northward, they were left behind to be gathered up on the return journey. It was a wretched period in Wollstonecraft's life. Imlay, who prior to Fanny's birth had been a devoted paramour, had been seeing other women since. She clung to him desperately, as if life itself were at stakeâas it had been two months earlier when, wild with misery at his betrayals, she had attempted suicide. Now, journeying through strange lands with neither lover nor child, she was wracked by the grief of abandonment. Yet, as always, the literary professional was on the qui vive, alert to possibilities. Shortly after returning to London, Wollstonecraft brought out a volume of letters addressed to an errant lover, but in fact written for publication and never sent to Imlay. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden was one of her best-received works, a favorite especially with the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, who enjoyed her self-portrayal as a melancholy solitaire, a companionless voyager in a loveless world. The image of the lone woman, shorn of all intimate ties, was touching but also pleasurably outrĂŠ, a startling contrast to the familial, male-oriented feminine ideal of the late eighteenth century.1 The âgeneralityâ of women, Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, âflyâ from solitude as from a âfearful void.â2 Trained to submission, leached of inner resources, most women find aloneness intolerable. Against this, she set her own profound responses to solitude, offering up a repertoire of intenseâand dividedâreactions to her Scandinavian sojourn. The agonies of a forsaken heart were set against the exaltations of a mind freed from constraint. âHere I am writing quite alone,â she reported from Portor in Norway, after a hair-raising sea journey, âsomething more than gay, for which I want a name.â3 Yet returning to her lodgings in Tonsberg, she quailed at entering the room, âwithout lighting-up pleasure in any eyeâI dreaded the solitariness ⌠and wished for night to ⌠close my eyes on a world where I was destined to wander alone.â4 A farewell meal with some fellow travelers on the final leg of the trip left her stricken with sorrow, and something more: âI then supped with my companions, with whom I was soon after to part for everâalways a most melancholy, death-like ideaâa sort of separation of soul; for all the regret which follows those from whom fate separates us, seems to be something torn from ourselves.â5 What are we left with, who do we become, when we are alone? Solitude has been a key feature of human experience in all times and places. Yet little of its story has been told. Can such a powerfully personal experience have a history? If it can, then biography must surely be a chief route into it, just as a historical understanding of the solitary self is likely to yield valuable insights into the biographical subject. Biographyâit will be no news to readers of this roundtableâis a controversial enterprise for historians. Some of the features that have made it controversialâits belletristic character; its emphasis on individual agency at the expense of larger historical forces; its flattening of complex causal connections to fit a linear life narrativeâare less pronounced today than in the past, or at any rate seem to generate less anxiety. We now possess many historical biographies that do a superb job of integrating their subjects into their historical contexts; life histories are no longer a genre apart. At the same time, the wall that once divided history from literature has been well and truly breached, with many historians incorporating life-writing and even fictional narratives into their historical monographs. A new literary boldness has entered the discipline, from which biography has been a chief beneficiary. But there is one respect in which biography remains highly problematic for historians, and that is its psychological dimension. The role of personal psychology in history is possibly the most poorly developed field of modern historical discussion, plagued by âcommonsenseâ prejudices, on the one hand, and hard-line theoretical diktats, on the other. All historians use psychologyâit is impossible to write human history without itâbut the psychology that most historians deploy is of the pick-and-mix variety, blending commonplace assumptions about human motivation with bits of pop psychology, often Freudian in flavor. The exceptions to this are those historians who embrace postmodernist anti-humanism, and thus assign no causal role whatsoever to individual psychology. For these historians, the âdeath of the subjectâ decreed by Foucault and his epigones has swept subjectivity off the historical stage. The âindividual coherent selfââthat is, the biographical subject as traditionally conceivedâhas been deconstructed and dismissed as a âbourgeois fiction.