Introduced in this paper is the author's view on some t opics of genera l interest in the issue of real-estate management legislation:a) principles of r eal-estate management legislation.Legislation at the state (central) level or at decentralized locality level should follow this criterion --to legislate on a n orderly and step-by-step basis;b) the legal status of the Board of Estate-Owne rs.The author argues that,as an autonomous organization representing the estate- owners of the residential guarter,the Board is the subject for civil liability o f limited ability; 3)legal liability of estate management companies.The legisla tion for these companies' liability is applicable to the principle of liability on the faulty part.In special circumstances,the legislation can be applicable to strict liability. The owners' conference,or the contracts agreed upon by both t he Board and the Company are the basis on which liability shall be recognized.
The financial reform of compulsory education in China since 1985 was characterized by fiscal decentralization and resource diversification. It has brought important benefits but did contribute to growing disparities in the quality of education across regions and to inadequate public financing of education in poor areas. This suggests that in the future, more effort needs to be put into the establishment and development of a substantial and regularized scheme of intergovernmental grants. This study, based on 1997 and 1999 county level data, attempts to document the utilization of education resources and disparities in per student spending in late 1990s. Then the study goes further to review the international experience regarding the role of intergovernmental grants in a decentralized system of financing, and finally examines the issues involved in establishing a regularized and substantial system of intergovernmental grants in compulsory education in China.
Autonomy and its autonomous law is an extremely significant phenomenon. The idea of autonomy contains the idea of the right to self-organization, which also encompasses the right to relatively independent i.e. autonomous normative activity. But if autonomy were independent, i.e. independent of state authority, then it would not be autonomous, but new state authority. That means that autonomy, despite its origin, is possible only as a correlative or as an appendage of state authority, which permits and defines it. For that reason autonomy, in comparison to state authority, is always relative and proportionate. The existence of the appropriate measure of autonomy and the autonomous forms adapted to it - no matter when and where - is a sign of the assessment and decision within the state that autonomy is necessary as a measure of proportionate and relative freedom within the given borders. Autonomy in the sense just described, therefore, is not only a matter of the will of a person, nor is it only a matter of the decision, assessment or relevant legal measure, it is also the result of the development of state communities in which decentralization, deconcentration and devolution - as synonyms for the said assessment and change, are accompanied by simultaneously integrative and disintegrative trends and processes represent a clear intimation of the need to satisfy in the mentioned sense only those reasons that are conducive to legal and not false autonomy.
This special report on the theme of interculturality brings together a number of contributions by researchers from different specialisations (information and communications sciences, history, sociology, literature, cinema, etc) and different parts of the world (Germany, Spain, United States, France, Greece, Poland). In terms of research and university teaching in Europe and elsewhere in the western world, there has been considerable development in this field since 1980 within the multitude of disciplines of which it is, in part, a result. As Jacques Demorgon states, although interculturality has "always formed part of the human condition, it has only been placed in perspective [] [so] recently" that it offers a large number of definitions and consequently a large body of authors, work and publications, as the object being studied -culture -is still just as wideranging. Thus interculturality may be compared to a vast building site where work is constantly in progress, to which anyone -whether a scientist or not -may contribute. An illustration of this is provided by a recent issue of Communication et Organisation (2002) on this topic, in which a number of authors each broach, in turn, the complexity and diversity of the field. While Dominique Desjeux (2002: 88; 95) notes in it that "culture is both a structure and a dynamic [] which makes its analysis and observation [] difficult, [] and that it may be just as much a key to functioning better with other people as a means of avoiding them", we shall emphasis that culture is an integral part of the human being and of the affiliations to which he/she is linked, whether deliberately or not (family unit and history; educational, professional, militant, associational circles; places for living and geographical, historical, political places, etc). Further proof of what is as stake in this topic is provided by the publication of the quarterly review En Temps Rel (2003), which
