Two petro-states diverge: explaining the institutional evolution of Nigeria and Angola

It is well-established that oil wealth in weakly institutionalised states tends to undermine development instead of catalysing it. Cross-country regressions, however, struggle to explain why comparably oil-wealthy countries such as Nigeria and Angola experience different political and economic outcomes over time. This thesis explains these differing outcomes through a theoretical lens derived from the New Institutional Economics and Political Settlements literature. Methodologically, it employs analytic narrative - the application of a game theoretic model to a historical puzzle to produce a thin explanation - and treats economic transactions as the key unit of analysis for understanding why particular outcomes obtain and not others. As a comparable site of analysis, I select the oil-for-infrastructure deals that were negotiated in Angola and Nigeria with Asian National Oil Companies between 2004 and 2007. Contrary to expectation, the deals were struck in Angola but failed in Nigeria. I hypothesise that the differential outcome reflects the varying quality of the institutional arrangements in each country for engaging foreign investors. This differential institutional quality resulted in differing commitment credibility over time, which partly accounts for deal failure in Nigeria. Divergent political economy trajectories and political settlements account for these differences. I use a game theory model that explains heterogeneity within authoritarian regimes to test these hypotheses. Application of the model to Angola and Nigeria respectively shows that Angolan dictator, José Eduardo dos Santos, was able to consolidate power within six years of becoming the head of state by successfully eliminating potential threats to his dictatorial ambitions. Under this closed, stable regime, foreign investors perceived greater levels of commitment credibility and struck deals. Nigeria’s uneven institutional evolution towards greater openness was punctuated by multiple successful coups and occasional civilian rule between long periods of military autocracy. The resultant instability undermined the perception of credibility, explaining why the deals failed. The thesis closes with a description of how Nigeria and Angola’s political economies have evolved since the oil-price crash of 2014, including how dos Santos unexpectedly lost power, and poses questions for future research

Proceedings, MSVSCC 2015

The Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center (VMASC) of Old Dominion University hosted the 2015 Modeling, Simulation, & Visualization Student capstone Conference on April 16th. The Capstone Conference features students in Modeling and Simulation, undergraduates and graduate degree programs, and fields from many colleges and/or universities. Students present their research to an audience of fellow students, faculty, judges, and other distinguished guests. For the students, these presentations afford them the opportunity to impart their innovative research to members of the M&S community from academic, industry, and government backgrounds. Also participating in the conference are faculty and judges who have volunteered their time to impart direct support to their students’ research, facilitate the various conference tracks, serve as judges for each of the tracks, and provide overall assistance to this conference. 2015 marks the ninth year of the VMASC Capstone Conference for Modeling, Simulation and Visualization. This year our conference attracted a number of fine student written papers and presentations, resulting in a total of 51 research works that were presented. This year’s conference had record attendance thanks to the support from the various different departments at Old Dominion University, other local Universities, and the United States Military Academy, at West Point. We greatly appreciated all of the work and energy that has gone into this year’s conference, it truly was a highly collaborative effort that has resulted in a very successful symposium for the M&S community and all of those involved. Below you will find a brief summary of the best papers and best presentations with some simple statistics of the overall conference contribution. Followed by that is a table of contents that breaks down by conference track category with a copy of each included body of work. Thank you again for your time and your contribution as this conference is designed to continuously evolve and adapt to better suit the authors and M&S supporters. Dr.Yuzhong Shen Graduate Program Director, MSVE Capstone Conference Chair John ShullGraduate Student, MSVE Capstone Conference Student Chai

Startup dilemmas - Strategic problems of early-stage platforms on the internet

siirretty Doriast

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Social network support for data delivery infrastructures