â This is a development that calls for closer scrutiny. The Western self has been receiving a lot of attention recently. Studies with titles like âMaking the Self,â âConstructing the Self,â and âInventing the Selfâ proliferate. As the active verbs make plain, virtually all these studies present selfhood as a cultural artifact or, in a variation on this, a discursive construct. A shared narrative unfolds that begins with a pre-modern, âextensiveâ self (a self rooted in communal life, lacking any sense of unique individuality) and then charts a shift (via the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, or the Romantic Age: the putative transition points are multiple) to the modern Western self, a âbounded, uniqueâ individual possessing innate character and psychological interiority: the âunitaryâ or âdeepâ self, as this modern subject type is often called.6 The story is basically a retelling of the familiar tale of the rise of bourgeois individualism, with the additional twist that it is not just the individualist character type that is deemed to originate with modern commercialism, but human subjectivity in toto. Inner experienceâthe private universe of psychic lifeâis also a historical invention, we are told: there is no subjectivity, only social phenomena that produce the effects of it. As one British follower of Foucault puts it, âwe are âassembledâ selves, in whom all the âprivateâ effects of psychological interiority are constituted by our linkage into âpublicâ languages, practices, techniques and artefacts.â7 This socio-historicist account of subjectivity, regularly paraded as a first-order heresy, is now such an article of faith in many academic circles that alternative views tend to be rejected out of hand, as in Dror Wahrman's Making of the Modern Self, where the âself withinâ is exposed as a cultural fabrication, a postâFrench Revolution âidentity regime.â But subjectivity, as Stephen Greenblatt once noticed with some embarrassment, tends to âclingâ on, even in its most convinced critics, long after pronouncements of its demise.8 Biography, with its focus on the complexities of an individual life, highlights the deficiencies of this culturalist approach; biographies of the solitary self point up its psychological sterility. âDetached from the whole world, what am I?â Rousseau asked at the beginning of his Reveries of the Solitary Walker. âThis must now be the object of my inquiry.â9 The investigation plunged him deep into meditations on the inner life, which is where any inquirer into human solitude must follow him. Solitude is one of the great debating points in Western thought, spooling out a string of oppositionsâself versus society, private versus public, country versus city, contemplation versus actionâthat stretch back to antiquity. Classical thinkers tended to favor sociality as more conducive to virtue, with Aristotle's denunciation of solitude as fit only for beasts or gods setting the dominant tone. Philosophical solitude of course was exempted, with the figure of Socrates standing on a lonely hillside in frozen meditation for a full day and night symbolizing the mental autarky of the great sage. For ordinary citizens, however, society was essential to fulfill their potentia. This division between a socially embedded existence and a higher, solitary life reappeared in Christian thought as the dichotomy between the city of man and the city of God, where a spiritual elite dedicated to holy living were permitted to withdraw into monasteries or other forms of religious seclusion. With the Reformation, and its democratic leveling of access to the holy, this elite physical withdrawal gave way to a universal movement into the soul: an individuated form of spiritual retreat which, unlike monasticism and eremiticism, could be accommodated by ordinary life. A righteous man, Daniel Defoe wrote, could be âas perfectly retired from the worldâ in the London Exchange as in a hermitage. Heavenly meditation was the âessence of solitude,â not âmonkish cells and forcible retreats.â âThe business is to get a retired soul ⌠and then we may be alone whenever we please.â10 From the mid-seventeenth century, a new scientific note was heard as enlightened anatomists of human nature entered the debate. Hobbes's bleak account of man as a lone pleasure-seeking machine was countered by defenders of natural sociability who declared Hobbesian man âmonstrous,â a âwolfâ in human dress.11 Latter-day Stoics quoted Cicero on civic duty: âwe are not born for ourselves alone, but ⌠mutually to help one another.â12 âWe are made for the Cements of Society âŚ,â a Ciceronian correspondent wrote to the Spectator, âand Solitude is an unnatural Being to us.â13 Positions proliferated, as retirement poets hymned pastoral solitude as an escape from worldly corruption while moral sentimentalists warned that without social intercourse, men descended into egoist bestiality. Celebrations of solitude as the âschool of geniusâ were countered by medical warnings about the debilitating effects of solitary cerebration.14 In 1757, RousseauâEnlightenment Europe's premier solitaireâtook offense at words spoken by a character in one of his friend Diderot's plays, âOnly the man alone,â which no as at him. were with from who him that as Rousseau was his but the a is a strange sort of a as a for his but also solitude was a to him. âDetached from the whole world, what am I?