Summary: This paper develops and implements a simple model for estimating local government physical infrastructure and fiscal requirements associated with attaining minimum participation standards in education. The initial empirical evidence suggests that an increase in physical capital of just over 15 percent might be required to meet the minimum participation rate of 80 percent for primary, junior secondary, and senior secondary levels of education. In addition, the results indicate that kabupaten/kota might also need to increase routine education expenditure by about 5.5 trillion rupiah per year in order to reach the desired level of participation; this level of spending implies a rise of nearly 20 percent over current amounts. It is important to stress that these estimates reflect fiscal implications associated with increasing access to education only. Estimates produced elsewhere suggest that needed enhancements to the quality of education would require significantly more resources—perhaps on the order of an additional 10 trillion rupiah annually (for just primary and junior secondary levels). Obviously, attaining quantity and quality standards in the local education sector would not be inexpensive. While it is premature to make a definitive judgment regarding the affordability of minimum standards in education, and more generally, if fiscal requirements for other sectors are anything like those estimated here for education then securing needed finance across all obligatory functions will prove more than a little difficult. Categorical grants probably offer the most feasible means for financing standards in education. Most analysts argue that such specific-purpose transfers are, from a technical point of view, the most suitable instruments for supporting central government objectives regarding the achievement of minimum standards. Obtaining the necessary funding would be hard but if MoNE were willing to exchange its significant regional DIPs for a new DAK, then the chances of acquiring at least a portion of the needed finance would increase. A resolution to the issue of financing minimum standards in education depends, therefore, very much on what MoNE itself is willing to do. The possibilities of financing new categorical grants to support minimum standards in other sectors through DIP-DAK swaps requires further examination. In any case, a decision one way or the other on the question of creating and funding new sectoral categorical grants does not absolve MoF of its responsibility to provide regions with greater access to and control over important local tax bases, such as that for property. Such funds would prove invaluable in financing more and/or better local public services—in education and other in sectors. If securing finance for the full array of minimum standards proves as problematic as it seems, then only two options present themselves regarding the further development, use, and financing of standards. The first option involves a series of three possible actions: reduce the number of minimum standards within sectors, focusing only on those of highest priority; (2) lower the levels at which “minimum” standards are fixed; and (3) prioritize some subset of obligatory functions for immediate action. A fewer number of standards, set at lower levels, for a more limited range of obligatory functions would be relatively more affordable, all things considered. If achieving some realistic combination of these three actions proves impossible, then only a second option remains. This alternative posits that minimum standards function simply as general guidelines or targets for national and regional governments to employ in the context of planning, monitoring, and evaluation. Employing minimum standards in this fashion may prove very constructive, of course, if taken seriously but this seems not to be what many actors involved in the standard-setting process have in mind. Some of these participants have ∗ The author currently serves as senior adviser to the Ministry of Finance (MoF) under a project financed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The views expressed here are those of the author and should not be attributed to either MoF or to USAID. The author would like to thank Mira Kestari for research assistance and Gabe Ferrazzi and Michael Sinclair for useful comments on an earlier version of the paper.
Tuberculosis(TB)is one of the most serious public health problems in China.In this study,finance of TB control programs was analyzed with the data from four counties in Shandong province.The results showed that the disease burden of TB was more serious in poorer counties,however the financing was more limited for poor counties than for wealthy ones.Local governments in poor counties were not capable to finance regular and specific TB control programs so that TB patients had to share the health expenditure;and performance of TB control in poorer counties was not operated as well as that in wealthy counties.Establishment of fiscal transfer payment systemfor public health care and increasing the public health input in poverty-stricken areas are recommended for the smooth execution of TB control programs.