Network infrastructures often need to stage content so that it is accessible to consumers. The standard solution, deploying the content on a centralised server, can be inadequate in several situations. Our thesis is that information encoded in social networks can be used to tailor content staging decisions to the user base and thereby build better data delivery infrastructures. This claim is supported by two case studies, which apply social information in challenging situations where traditional content staging is infeasible. Our approach works by examining empirical traces to identify relevant social properties, and then exploits them. The first study looks at cost-effectively serving the ``Long Tail'' of rich-media user-generated content, which need to be staged close to viewers to control latency and jitter. Our traces show that a preference for the unpopular tail items often spreads virally and is localised to some part of the social network. Exploiting this, we propose Buzztraq, which decreases replication costs by selectively copying items to locations favoured by viral spread. We also design SpinThrift, which separates popular and unpopular content based on the relative proportion of viral accesses, and opportunistically spins down disks containing unpopular content, thereby saving energy. The second study examines whether human face-to-face contacts can efficiently create paths over time between arbitrary users. Here, content is staged by spreading it through intermediate users until the destination is reached. Flooding every node minimises delivery times but is not scalable. We show that the human contact network is resilient to individual path failures, and for unicast paths, can efficiently approximate flooding in delivery time distribution simply by randomly sampling a handful of paths found by it. Multicast by contained flooding within a community is also efficient. However, connectivity relies on rare contacts and frequent contacts are often not useful for data delivery. Also, periods of similar duration could achieve different levels of connectivity; we devise a test to identify good periods. We finish by discussing how these properties influence routing algorithms.This work was supported by a St. John's College Benefactor's Scholarship and a Research Studentship from the Cambridge Philosophical Society

Modelling religious signalling

The origins of human social cooperation confound simple evolutionary explanation. But from Darwin and Durkheim onwards, theorists (anthropologists and sociologists especially) have posited a potential link with another curious and distinctively human social trait that cries out for explanation: religion. This dissertation explores one contemporary theory of the co-evolution of religion and human social cooperation: the signalling theory of religion, or religious signalling theory (RST). According to the signalling theory, participation in social religion (and its associated rituals and sanctions) acts as an honest signal of one's commitment to a religiously demarcated community and its way of doing things. This signal would allow prosocial individuals to positively assort with one another for mutual advantage, to the exclusion of more exploitative individuals. In effect, the theory offers a way that religion and cooperation might explain one another, but which that stays within an individualist adaptive paradigm. My approach is not to assess the empirical adequacy of the religious signalling explanation or contrast it with other explanations, but rather to deal with the theory in its own terms - isolating and fleshing out its core commitments, explanatory potential, and limitations. The key to this is acknowledging the internal complexities of signalling theory, with respect to the available models of honest signalling and the extent of their fit (or otherwise) with religion as a target system. The method is to take seriously the findings of formal modelling in animal signalling and other disciplines, and to apply these (and methods from the philosophy of biology more generally) to progressively build up a comprehensive picture of the theory, its inherent strengths and weaknesses. The first two chapters outline the dual explanatory problems that cooperation and religion present for evolutionary human science, and surveys contemporary approaches toward explaining them. Chapter three articulates an evolutionary conception of the signalling theory, and chapters four to six make the case for a series of requirements, limitations, and principles of application. Chapters seven and eight argue for the value of formal modelling to further flesh out the theory's commitments and potential and describe some simple simulation results which make progress in this regard. Though the inquiry often problematizes the signalling theory, it also shows that it should not be dismissed outright, and that it makes predictions which are apt for empirical testing

Developing sustainable business models for institutions’ provision of open educational resources: Learning from OpenLearn users’ motivations and experiences

Universities across the globe have, for some time, been exploring the possibilities for achieving public benefit and generating business and visibility through releasing and sharing open educational resources (OER). Many have written about the need to develop sustainable and profitable business models around the production and release of OER. Downes (2006), for example, has questioned the financial sustainability of OER production at scale. Many of the proposed business models focus on OER’s value in generating revenue and detractors of OER have questioned whether they are in competition with formal education. This paper reports on a study intended to broaden the conversation about OER business models to consider the motivations and experiences of OER users as the basis for making a better informed decision about whether OER and formal learning are competitive or complementary with each other. The study focused on OpenLearn - the Open University’s (OU) web-based platform for OER, which hosts hundreds of online courses and videos and is accessed by over 3,000,000 users a year. A large scale survey and follow-up interviews with OpenLearn users worldwide revealed that university provided OER can offer learners a bridge to formal education, allowing them to try out a subject before registering on a formal course and to build confidence in their abilities as learners. In addition, it was found that using OER during formal paid-for study can improve learners’ performance and self-reliance, leading to increased retention and satisfaction with the learning experience

Open educational resources for all? Comparing user motivations and characteristics across The Open University’s iTunes U channel and OpenLearn platform.

