Big data for monitoring educational systems

This report considers “how advances in big data are likely to transform the context and methodology of monitoring educational systems within a long-term perspective (10-30 years) and impact the evidence based policy development in the sector”, big data are “large amounts of different types of data produced with high velocity from a high number of various types of sources.” Five independent experts were commissioned by Ecorys, responding to themes of: students' privacy, educational equity and efficiency, student tracking, assessment and skills. The experts were asked to consider the “macro perspective on governance on educational systems at all levels from primary, secondary education and tertiary – the latter covering all aspects of tertiary from further, to higher, and to VET”, prioritising primary and secondary levels of education

Critiquing commodification in environmental governance :examples of urban waste governance in Cape Town, Rotterdam, and Bristol

Is the governance of waste in cities being encroached by logics of commodification? This question is posed to analyse a capitalistic turn in environmental governance. Encroachment of such logics is hypothesised to occur by innovation- and discourse-based means. But, alongside changes in how urban waste governance systems are contested, there are changes in how they are maintained and reinforced, e.g., through information technologies. Therefore, this thesis aims to better understand the commodification of waste – including relevant ideas with political traction – which is shaping and shaped by institutionalisation in urban waste governance. Three objectives follow this aim. The first is to identify and critically analyse institutions sharing explicit alignment with either or both circular economy or food-energy-water nexus ideas, and relationships between these institutions in Rotterdam, Cape Town, and Bristol. The second is to investigate and critically analyse the role of ideational power in processes of institutionalisation, or institutional change, within urban waste governance systems. And third, to synthesise and simulate factors affecting the outcomes of institutionalisation or institutional change aligned with circular economy or foodenergy-water nexus discourse in different urban waste governance systems. An innovative mixed method methodology which includes social network analysis, qualitative analysis, and agentbased modelling has been developed and applied to achieve these research objectives. Methods were selected and integrated with reference to an interdisciplinary theoretical framework including environmental governance and critical institutionalism, a systems-thinking analytical framing, and a conceptual frame that foregrounds context in the interaction between research and government policy. Results suggest that the way critique is mobilised and affects institutional networks through which waste governance occurs in cities is becoming increasingly complex and nuanced. Whilst this may mean that contestation is increasingly open to influence or disruption, caution is warranted in such interpretations. A shallow process of institutional diversification may obscure deeper rigidity of established power hierarchies in urban environmental governance. How such systemic asymmetries or inequities might be addressed by innovative forms of critique is an open question, but a systems-thinking analytical approach which is sensitive to contextual factors determining how and whether critical engagement affects policy, and its outcomes, is instructive. The commodification of waste and of competing ideas interacting with waste governance systems calls for holistic analysis of urban waste governance networks. Mixed methods that appraise and integrate computer based- and empirical forms of social data enable holistic-critical analysis of the governance networks wherein hegemony or domination is difficult to pinpoint and destabilise. Such exercises of holistically analysing and critically engaging with diffuse / fluid domination in urban waste governance networks give impetus to unorthodox alternatives to commodification – both in terms of governance processes and outcomes that we might reasonably expect from those

Synchronization in complex networks

Synchronization processes in populations of locally interacting elements are in the focus of intense research in physical, biological, chemical, technological and social systems. The many efforts devoted to understand synchronization phenomena in natural systems take now advantage of the recent theory of complex networks. In this review, we report the advances in the comprehension of synchronization phenomena when oscillating elements are constrained to interact in a complex network topology. We also overview the new emergent features coming out from the interplay between the structure and the function of the underlying pattern of connections. Extensive numerical work as well as analytical approaches to the problem are presented. Finally, we review several applications of synchronization in complex networks to different disciplines: biological systems and neuroscience, engineering and computer science, and economy and social sciences.Comment: Final version published in Physics Reports. More information available at http://synchronets.googlepages.com

Scenario Planning as a Tool for Long Term Strategic Planning. The Generics Drug Industry in the European Union