The paper addresses the development of higher education in the Czech Republic after 1989, with special emphasis on the relevant legislation, institutional settings, financing, & enrollment. Czech higher education has changed profoundly since 1989. Universities were granted almost full autonomy as early as in 1990. They have reformed their curricula, expanded programs in the humanities & social sciences, & eliminated political criteria from admissions policies, both for faculty & students. However, the structural changes were not as quick & profound as obtaining & mastering the freedom was. The most significant structural changes in the Czech tertiary educational system addressed in the paper are decentralization & diversification. With regard to financing, the authors argue that universities have remained dependent on the state to a high degree. Several attempts to expand multi-source financing by introducing cost-sharing features (tuition fees, loans, student allowances) failed. The reliance on the public budget led to a severe financial crisis in public universities. As far as enrollment is concerned, the authors demonstrate that, although the number of students rose by almost 60% between 1989 & 2001, the offer of educational opportunities was too low to meet the steeply rising demand for tertiary education. The chance of being admitted hovered around 50%. Owing to the combined effect of a drop in the size of the relevant age cohort & the growing proportion of students admitted to bachelor programs, the chance of enrollment started to increase in 2001. In spite of this recent change, the transition from secondary to tertiary education still remains the most critical moment in an educational career.
This article discusses the importance of the Colombian decentralization process in recent decades as a central axis bearing the tax side: revenues and expenditures of central government and the local authorities. The author makes it clear that despite the advantages of this system in Colombia are multiple problems due to gaps in the regulation of various aspects of reality and especially in the field of finance, taxation and spending. In recent decades, decentralization has brought the phenomenon of overflow discharges from local authorities based on an unlimited autonomy, so the National Government, together with the Congress, has issued various rules to clean up finances at the central, regional and local levels.
A hundred times a day I remind myself that my life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give, in the measure as I have received and am still receiving. Albert Einstein As mere mortals we do not have the skills of Harry Potter or even the great Houdini. Authorship is an honor and a privilege and though there is something magical about scientific writing its unlikely to find a place in Hollywood or even late night television. More likely than not, as is the case in most publications, citation by others is infrequent and stardom doesn’t exist. Most write scientific papers for the pleasure of being involved in something exciting, i.e., a new treatment, technique, or process that is thought to be better than others and certainly no worse. Others write papers because they simply want to share their scientific work with their peers and defend their ideas and methods. They believe that their work will impact others in the field in a positive way. Some believe their results may actually change practice, and or change our understanding of our daily work, whether clinical or experimental. Intellectual Capital Though the efforts of authors and co-authors are not patentable and rarely bring direct monetary gain, they are generally not expended for strictly altruistic motives. The hoped for academic advancement and associated academic promotion that follows successful publication is often accompanied by increased wages. Since the dollars are usually small, the academic and collegial respect gained are often more important. Thus, the intellectual capital of the investigator(s) and author(s) is significant and quantified similarly to the way a business usually evaluates and values their employees. As academically oriented physicians and scientists, our intellectual capital is our major asset. The value of that asset may be reflected in the market by salary and benefits. Like a professional athlete, most of our value is based on our performance. Authorship is one means of evaluating academic performance based on the assumption that much of that performance is reflective of our intellectual capital. After all, there are incredible skills involved in being an author. Though not as recognized as those of an athlete, they are no less impressive. Publishing frequently or in prestigious journals demonstrates to your company (hospital, laboratory, etc.) that your intellectual capital has relative value. It could be likened to fielding percentage in baseball or field goal percentage in basketball or football. In each case you are judged by your performance. In baseball, your batting average may be the most important statistic, unless of course you are a pitcher, where number of wins may be the key performance measure and ERA (earned run average) a secondary measure. As an academic physician, authorship should be but one measure of performance. As a physician, intellectual capital must incorporate your surgical and/or medical skills as well as your diagnostic and clinical acumen. Your value to your institution and your community is a composite. The number of patients seen and/or number of surgeries performed must not be the sole performance criterion of a clinician, nor