With the rise in access to mobile multimedia devices, educational institutions have exploited the iTunes U platform as an additional channel to provide free educational resources with the aim of profile-raising and breaking down barriers to education. For those prepared to invest in content preparation, it is possible to produce interactive, portable material that can be made available globally. Commentators have questioned both the financial implications for platform-specific content production, and the availability of devices for learners to access it (Osborne, 2012). The Open University (OU) makes its free educational resources available on iTunes U and via its web-based open educational resources (OER) platform, OpenLearn. The OU’s OER on iTunes U reached the 60 million download mark in 2013; its OpenLearn platform boasts 27 million unique visitors since 2006. This paper reports the results of a large-scale study of users of the OU’s iTunes U channel and OpenLearn platform. A survey of several thousand users revealed key differences in demographics between those accessing OER via the web and via iTunes U. In addition, the data allowed comparison between three groups: formal learners, informal learners and educators. The study raises questions about whether university-provided OER meet the needs of users and makes recommendations for how content can be modified to suit their needs. As the publishing of OER becomes core to business, we reflect on reasons why understanding users’ motivations and demographics is vital, allowing for needs-led resource provision and content that is adapted to best achieve learner satisfaction, and to deliver institutions’ social mission

Sustainability Conversations for Impact: Transdisciplinarity on Four Scales

Sustainability is a dynamic, multi-scale endeavor. Coherence can be lost between scales – from project teams, to organizations, to networks, and, most importantly, down to conversations. Sustainability researchers have embraced transdisciplinarity, as it is grounded in science, shared language, broad participation, and respect for difference. Yet, transdisciplinarity at these four scales is not well-defined. In this dissertation I extend transdisciplinarity out from the project to networks and organizations, and down into conversation, adding novel lenses and quantitative approaches. In Chapter 2, I propose transdisciplinarity incorporate academic disciplines which help cross scales: Organizational Learning, Knowledge Management, Applied Cooperation, and Data Science. In Chapter 3 I then use a mixed-method approach to study a transdisciplinary organization, the Maine Aquaculture Hub, as it develops strategy. Using social network analysis and conversation analytics, I evaluate how the Hub’s network-convening, strategic thinking and conversation practices turn organization-scale transdisciplinarity into strategic advantage. In Chapters 4 and 5, conversation is the nexus of transdisciplinarity. I study seven public aquaculture lease scoping meetings (informal town halls) and classify conversation activity by “discussion discipline,” i.e., rhetorical and social intent. I compute the relationship between discussion discipline proportions and three sustainability outcomes of intent-to-act, options-generation, and relationship-building. I consider exogenous factors, such as signaling, gender balance, timing and location. I show that where inquiry is high, so is innovation. Where acknowledgement is high, so is intent-to-act. Where respect is high, so is relationship-building. Indirectness and sarcasm dampen outcomes. I propose seven interventions to improve sustainability conversation capacity, such as nudging, networks, and using empirical models. Chapter 5 explores those empirical models: I use natural language-processing (NLP) to detect the discussion disciplines by training a model using the previously coded transcripts. Then I use that model to classify 591 open-source conversation transcripts, and regress the sustainability outcomes, per-transcript, on discussion discipline proportions. I show that all three conversation outcomes can be predicted by the discussion disciplines, and most statistically-significant being intent-to-act, which responds directly to acknowledgement and respect. Conversation AI is the next frontier of transdisciplinarity for sustainability solutions

Platforms of co-creation : learning interprofessional design practice in creative sustainability

