Legislative Organization and Administrative Redundancy

Congress regularly enacts legislation providing for redundant administrative programs. For example, there are more than 100 federal programs for surface transportation, 82 programs to ensure teacher quality, 80 programs to promote domestic economic development, and 47 programs to provide employment and job-training services. Recent high-profile legislation–-such as the financial-industry reform measure and the health-care reform measure–-add new programs without repealing existing ones directed at the same policy goals. Prior academic analyses generally have not considered why Congress pursues redundancy. This article addresses that question through both theoretical and institutional analysis. The article first constructs an organizational theory that attributes redundancy in administrative programs to the congressional committee system. Specifically, the article demonstrates that two critical components of the existing committee system-–fragmented jurisdictions and parliamentary prerogatives–-systematically bias legislative outcomes in favor of redundancy. Building on leading theoretical accounts of congressional committees from political science, the article then presents a novel cost-benefit analysis of this tendency toward redundancy. It shows that redundancy allows legislators to increase distributive favors for constituents and interest groups but that redundancy is also linked to the desirable pursuit of informational efficiency. Thus, the institutional structures facilitating redundancy have mixed effects. Consequently, the article describes and analyzes specific institutional reforms that trade off the distributive costs and the informational benefits associated with redundancy. One approach would subject more legislative decisions to external advisory processes such as that used to close unneeded military facilities. A second and more promising approach would preserve existing committee jurisdictions but would scale back committees’ parliamentary prerogatives, thereby encouraging redundancy in program design but discouraging redundancy in program implementation

XML document design via GN-DTD

Designing a well-structured XML document is important for the sake of readability and maintainability. More importantly, this will avoid data redundancies and update anomalies when maintaining a large quantity of XML based documents. In this paper, we propose a method to improve XML structural design by adopting graphical notations for Document Type Definitions (GN-DTD), which is used to describe the structure of an XML document at the schema level. Multiples levels of normal forms for GN-DTD are proposed on the basis of conceptual model approaches and theories of normalization. The normalization rules are applied to transform a poorly designed XML document into a well-designed based on normalized GN-DTD, which is illustrated through examples

Justification for inclusion dependency normal form

Functional dependencies (FDs) and inclusion dependencies (INDs) are the most fundamental integrity constraints that arise in practice in relational databases. In this paper, we address the issue of normalization in the presence of FDs and INDs and, in particular, the semantic justification for Inclusion Dependency Normal Form (IDNF), a normal form which combines Boyce-Codd normal form with the restriction on the INDs that they be noncircular and key-based. We motivate and formalize three goals of database design in the presence of FDs and INDs: noninteraction between FDs and INDs, elimination of redundancy and update anomalies, and preservation of entity integrity. We show that, as for FDs, in the presence of INDs being free of redundancy is equivalent to being free of update anomalies. Then, for each of these properties, we derive equivalent syntactic conditions on the database design. Individually, each of these syntactic conditions is weaker than IDNF and the restriction that an FD not be embedded in the righthand side of an IND is common to three of the conditions. However, we also show that, for these three goals of database design to be satisfied simultaneously, IDNF is both a necessary and sufficient condition

Development of improved redundancy measure for the Colorado State Highway System

Includes bibliographical references.2022 Fall.The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has been working to improve the resiliency of its transportation system and facilities. A vital attribute of a resilient transportation system is whether or not the system has redundancies built into it. For example, if a roadway is closed to traffic, but there are alternative routes for the drivers to take, then the closed roadway could be considered to have redundancy. The current redundancy measure that CDOT uses is based on the number of other state highways that connect to a particular highway. The redundancy measure needs refinement because it does not consider the additional travel time and distance from the alternative routes. This research aims to develop an improved method for measuring the redundancy of state highway facilities in Colorado. To establish information on the number of detours (i.e., alternative routes) for a specific road segment and the additional travel time and distance on each of the detours, detour analyses are carried out to identify (if any) the first, second, and third best alternative detours for all the highway segments in the state highway system. This is realized by closing the corresponding road segment or alternative routes, updating the transportation network, and rerunning the traffic analysis on the updated transportation network. For more accurate traffic analysis, the combined distribution and assignment model is used to take into account the effects of congestion on the traffic flow. Because the full transportation network in CDOT's state-wide model has large number of nodes and links, to reduce the computational effort for the detour analysis (which needs to be repeated for all road segments), an aggregated network based on the full network is developed and used for detour analysis for cars. Separate detour analyses are also carried out for the freight vehicles since they use a separate freight network, which is a subnetwork of the aggregated network. In the end, using the information from the detour analyses, a new improved redundancy metric is developed that takes into account not only the number of alternative routes for a road segment but also the additional time and distance on the alternative routes. The new redundancy metric also incorporates a weight for each best detour (e.g., the first, second, and third best detours are weighted differently). The detour information will be used to update the existing CDOT Detour Identification Tool. The redundancy metric can be further used to calculate and update CDOT's criticality score to determine the resiliency of the Colorado State Highway System and guide activities to enhance its resilience

The Yamanote Loop: Unifying Rail Transportation and Disaster Resilience in Tokyo

As climate change and population growth persist, and as the world rapidly urbanizes, major cities across the globe will face unprecedented strains. The risk of devastating impact from natural disasters increases in areas with a growing concentration of people. Megacities in Asia are the most at-risk of natural disasters, given their geographic location and high population density. With the highest projected population growth in the world, Asian cities must quickly expand and adapt their existing infrastructure to accommodate the transforming global conditions. A remarkable anomaly amongst Asian megacities, Tokyo, Japan is effectively adapting to its earthquake-prone environment. Within the last century, Japan has implemented seismically reinforced buildings and educational resources for earthquake preparedness. Amongst other technological innovations, investments in railway transportation have permitted major cities like Tokyo to expand and adjust according to its changing needs. The Yamanote Line is the primary commuter rail line in Tokyo. Its antecedent originated in 1885 and has since undergone significant changes to evolve into the highly sophisticated system it is today. By examining the evolvement of the Yamanote line from its conception and into the 21st century, this study explores the correlation between local rail transportation networks and their city’s resilience to natural disasters. A descriptive analysis aligned with four constructs of transportation resilience—robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity—observes instances in which the Yamanote line potentially strengthens Tokyo’s comprehensive disaster preparedness. The following study intentionally circumvents normative-prescriptive conclusions and focuses primarily on the impact of transformations of railway transportation on its broader urban context over time respective to disaster resilience and with consideration of other relative factors