should the absolute number of experiments performed by a bench scientist. These easily quantifiable attributes would give one a skewed and under-representative sense of one’s intellectual capital. There is yet another layer of confounding added to the attempt to value intellectual capital. Performing surgery or doing the experiment is, of course, difficult, but doing it correctly and achieving the prescribed goal is more dependent on the preparation than the actual procedure. The years and years of training in the classroom, the laboratory and or the operating theater to obtain the necessary intellectual capital and skills, must not be dismissed. With any great athlete, it is the off the field work and the preparation that makes that athlete great. Of course some are born with extraordinary skills, but their work ethic is what makes them great. For example, there are many great basketball players. Why do we remember Michael Jordan? Because Michael Jordan has all the skills but it is his off the court training and work effort that make him the best. In the corresponding world of science and medicine there are also Michael Jordans, like Einstein or Salk. Authors, not unlike great athletes, are interested in having their work recognized and appreciated by those who hear it or read it in the peer reviewed literature. Authors want recognition at a level commensurate with the quality and public importance of their work. Authors who work hard in the preparation of their scientific question, employ the best scientific methods and perform excellent clinical and basic research have the opportunity to publish their work. In so doing they expose themselves to peer review and open discussions for and against their work. But the decision of who should be the lead author and co-author is not unlike that of who gets to be in the starting lineup. Unlike sports, it is not simply the best guy on the team or even the captain. Authorship is very special and needs to be understood by all. Given what’s at stake in the assignment of authorship (e.g., respect and prestige, promotion, tenure), it is an awesome responsibility. So many people contribute to scientific endeavor, at levels ranging from the administrative to the strictly conceptual, that it can be difficult to discern where the lines of authorship should be drawn. However, there have begun to be clear guidelines about who to include as author and who not to. To me, it is all about intellectual capital. Someone had the idea, did the literature search, wrote the grant, coordinated and orchestrated the project, acquired the funding, analyzed the data, interpreted the data, wrote the paper, reviewed and edited the paper (often multiple times), etc. Now it is done and the weighing of who contributed what must be put down in writing upon submission of the paper. Who is included, who is first and last? Seniorship Does Not Mean Authorship Just because you’re the boss doesn’t mean your name should go on every paper. Or just because you’re the best know person at your institution does not mean you deserve authorship (this is known as the Halo Effect). There have been many institutions wherein the most senior person has been a “guest author.” This is neither necessary nor correct. The senior author may be present but if not part of the idea and the writing, editing and/or interpretation they need not be an author. Just reading the paper is not enough. To continue with the athletic and business metaphors, Michael Jordan does not take credit for other team members’ points to make his average better. He does not ask someone else to shoot his free throws and credit those shots to himself. A business person doesn’t usually give credit to others for his/her sales or expect a bonus for work someone else did. Likewise an author can only claim authorship for work they in fact do. Authorship Depends on What You Do, Not Who You Are JAMA deputy editor Drummond Rennie MD, 1 recently modified JAMA’ s Information for Authors to correspond directly to the most recent update of the uniform requirements originally recommended in 1985 and continuously updated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. 2 According to the ICMJE, authorship credit should be based only on: Substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and Final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship. Among other journal editors, Rennie was dismayed to find that these guidelines were being ignored, and decided to follow the leads of the editors of The Lancet and BMJ in requiring that authors disclose their specific contributions to the article, and that the journal actually publish them. 1,3 For simplicity, JAMA provides a list of contributions categories for authors to check off before submission. Spine Policy Authorship is all about performance and valuing intellectual capital. Spine agrees with The Lancet, BMJ, and JAMA that authors should be recognized by their specific contributions to the manuscript under review and has added this requirement to the Information to Authors section. Each author’s contribution must be specified in the submission of a new manuscript. This should be present on the title page with each author’s degrees and institutional affiliation followed by their specific contribution to the submitted manuscript (Table 1). Beginning in the spring of 2003 this information will be published in the electronic version of Spine at the end of each article.Table 1: Authorship Contributions ChecklistOrder of Authors Regarding the issue of author order, Spine recommends that the lead author be the person responsible for much of the “work” as defined