Latin American perspectives to internationalize undergraduate information technology education

The computing education community expects modern curricular guidelines for information technology (IT) undergraduate degree programs by 2017. The authors of this work focus on eliciting and analyzing Latin American academic and industry perspectives on IT undergraduate education. The objective is to ensure that the IT curricular framework in the IT2017 report articulates the relationship between academic preparation and the work environment of IT graduates in light of current technological and educational trends in Latin America and elsewhere. Activities focus on soliciting and analyzing survey data collected from institutions and consortia in IT education and IT professional and educational societies in Latin America; these activities also include garnering the expertise of the authors. Findings show that IT degree programs are making progress in bridging the academic-industry gap, but more work remains

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): Negotiations and Issues for Congress

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a potential free trade agreement (FTA) among 12, and perhaps more, countries (Figure 1). The United States and 11 other countries o f the Asia-Pacific region—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam—are negotiating the text of the FTA. With over 20 chapters under negotiation, the TPP partners envision the agreement to be “comprehensive and high-standard,” in that they seek to eliminate tariffs and nontariff barriers to trade in goods, services, and agriculture, and to establish or expand rules on a wide range of issues including intellectual property rights, foreign direct investment, and other trade-related issues. They also strive to create a “21st-century agreement” that addresses new and cross-cutting issues presented by an increasingly globalized economy. The TPP draws congressional interest on a number of fronts. Congress would have to approve implementing legislation for U.S. commitments under the agreement to enter into force. In addition, under long-established executive-legislative practice, the Administration notifies and consults with congressional leaders, before, during, and after trade agreements have been negotiated. Furthermore, the TPP will likely affect a range of sectors and regions of the U.S. economy of direct interest to Members of Congress and could influence the shape and path of U.S. trade policy for the foreseeable future. This report examines the issues related to the proposed TPP, the state and substance of the negotiations (to the degree that the information is publicly available), the specific areas under negotiation, the policy and economic contexts in which the TPP would fit, and the issues for Congress that the TPP presents. The report will be revised and updated as events warrant

The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Negotiations and Issues for Congress

[Excerpt] The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a potential free trade agreement (FTA) among 11, and perhaps more, countries. The United States and 10 other countries of the Asia-Pacific region— Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam—are negotiating the text of the FTA. Canada and Mexico participated for the first time in the Auckland round of negotiations in December 2012, and Japan recently announced it would seek to participate in the negotiations. With 29 chapters under negotiation, the TPP partners envision the agreement to be “comprehensive and high-standard,” in that they seek to eliminate tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade in goods, services, and agriculture, and to establish rules on a wide range of issues including foreign direct investment and other economic activities. They also strive to create a “21st-century agreement” that addresses new and cross-cutting issues presented by an increasingly globalized economy. The TPP draws congressional interest on a number of fronts. Congress would have to approve implementing legislation for U.S. commitments under the agreement to enter into force. In addition, under long-established executive-legislative practice, the Administration notifies and consults with congressional leaders, before, during, and after trade agreements have been negotiated. Furthermore, the TPP will likely affect a range of sectors and regions of the U.S. economy of direct interest to Members of Congress and could influence the shape and path of U.S. trade policy for the foreseeable future. This report examines the issues related to the proposed TPP, the state and substance of the negotiations (to the degree that the information is publically available), the specific areas under negotiation, the policy and economic contexts in which the TPP would fit, and the issues for Congress that the TPP presents. The report will be revised and updated as events warrant

Trade and the Americas

CRS ReportCRSTradeAmericas12Sept03.pdf: 220 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Actividades latinoamericanas en el espacio ultraterrestre en el siglo XXI: una actualización

En el siglo XXI, los países latinoamericanos han hecho esfuerzos significativos para avanzar en sus programas espaciales. Estos esfuerzos han abarcado desde una indagatoria sobre la instalación de un sistema de satélites, como es el caso en Colombia, hasta el lanzamiento de satélites con la ayuda de gobiernos extranjeros, en el caso de Brasil, Argentina y Bolivia. En todos estos casos, la falta de un marco jurídico coherente que apoye un programa espacial sólido que proporcione comunicaciones por satélite a las poblaciones más vulnerables es uno de los desafíos más apremiantes. El Consejo Asesor de Generación Espacial (SGAC) podría resolver este problema mediante un proyecto unificador que pondrá todas las mentes y desarrolladores en el objetivo común de alcanzar la autonomía espacial para América Latina.In the twenty-first century, Latin American countries have made significant efforts to advance their space programs. These efforts have ranged from inquiring about setup of a satellite system, as is the case in Colombia, to launching satellites with the aid of foreign governments, in the case of Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia. In all these cases, the lack of a coherent legal framework that supports a solid space program that provides satellite communications to the most vulnerable populations is one of the most pressing challenges. The Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC) could solve this problem in the form of a unifying project that will put all minds and developers to work towards the common goal of achieving space autonomy for Latin America