Contemporary design and planning activities often involve complex and multifaceted problems that call for collaborative assessment between several actors, concepts, and interests. The overarching discourse on sustainability is a clear example, connecting together not only scientific research and politics, but also the perceptions and actions of professionals and laypeople. Recently, academic education has become increasingly structured around overarching thematic content, involving problem- and project-based learning in real-world contexts and in interprofessional constellations. Design, as a professional practice is collaborative problem-solving and communication, can offer several insights into the management of such interaction; and yet, in the context of sustainability, design becomes challenged as a discipline, constrained by the professional, institutional, and cultural structures and roles in contemporary meaning-making. This research studies the context of interprofessional design education for sustainability – more specifically, the development and implementation of an international and interprofessional Master’s degree study program in Creative Sustainability (CS), initiated in 2010 at Aalto University, Finland. The case assessment on which the analysis is based consists of three sets of interviews with supportive data, collected from the initiators, teachers, and students of the CS program between the years 2010 and 2015. Overall, the findings contribute to an understanding of how (design) professionalism contributes to sustainability, what type of support is needed in learning for interprofessional design for sustainability, and how such learning developes the (design) academia itself. In analyzing the case, the analytical framework builds on cultural-historical activity theory, with supporting insights that are drawn from practice theory (with a notion of communities of practice) and actor-network theory. In line with these theoretical perspectives, and to emphasize organizarional learning and developmental perspectives, interprofessional interaction in the academic context is constructed to involve three phases – priming, implementing, and experiencing – that also act as analytic components in assessing data. In this research, those aspects that are identified as important in implementing interprofessional learning for sustainability are ensuring that sufficient resources and competences exist to initiate practical inquiries and real-world interaction, and determining that the learning connects back to the initial objective of developing practice. Through such a process, a new kind of professionalism emerges, also renewing the academia as a platform for transdisciplinary action. For Aalto University, the CS interaction created new openings for outreach and for the development of teaching. At the same time, however, this new interaction became conflicted with existing interests and conventions, introduced by the various actors and interacting agendas, and the roles and structures in the current academia.Tämän päivän muotoilu käsittelee usein kompleksisia ja monitahoisia ongelmia, jotka vaativat useiden toimijoiden, konseptien ja kiinnostusten yhteistä arviointia. Selkeä esimerkki tästä on kestävä kehitys, joka yhdistää tieteen ja politiikan, mutta myös ammattilaisten ja kansalaisten näkemykset ja toiminnan. Akateeminen koulutus on järjestynyt nykyisin yhä selkeämmin temaattisiin kokonaisuuksiin, jotka sisältävät ongelmalähtöistä ja projektipohjaista oppimista. Muotoilu ammatillisena taitona yhteissuunnittelun toteuttamiseen voi tarjota useita menetelmiä tällaiseen oppimiseen. Kestävä kehitys kontekstina haastaa kuitenkin muotoilun ammattina, sekä ne roolit ja rakenteet joille se perustuu. Tämä tutkimus keskittyy moniammatilliseen muotoilukoulutukseen kestävän kehityksen kontekstissa. Tapaustutkimukseni kohteena on Creative Sustainability (CS), Aalto-yliopistossa vuonna 2010 alkanut korkeakoulujen välinen maisteriohjelma. Tutkimusmateriaalina ovat haastattelusarjat ohjelman aloittajista, opettajista ja opiskelijoista vuosilta 2010-2015 sekä muu kerätty kirjallinen materiaali ohjelman alkuvuosilta. Tutkimuksen tulokset lisäävät ymmärrystä siitä, mikä muotoilun suhde on kestävyyteen, minkälaista tukea tarvitaan moniammatillisen muotoilun oppimiseen kestävän kehityksen kontekstissa, ja miten tällainen oppiminen muuttaa itse koulutusta. Analyysin viitekehys perustuu toiminnan teoriaan (cultural-historical activity theory) ja huomioihin sekä käytäntöteoriasta (practice theory) että toimijaverkkoteoriasta (actor-network theory). Työssä tarkastellaan moniammatillisen oppimisen toteutumista kolmivaiheisen rakenteen kautta (priming, implementing, experience), jonka osien välisen dynamiikan ja mahdollisten ristiriitojen pohjalta syntyy syvempi ymmärrys vuorovaikutuksesta. Työ nostaa esiin viisi pääteemaa, joiden ympärille analyysi rakentuu. Tarvitaan riittävä resursointi ja tarvittavien kompetenssien tunnistaminen, jotta käytännön vuorovaikutus voi alkaa ja jotta vuorovaikutuksen tulokset linkittyvät takaisin toimintaan. Tällöin syntyy uudenlaista ammatillisuutta, joka mahdollistaa oppimisympäristön kehittämisen edelleen. CS toi Aalto-yliopistoon uudenlaista yhteiskunnallista vuorovaikutusta ja opetuksen kehittymistä. Samaan aikaan nämä avaukset synnyttivät kuitenkin myös jännitteitä suhteessa nykyisiin opetuksen ja ohjelmakehityksen käytäntöihin ja rakenteisiin