by collaborators and the investigative team. In many situations there are a priori criteria established for authorship, as well as a designated person(s) or writing group responsible for making important decisions around the issues of authorship. In some cases the Principal Investigator of a large study will act as the arbiter and decision-maker when potential conflicts of authorship, order, and or attribution arise. Spine supports the concept that the senior author of a work should be last but should not be automatically conferred. Senior authors can and should be first authors when their contribution to the work warrants it. Likewise, statisticians should be authors but not simply for running the numbers. They need to be involved in the study design, data acquisition and data interpretation with the writing team. A good statistician can not work in isolation and be brought on the scene to “save” the day by contributing a “P value.” This is not the way to utilize a statistical colleague nor is it a good use of their talents. Like an athletic team, there are positions each player can identify as their primary role, i.e., goalie, wing man, guard, pitcher, quarterback, etc. In a scientific paper for Spine I would like the authors to identify their contribution to the team. Many institutions around the world now use the Scientific Citation Index (SCI) as a means of quantifying ones academic efforts and the significance of their publications. Spine is ranked 2 in Immediacy and 4 in Impact when compared to all other orthopaedic journals in SCI’s Journal Citation Report, 4 and it is the only musculoskeletal journal listed in the evidence-based medicine lists by Sackett. 5,6 To reach this level of excellence requires us to maintain the highest of standards and to have policies that respect the individual authors, reviewers and readers. We are proud of our publication policies at SPINE and hope that we have clarified any doubts about a very complicated and truly important issue of authorship. As Einstein said, “A hundred times a day I remind myself that my life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give, in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.” To be accountable for one’s work is an expected responsibility imposed upon authors. In order to maintain the quality and integrity of one’s research and the respect of colleagues, institutions and representative societies, one’s authorship bears much of the burden of proof of one’s intellectual capital. At the same time, as an author you are more often than not dependent on the labors of others. Therefore, you must exert yourself in the contribution you make as an author so as to be deserving of the credit that is associated with authorship and the acclaim and or recognition it brings to bear on that intangible but all important intellectual capital.
We live in a global age. ‘Promoted by unrestricted mobility of capital and the unfettered freedom of trade’ (Gray, 1998, pp. 6–7), economic globalization has been a significant trend in our times. The process of globalization has not only internationalized the movement of capital and information, but also has affected the approaches individual nation states use to pursue their economic and social policies. With the rise of economic globalization, accompanied by the collapse of communism and the collectivist ideology, the values of free market capitalism prevail. The processes of decentralization and marketization can be detected even in the social service sectors in many countries (Bray, 1999). Similarly, the financing, curriculum, governance and management of education have been re-oriented and re-shaped by market-oriented approaches and practices (Currie and Newson, 1998; Spring, 1998; Taylor et al. , 1997). This tidal wave has also spilled over into China with the adoption of reform and open-door policies in 1978. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
The 73rd Constitutional Amendment of 1993 giving local government a constitutional status introduced new institutions into the working of Indian democracy through several significant innovations, such as reservations of seats for marginal groups, women, Dalits, and Adivasis; creation of a decentralized planning mechanism; establishment of state election commissions to oversee local elections and state finance commissions to prepare a blueprint for sharing of state revenues; and institutionalization of the village assembly (gram sabha). This article examines the implications of these innovations for local government and vulnerable groups in the context of Indian democracy. It does so within the larger debate on the capability of political institutions to produce outcomes and so a new political culture.
Konstantin Sonin, Centre for Economic Policy Research (United Kingdom)
In a federal state, political leaders of constituent units might protect their enterprises from the federal center (e.g., allowing them not to pay federal taxes). The effectiveness of such protection depends crucially on the ability of local authorities to extract rents from enterprises. They can easily do so, if there are a small number of enterprises with large employment, and local monopolies can be effectively sustained. They cannot do it so easily if regional industry is competitive, political opposition is strong, and the federal center has enough means to enforce payment of taxes. We build a simple model to argue that it is the industrial structure of constituent units that determines political relations between them and the federal centre. The theory is supported by the recent experience of Russia, China, and Argentina.