As costs associated with medical care continue to increase, and populations continue to age, member states of the EU are increasingly concerned about their long-term public spending budgets. Generic drugs have been targeted by EU policy makers as replacements to high cost pharmaceutical drugs so as to bring healthcare costs down. The EU has taken several measures in the recent past to increase competition in the generic drugs industry within the EU marketplace. As competition increases in the EU generics market over the coming years, firms within the pharmaceuticals drug industry in the region must explore new strategies so as to thrive and prosper in the long term. Decisions on making the best use of available resources must be made and strategies must be reformulated to determine actions going into the future. These long-term strategies will help companies determine their current and future positions, and ultimately, the relevant steps that they need take presently to maintain their market positions. This report seeks to analyze the current EU macro-environment and provide possible future (twenty year timeframe) scenarios to which players within the generic drugs market can prepare themselves for so as to attain a competitive position in the long-term. The scenarios that were crafted after a thorough macro environmental analysis are: the positive scenario (“Todo es Bueno!”), the negative scenario (“Nein, nicht gut!”) and the mixed scenario (“Deux Union Europeenne!”). After the scenario crafting phase, opportunities and threats were identified for the possible future scenario, and thereafter, versatile strategic recommendations were made. Based on the scenarios, the report proposes strategies and recommendations by combining the implication of the scenarios’ opportunities and threats. The report advices 7 strategies that producers can use to add value to their internal strategies and/or further examine the implication of the recommendations presented. The report argues against traditional strategic polar thinking (cost leadership or differentiation) and proposes players to use mixed strategies. It suggests producers to identify the key ingredient that differentiated themselves from competitors. It promotes investing on research to soften the blow of sudden technology changes, identify new technologies to improve business processes, and research to develop new formulation patents. It also suggests producers to invest in stakeholder management, focus on green technologies, proposes investigating the advantages of strategic manufacturing location (i.e. Turkey), and finally, suggests formulating strategic alliances to organizational learning

The Nexus Solutions Tool (NEST): An open platform for optimizing multi-scale energy-water-land system transformations

The energy-water-land nexus represents a critical leverage future policies must draw upon to reduce trade-offs between sustainable development objectives. Yet, existing long-term planning tools do not provide the scope or level of integration across the nexus to unravel important development constraints. Moreover, existing tools and data are not always made openly available or are implemented across disparate modeling platforms that can be difficult to link directly with modern scientific computing tools and databases. In this paper, we present the Nexus Solutions Tool (NEST): a new open modeling platform that integrates multi-scale energy-water-land resource optimization with distributed hydrological modeling. The new approach provides insights into the vulnerability of water, energy and land resources to future socioeconomic and climatic change and how multi-sectoral policies, technological solutions and investments can improve the resilience and sustainability of transformation pathways while avoiding counterproductive interactions among sectors. NEST can be applied at different spatial and temporal resolutions, and is designed specifically to tap into the growing body of open access geospatial data available through national inventories and the earth system modeling community. A case study analysis of the Indus River Basin in South Asia demonstrates the capability of the model to capture important interlinkages across system transformation pathways towards the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, including the intersections between local and regional transboundary policies and incremental investment costs from rapidly increasing regional consumption projected over the coming decades

The Centripetal Network: How the Internet Holds Itself Together, and the Forces Tearing It Apart

Two forces are in tension as the Internet evolves. One pushes toward interconnected common platforms; the other pulls toward fragmentation and proprietary alternatives. Their interplay drives many of the contentious issues in cyberlaw, intellectual property, and telecommunications policy, including the fight over network neutrality for broadband providers, debates over global Internet governance, and battles over copyright online. These are more than just conflicts between incumbents and innovators, or between openness and deregulation. Their roots lie in the fundamental dynamics of interconnected networks. Fortunately, there is an interdisciplinary literature on network properties, albeit one virtually unknown to legal scholars. The emerging field of network formation theory explains the pressures threatening to pull the Internet apart, and suggests responses. The Internet as we know it is surprisingly fragile. To continue the extraordinary outpouring of creativity and innovation that the Internet fosters, policy-makers must protect its composite structure against both fragmentation and excessive concentration of power. This paper, the first to apply network formation models to Internet law, shows how the Internet pulls itself together as a coherent whole. This very process, however, creates and magnifies imbalances that encourage balkanization. By understanding how networks behave, governments and other legal decision-makers can avoid unintended consequences and target their actions appropriately. A network-theoretic perspective holds great promise to inform the law and policy of the information economy

Global Risks 2014, Ninth Edition.

The Global Risks 2014 report highlights how global risks are not only interconnected but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies between risks, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain environments. If global risks are not effectively addressed, their social, economic and political fallouts could be far-reaching, as exemplified by the continuing impacts of the financial crisis of 2007-2008