Bargaining In Legislature: Number Of Parties And Ideological Polarization

This paper studies whether a government party always prefers to negotiate with another compact party rather than with many different parties in a legislature. We claim that the interaction between ideological polarization and number of parties plays an important role in this decision. We start by modeling two types of legislatures: The 2-parties legislature, in which the government party negotiates with another compact party; and the m+1-parties legislature, in which it negotiates with m>2 parties. Parties negotiate on both a public (ideological) and a distributive (private) policy. Our main result shows that the government party does not always prefer to negotiate in a bilateral situation. If the level of ideological polarization in the 2-parties legislature is high enough, it prefers to negotiate with m less polarized parties. We also find that if there are two legislatures with the same number of parties, the government party prefers to negotiate in that with the smallest level of ideological polarization.number of parties, bargaining, legislature

All that Glitters: A Review of Payments for Watershed Services in Developing Countries

This report reviews the current status of payments for watershed services in developing countries. It highlights the main trends in the evolution of these schemes, synthesising the available evidence on their environmental and social impacts, and drawing lessons for the design of future initiatives. The interest in payments for watershed services (PWS) as a tool for watershed management in developing countries is growing, despite major setbacks. This review identified 50 ongoing schemes, 8 advanced proposals and 37 preliminary proposals for PWS. A previous review published by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) on markets and payments for environmental services (Silver Bullet or Fools' Gold? (Landell-Mills and Porras 2002)) identified just 41 proposed and ongoing PWS schemes in developing countries, which suggests a considerable growth in interest in this approach

Forms of Participatory Democracy: An Analytical Framework Based on the Experiences of Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia

Based on the experiences of Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia, the paper proposes a general analytical framework for participatory mechanisms. The analysis is oriented to detect the incentives in each system and the ethics and behavior sustaining them. It investigates about the sustainability of participatory democracy, in the face of tensions with representative democracy. The article presents a theoretical framework built from these experiences of institutional design and political practice, and confronts it against the theoretical conceptualizations of participatory democracy in Bobbio, Sartori, Elster and Nino, among others. In this context, different ways in wich those schemes can be inserted in the political systems become apparent, along with the variables that result from combinig elements of direct, representative and participatory democracy.********************************************************************************************************A partir de la experienca de Colombia, Brasil y Bolivia, el artículo propone un marco de análisis general de esquemas de democracia participativa. El análisis está orientado a detectar los incentivos presentes en cada uno de los sistemas y la ética y el comportamiento que sostiene estas instituciones. Investiga además su sostenibilidad al enfrentar tensiones en su interacción con la democracia representativa. El artículo presenta un marco teórico a partir de estas experiencias de diseño institucional y prácticas políticas, y su comparación con las conceptualizaciones teóricas de la democracia participativa de Bobbio, Sartori, Elster y Nino, entre otros. En este análisis se resaltan las diferentes maneras en que tales sistemas políticos son introducidos, así como las variables que resultan de la combinación entre democraica directa, participativa y representativa.democracy, participation, participatory budgets, local government

A People’s History of Collective Action Clauses

For two decades, collective action clauses (CACs) have been part of the official-sector response to sovereign debt crisis, justified by claims that these clauses can help prevent bailouts and shift the burden of restructuring onto the private sector. Reform efforts in the 1990s and 2000s focused on CACs. So do efforts in the Eurozone today. CACs have even been suggested as the cure for the US municipal bond market. But bonds without CACs are still issued in major markets, so reformers feel obliged to explain why they know better. Over time, a narrative has emerged to justify pro-CAC reforms. It relies on history and portrays CACs as novel solutions to previously-unappreciated coordination problems among bondholders. But this pro-CAC narrative is based on flawed premises. In this article, we trace the use of CACs in sovereign bonds during the 20th century. We show that CACs have been used for much of that time, although often in forms (such as trustee and collective acceleration clauses) that are no longer central to modern reform debates (which focus on modification clauses). Market participants have long been aware of CACs but did not view them as a necessary part of sovereign bond documentation. Indeed, we recount one episode in which sovereign debt was restructured without anyone seeming to notice that the relevant debt already included CACs. Contracts do not always include the optimal terms, and, at the margins, the sovereign debt markets might perform better if all bonds contained CACs. But if CACs are to be a central part of reform agendas, they should be defended on functional grounds rather than on contestable historical ones

Culture, neo-liberalism and citizen communication: the case of Radio Tierra in Chile

This article analyses the Chilean independent and not-for profit station Radio Tierra In the general context of the work of two key Chilean sociologists, José Joaquín Brunner and Manuel Antonio Garretón, in particular the latter’s theory of an epochal transformation in the relationship between culture and neo-liberalism in Chile over the preceding 30 years. More specifically, it suggests that Radio Tierra makes evident the emergence of a new form of social communication which, in contrast to the traditional liberal model of communication of, and for, information, is more attuned to the new functions of culture in the expansion and implementation of citizenship under conditions of (neo-liberal) globalization. After a discussion of the contemporary media scene and the role of public journalism and alternative communication in Latin America, the article then focuses on the communicational, political and cultural work of Radio Tierra. In 1990, along with the transition to democracy, Radio Tierra (RT) was born in Santiago as an independent station. Using its trajectory, I will try to concretely show some important connections between globalization, neo-liberalism and culture in contemporary Chile