3 Song of Solomon picks up where Mumbo Jumbo leaves off. That is, in repeating with a difference certain details and motifs of Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel, Toni Morrison signifies upon what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has called one of grand works of critical Signification (238). (1) While the writing of Mumbo Jumbo concludes, we read, at P.M. on Jan. 31st, 1971, Morrison's famous North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent sets off from the roof of Mercy Hospital for other side of Lake Superior ... [a]t 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February 1931 (Reed 218; Morrison, Song 3). If Morrison sets her watch by Reed's earlier novel, she also rewinds the time back to the early years of the Depression. Yet even in that return to the past, Song of Solomon continues Mumbo Jumbo, a novel that, except for its epilogue, is set in a fantastic pastiche of the 1920s. With this opening example, I would like to suggest how an exploration of Song of Solomon and its many intertexts evoke questions of narrative logic, historical time, and cultural memory. Because it is so densely allusive on so many different levels and in so many different modes, Morrison's novel deserves to be read not only through its numerous intertexts, but also as a commentary on the significance of intertextuality as a literary, historical, and social process. As her careful but parodic dating suggests, Morrison, like Reed, uses intertextuality to provide an alternative to dominant accounts of history, and, like Reed again, she does so by engaging both with texts of the black Atlantic and with Euro-American currents in Western literary culture. In particular, for my interests, both Song of Solomon and Mumbo Jumbo rewrite Thomas Pynchon's paranoid postmodern quest classic The Crying of Lot 49. (2) On the surface, Morrison's novel seems far from Pynchon's and Reed's work, but in fact they constitute a complex constellation that can lead to a rethinking both of intertextual relations and of intersections among literature, history, and memory. Each novel involves a protagonist's quest for a hidden truth that destabilizes his or her everyday world and turns out to involve coming to terms with some significant, but previously obscure, aspect of the past and its still operative influence on the present. Pynchon's Oedipa sets out to execute a will and finds herself searching for proof of an elaborate postal conspiracy that recedes hundreds of years into the past. Reed's PaPa LaBas attempts to understand the wax and wane of the Jew Grew infection and ends up seeking the sacred Text of black culture and uncovering an epic battle that stretches back to ancient Egypt. Finally, Morrison's Milkman initially sets out after his Aunt Pilate's inheritance, only to discover that it is not gold that is at stake, but an oral cultural document of familial and communal history. Despite broad narrative and thematic similarities--and a host of smaller-scale convergences--Morrison's work diverges significantly from the two other texts I have identified. While Reed in Mumbo Jumbo pushes Pynchon's paranoid and conspiratorial logic to the extreme, at once universalizing and shattering it, Morrison takes a different tack. She backgrounds conspiracy in order to explore a related, but significantly different, narrative logic, that of traumatic memory. While critics have in particular read Morrison's Beloved as a literary enactment of trauma, Song of Solomon also offers an opportunity to engage with contemporary legacies of traumatic memory. (3) Exploring the intersections among these texts takes on particular significance because narratives of conspiracy and trauma have emerged in recent decades as two of the most powerful logics through which the subjects of postmodern U.S. culture register and reflect on history. The two narrative logics are often linked, both in real life and in popular culture. In two well-known examples, the trauma of Kennedy's assassination has given birth to rampant paranoid speculation, and Mulder's conspiratorial thinking on The X Files has supposedly been spurred by the traumatic abduction of his sister. …
This dissertation examines the quest for spiritual certainty in the works of Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, George Herbert, and John Milton. My governing assertion is that these seventeenth-century poets strive to mitigate the destructive effects of doubt produced by the explosive religious, political, and academic debates ignited in the century preceding theirs. I contend that they seek to lessen their own and their readers' preoccupation with their heavenly (and earthly) standing by countering a Calvinist tendency to overvalue the subjective experience of certitude as a criterion of religious knowledge. These poets attempt to alleviate in a counterintuitive way the anguish many believers suffered as they sought to achieve certainty about their spiritual status. By cultivating their