â What is The now as in tends to in their The of of other one of course be about that is, be in the of when one one a great story about but also with is for many the most solitary of social of these are solitude, some may be for it. This is solitude is not a experience but a an of self that is to be by any between and In a solitude as an inner at the back of the in his which the soul not to itself but to with and of a unique âWe have a soul to in on ⌠⌠to to to and to not that in such a solitude we be in lonely be a The lone self is no but a of solitude is an The Western thought, from less alone than when to of the solitary as an of The account is a by the âThe to solitude, in this is a that in as the aloneness by from his other while in her and as as a to a for his when is Solitude without such is intolerable. of alone is something which that is We are of other selves, who favorite one of this even a the history of Western solitude it to be with of course has been the key but and and an all in the were to be in a of that is, in the of the Christian by without for to one of most of my Solitary were more than by the of to my In solitude, poets with their with their with readers with fictional Rousseau with a self, an with whom a solitary The to in this was a of the the man like was less alone than when alone,â the without a and without For most of Western have with and and the as an physical the by as the religious The of is not as a in the psychology of solitude, but the by as a a of solitary for ⌠the and of individual men in their solitude as they to in to they may the these and as reported by what were of by of a of what we may which in its and any of the of for the of this it in the into mental life of and in what the a of from the self but in a to it. is and more life in our we are at any all of this life was most of the of inner by profound of and were and solitude,â the in a of individual is to find ⌠that which is his but by of But the individual in a of inner the of holy in fact be in gave way to of the of an its through the The was highly controversial in the eighteenth as the human of all a mental between man and was for its its wild Solitary was as conducive to an of the a of are Samuel in an which in its a with the religious to a in which and were for the living Solitude and was not âThe of who their in solitary a ⌠the from their own and which have no in of alone, mind be with and of which are truly and to be no where but in Mary Wollstonecraft as something of an A she and her it as and as a to In she a A a young of who her solitary with is to her literary Mary is a to in lonely places. Wollstonecraft the as a and it is in the of and two poets of the and meditations on solitude the Mary in a she the of But it also Wollstonecraft's own highly sense of religious Wollstonecraft was born into the but by the she wrote her her views were and she her a natural this shift of however, a sense of a to God, as her it, that during some in her life, but never left The an intimate with the most powerfully in A from alone on a an in is the she wrote in an on solitude the all and the which the and of ⌠and the world seems to only the mind that and the mind that all of the solitary however, Wollstonecraft was of its especially for were more than more to corruption by in women was to be than and other regularly women of with In solitude, all women were to in the form of or history of the the of lone readers by who to in the of the of some of her modern into this with as and their for A with an account of an who her alone in her most for She on the ⌠as she accompanied the to the lonely and ⌠with by the of the she thought while she her mind have been daughter, whom she and is of course made of with a mind and heart to But her and she to She in with an with whom she life as a and her truly to her which there was a that even ⌠could not but by now in Mary the of her life and that an could the human and ⌠when other were as a of the to Wollstonecraft was a when she wrote the but little to her she have her or had they her Wollstonecraft wrote at one point of not have out a new The was The of a and an Wollstonecraft was by the of the but regularly a heart to all the ⌠I have never with she wrote to the of her Scandinavian âI once thought I but it was all a She to be off from ordinary âI with who are by ⌠and I am to ⌠of am I thus was to of and into which she to those with is a great in my heart its own she wrote to her in after the of her with the I am a to to after A was the were in a about a solitaire, The of or, in which Wollstonecraft wrote in the final months of her life and which was at her is a tale of is an the of who little for her that she up the who that is a man of A of and by her in