Policy rationales for electronic information systems : an area of ambiguity

Child welfare and protection (CWP) has engaged in the introduction of Electronic Information Systems (EIS), such as electronic recording, assessment and decision- making tools. It has been argued that EIS have adverse consequences in which gov- ernments are conceived as homogeneous entities that install EIS for self-interested purposes. Consequently, research focuses on how social workers evade/reshape the sometimes pernicious effects of EIS. Insufficient attention has been given to the gov- ernmental perspective and to why governments install EIS. In this article, we contrib- ute to this debate by performing semi-structured interviews with policy actors (directors, policy advisers and staff members) in the field of CWP in Flanders. Asked about their rationales for installing EIS, they spoke of administrative, policy, care and economic reasons. However, while advocating these EIS, they also expressed a critical attitude concerning the usefulness of EIS, hoping that practitioners would move back and forth between governmental demands and day-to-day realities, to establish a more responsive social work. This ambiguous situation in which policy makers seem to be both strong supporters and critics of EIS at the same time is captivating, since it seems no longer necessary to perceive governments as a homogeneous bogeyman and social work as a victim

Professions, Organizations and Institutions: Tenure Systems in Colleges and Universities

A common strategy used by professions to support claims of workplace jurisdiction involves the institutionalization of professionally-endorsed formal structures, yet both theory and research suggest that ensuring the implementation of institutionalized structures after formal adoption can be problematic. This study investigates the influence of organizational characteristics on the implementation of one professionally-created institution in higher education organizations, tenure systems for faculty employment. Our results suggest that implementation of tenure systems is negatively affected by internal resource pressures, but positively affected by countervailing pressures from professionally-linked constituents. The results also suggest self-limiting aspects of the use of tenure systems

How does the franchisor’s choice of different control mechanisms affect franchisees’ and employee-managers’ satisfaction?

Satisfaction of franchisees and employee-managers affects the overall performance of a franchise system. We argue that different actors in the same franchise system need to be treated in different ways. The franchisor’s choice of control mechanisms affects the satisfaction of franchisees and employee-managers differently. Drawing on data from the largest German franchise system, we show that the effectiveness of different control mechanisms depends on actor type and experience. Outcome control leads to higher satisfaction among franchisees and employee-managers, while behavior control enhances employee-managers’ satisfaction. Thereby, outcome control leads to higher satisfaction among more experienced franchisees, while behavior control enhances both highly and lowly experienced employee-managers’ satisfaction. Our results suggest that franchisors face a dilemma: On the one hand, behavior control is associated with high costs and has no impact on franchisees’ satisfaction at all. On the other hand, it might still be necessary to prevent franchisees from behaving opportunistically

Artificial Intelligence and Systems Theory: Applied to Cooperative Robots

This paper describes an approach to the design of a population of cooperative robots based on concepts borrowed from Systems Theory and Artificial Intelligence. The research has been developed under the SocRob project, carried out by the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Institute for Systems and Robotics - Instituto Superior Tecnico (ISR/IST) in Lisbon. The acronym of the project stands both for "Society of Robots" and "Soccer Robots", the case study where we are testing our population of robots. Designing soccer robots is a very challenging problem, where the robots must act not only to shoot a ball towards the goal, but also to detect and avoid static (walls, stopped robots) and dynamic (moving robots) obstacles. Furthermore, they must cooperate to defeat an opposing team. Our past and current research in soccer robotics includes cooperative sensor fusion for world modeling, object recognition and tracking, robot navigation, multi-robot distributed task planning and coordination, including cooperative reinforcement learning in cooperative and adversarial environments, and behavior-based architectures for real time task execution of cooperating robot teams

How does the franchisor’s choice of different control mechanisms affect franchisees’ and employee-managers’ satisfaction?

Satisfaction of franchisees and employee-managers affects the overall performance of a franchise system. We argue that different actors in the same franchise system need to be treated in different ways. The franchisor’s choice of control mechanisms affects the satisfaction of franchisees and employee-managers differently. Drawing on data from the largest German franchise system, we show that the effectiveness of different control mechanisms depends on actor type and experience. Outcome control leads to higher satisfaction among franchisees and employee-managers, while behavior control enhances employee-managers’ satisfaction. Thereby, outcome control leads to higher satisfaction among more experienced franchisees, while behavior control enhances both highly and lowly experienced employee-managers’ satisfaction. Our results suggest that franchisors face a dilemma: On the one hand, behavior control is associated with high costs and has no impact on franchisees’ satisfaction at all. On the other hand, it might still be necessary to prevent franchisees from behaving opportunistically

Risk, precaution and science: towards a more constructive policy debate. Talking point on the precautionary principle

Few issues in contemporary risk policy are as momentous or contentious as the precautionary principle. Since it first emerged in German environmental policy, it has been championed by environmentalists and consumer protection groups, and resisted by the industries they oppose (Raffensperger & Tickner, 1999). Various versions of the principle now proliferate across different national and international jurisdictions and policy areas (Fisher, 2002). From a guiding theme in European Commission (EC) environmental policy, it has become a general principle of EC law (CEC, 2000; Vos & Wendler, 2006). Its influence has extended from the regulation of environmental, technological and health risks to the wider governance of science, innovation and trade (O'Riordan & Cameron, 1994)

The Possibility of Transfer(?): A Comprehensive Approach to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s Rule 11bis To Permit Transfer to Rwandan Domestic Courts

We present a learned image compression system based on GANs, operating at extremely low bitrates. Our proposed framework combines an encoder, decoder/generator and a multi-scale discriminator, which we train jointly for a generative learned compression objective. The model synthesizes details it cannot afford to store, obtaining visually pleasing results at bitrates where previous methods fail and show strong artifacts. Furthermore, if a semantic label map of the original image is available, our method can fully synthesize unimportant regions in the decoded image such as streets and trees from the label map, proportionally reducing the storage cost. A user study confirms that for low bitrates, our approach is preferred to state-of-the-art methods, even when they use more than double the bits.Comment: E. Agustsson, M. Tschannen, and F. Mentzer contributed equally to this work. ICCV 2019 camera ready versio