readers' experience of uncertainty, these poets enable them to surmount its debilitating hold through faith. Moreover, by advocating ethical behavior as a more reliable guide to spiritual status than inner sentiment, these poets see sustained participation in just community as fuller proof of genuine piety than fleeting experiences of ordered selfhood. My purpose, then, is to consider the political consequences of spiritual transformation. My study illustrates that moving readers from considerations of selfhood to concerns of community involves teaching them to read religious verse aright. The poets I treat are highly invested in their readers' intellectual and moral development, for they utilize a range of strategies to sharpen their readers' perception. Although they appreciate the merits of a given approach to proof, whether based on observation (Lanyer), reasoning (Donne), or a combination of the two (Herbert), they also realize ultimately (Milton most adamantly) that the foundation for certitude is God. Consequently, their verse dramatizes the limits of proof so as to advocate a principled uncertainty that is nonetheless faithful. By registering their evaluations of evidentiary procedures in their formal choices, these poets help their readers grasp what is at stake morally in seeking certainty. In probing the problem of knowledge from a literary angle and with an emphasis on religion, I contribute to our understanding of the evolution of evidence, the history of skepticism, and the myths of secularization in early modern England.
In Inside Appellate Courts: The Impact of Court Organization on Judicial Decision Making in The United States Courts of Appeals (Michigan 2002), Jonathan Matthew Cohen, a sociologist and practicing attorney, asks a question that has received scant attention in the academic commentary on appellate judging: If we accept the dominant conception of appellate court judging as a process of atomistic contemplation, how do federal circuit court judges continue to maintain high quality opinions in the face of pervasively growing judicial dockets? Cohen advances the provocative thesis that increasing workloads have not prevented appellate judges from producing high quality outputs, but rather, that the dominant image of appellate judging as an isolated contemplative task is conceptually flawed. A better approach, Cohen argues, is to compare the task of appellate court judging to production within a multi-divisional private firm. While Cohen recognizes the inherent limits of his analogy, and in particular, that unlike private firms, circuit courts lack a central coordinating authority, he nonetheless contends that it is more fruitful to consider the judges in the manner of workers in a complex organization than as autonomous actors reflecting in isolation on the legal issues presented on appeal. In this review essay, Stearns considers three complementary methodologies for analyzing appellate courts that yield insights of particular interest to lawyers and legal scholars. Such questions include how appellate courts transform preferences into doctrine; the nature of cases that are likely susceptible to further appellate process through en banc, mini-en banc, or Supreme Court review; and how best to evaluate appellate court opinions. While organizational theory provides a useful starting point, Stearns contends that insights drawn from other methodologies, including economics (demonstrating how decentralized informational processes can provide more meaningful data), probability analysis (demonstrating the quality of data drawn from subsets of a larger group), and social choice (demonstrating the nature and limits of group decision making), might prove more fruitful in evaluating at least some of these questions. Stearns concludes that a comprehensive understanding of federal appellate judging requires not only an understanding of the circuit courts' internal organizational structure, but also an analysis of the edifice of circuit court decision making from inside and out.
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Sam Chema, E. Gilbert, Johannes Roseboom, Chema, Sam · 6 authors
This study reviews the ongoing reforms of national agricultural research systems (NARS) in sub-Saharan Africa. The study not only takes stock of the principal reform themes (i.e., a redefinition of the role of government, decentralization, stakeholder participation, new financing mechanisms, and system linkages), but also highlights the underlying ideas and concepts that shape the present NARS reform agenda. NARS reform details are illustrated and discussed in seven case-study countries: Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda. While there is considerable consensus about the main trends, there are major differences and disputes on specific aspects of the reform agenda. Moreover, NARS reforms alone will not close the technological divide between Africa and the rest of the world—they are to be seen as part of a far broader modernization agenda.