a which is where the in her to her she her to up of with which she then a fellow a Gilbert by a she and sorrow, and solitude all to her and Wollstonecraft that she had a of But is and all of the that Wollstonecraft for the of her it for women to who have no active or but what is a of and to to men and her own lone the Mary is a solitary of The was but lacking any or moral Rousseau wrote to his friend had of that which and to the their be but they had fictional were a to this, as the Rights of was a of the of character in Yet it was in one of those for which was who Wollstonecraft with a for her in the figure of the of his is an solitaire, a torn between and virtue, who to with and to for with her at the of and works, Wollstonecraft's a of the and it is that their is as and as for a time, at she is no longer ⌠the in and sense was to and social Wollstonecraft Rousseau in the late when she and his for the soon she was one of his most if It was his which she to she wrote in the Rights of Woman, in the of the with him that of the âI was in with she his personal she a fellow as she in a to his Reveries of the Solitary a mind that into that world in which I have often and the that all is and of image as a especially in its his in she his account of the of in Rousseau had alone, his heart no object for his to ⌠the him of some of the and of the of which had never been to and with which by these she wrote, all the of his heart to one and his the of his with Rousseau then to these a woman, the with whom in with In her Wollstonecraft the story as an of a in the Rights of and she the of to their in his and her readers that the of of the of the as Rousseau wrote in in the that through the what is but a of truly to be but in is but it for itself ⌠⌠It its object as it into its it in like and Wollstonecraft's Mary and the profound of the solitary as it an ideal world to But the of such be in the object of her to him which, in the to be wrote of Wollstonecraft's with Imlay, Mary to her life the of her to Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian have the Scandinavian to his lover had she not attempted is impossible to but it must have been a to him to get her out of his She left and full of bleak and for the she wrote to him as her set from is ⌠I may some or in sense of the ⌠I will or this The trip with its many and a of and a for the final solitude of melancholy my she wrote, as one lonely after a a her with of only of which I a and misery am I thus to she to Imlay. âI have never in my life ⌠from Yet as the solitude her writing alone in from the she into the and in the âI am more than have for a long she wrote to after a day to the she her a of that her especially the young poets of her often do my produce that of the of many she wrote after a through a solitude the its and to the of its own The sense of her to God, of my and as in this solitude a new in the history of my own she what she on The a inner as she to a life from Imlay. She had his object once of his and now of his and she âI am I will not an object of to âI am to be but I will not be The she she was a an born of her and she to from the But she was and could not âI my from to the Being in the of the sense of âI without ⌠a I the want of it more in society, than in As the its the âI am to up by the the to which has been the of my she wrote to from life will have an of to and she to in London, she living with a new and to this âI seem to have no she had written to him from she wrote in her âI to find Solitude is the where self and other for of what Wollstonecraft have her on in the journey, on her for her other in her on the that her to life. âI have ⌠as a off from the of ⌠alone, some like the of made that I was part of a from which I could not ⌠by the of ⌠The solitary self to in an that is Wollstonecraft's solitude of some two was by her in more than been to But to it, we more than a account of subjectivity as a cultural construct. We a biographical that as well as to focus on the of human subjectivity as well as its we to of the the sense of well as of and
This project tries to look at decentralization of VAT revenue and administration to sub national governments in Ethiopia in light of the international practices. It used individual in-depth interview to collect primary data from Ethiopian revenue and custom Authority (ERCA), Addis Ababa regional city administration tax office and ministry of finance and economic development (MOFED). The methods used for analysis were both qualitative and quantitative. The project discusses the problems in connection with decentralization of VAT administration and assignment of VAT revenue. The project suggests that decentralization of VAT administration needs capable and autonomous regional government and strong central government that could monitor and evaluate decentralization; and the assignment of VAT revenue also needs the central governments' follow up to minimize the distortions and should be applied in consistent with the constitution