From the angle of institutional analysis, the paper makes a comprehensive, systematic and profound analysis of the institutional features, incentive mechanism and supervisory mechanism of non governmental chambers of commerce in Wenzhou which have been established in the past ten years, thus revealing the inner mechanism and structural features of these spontaneous, autonomous and service organizations. It can be found from the institutional features that the institutional supply of the chambers of commerce in Wenzhou is made possible not only by governments but also by the chambers themselves. The rules and regulations, as the fundamental institution of the chambers, are established by the interplay of both the chambers and the governments. In the management practice of chambers, the internal institution based on collective spontaneity play a guiding role. But the internal institution, according to which punishment for actions in violation of the rules and regulations are enforced by the system of decentralization, spontaneous feedback from society, or by the official, organizational system, can be classified into formal and informal rules and regulations. The incentive mechanism of the chambers of commerce includes material incentive, for unity and purposes, and different selective incentives for such different level people as common members, core members and full time personnel. This has thus attracted more and more corporations to participate in the management of the chambers of commerce, whose supervisory mechanism features dual characters of institutionalization and moral driveness. On the one hand the chambers of commerce have become more and more institutionalized and standardized, and on the other hand the non governmental chambers in Wenzhou, self governing organizations which appeared not long ago after all, cannot be as highly institutionalized and standardized as the governmental organizations. That is why the working of the supervisory mechanism of thechambers depends largely on the moral driven self discipline of their leaders. And the networked organization structure provides a low cost participating network, which results in the superiority of organizational supervision. Finally, it is pointed out that after China's entry into the WTO, it is very important work for the State government and Chinese people to speed up the setting up and development of trade associations so as to adapt to the government reform and market economy. The successful experience of the said chambers and trade associations in Wenzhou provides some examples and reference for the construction and development of those in other parts of the country.
Peer-to-peer systems have the ability to harness vast amounts of resources from a scalable collection of autonomous peers and especially emphasize on de-centralization and lack of a central authority. As a result these systems are particularly attractive to everyday home computer users, who seem empowered by the potential to independently select and change their own policies, roles, and responsibilities. By allowing peers to share a portion of the authority, these systems also possess other interesting technical characteristics such as self-organization and adaptation.
This dissertation introduces the notion of interest-based communities of peers and describes how these implicit structures can be used to naturally organize peer-to-peer systems for discriminative information dissemination, pruning the search space, and role-based trust. Communities are like interest groups, modeled after human communities. They are self-organizing, possibly overlapping structures involving peers that are actively engaged in the sharing, communication and promotion of common interests.
Initially, the behavior of randomly created communities is investigated and modeled. Then the community formation and discovery algorithms are presented and their complexity studied. The experiments illustrate that these algorithms do not require extensive computation or communication on the part of individual peers. Subsequently, a novel push-pull gossiping technique is provided that improves decentralized information dissemination by communicating only amongst peers within a specified community of interest. The technique enables the maintenance of dynamically changing communities and consists of a distributed discovery algorithm followed by repeatable push-pull gossiping. Experiments show that pushing gossip information to only a small number of peers allows a large percentage of peer members of a community to obtain (pull) the information within just two hops.
Peer communities help in pruning the search space and in content-based searches within the peer-to-peer network. This dissertation describes a community-based search query propagation scheme which provides more efficient searching by targeting one or more communities, irrespective of the current membership of the searching peer. The experiments demonstrate how a community-based search can reduce the number of messages and improve the quality of the search results when compared to other known peer-to-peer search algorithms.
Finally, an approach for community-based trust management is discussed. An optimistic role-based model for trust amongst peers is employed and it is shown to be scalable, dynamic, revocable, secure and transitive. The solution permits asymmetric trust relationships that can be verified by any peer in the system through a simple, low-cost algorithm.