Report on the Administrative Office of the Courts

In March 2011 Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye established the Strategic Evaluation Committee (SEC), composed of judges from courts of all size from throughout the state, assisted by advisory members with extensive executive managerial experience in government. The Chief Justice asked the committee to conduct an in-depth review of the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), the staff agency to the Judicial Council, with a view toward promoting transparency, accountability, and efficiency. The request from the Chief Justice required the committee to undertake a thorough and objective examination of the role, functions, organizational structure, methods of operation, and staffing of the agency, and to make recommendations to improve the manner in which it performs core functions and provides services to the courts and the public

Achieving IT diffusion within the fragments: an IT culture perspective

Many organizations still fail to make a return from the huge investments they make in implementing complex Information Technology (IT). This is usually due to cultural forces that inhibit the level of usage required to facilitate IT Diffusion. An emerging stream of research highlights the IT culture perspective, a perspective vital for understanding individuals’ social practices when they interact with IT. This paper adopted a case study approach to explore how the IT culture perspective may explain how organizational diffusion of an IT may happen despite opposing cultural forces causing a stalemate to the diffusion process. This study identified three IT culture archetypes - embracing, rejecting and confused, depicting a fragmented IT culture during the adaption, acceptance and routinization stages of diffusion of an IT. This study highlights how a salient element of a fragmented IT culture-embracing IT culture archetype could explain how diffusion of an IT happened despite the manifestations of negative IT culture archetypes - ‘confused’ and ‘rejecting’ during the diffusion process

Options for Regional Decision Making in Metro Atlanta

Who loses if nothing is done? The city of Atlanta, with its central location, mature transit network, excess capacity in utilities, and reasonably aggressive public officials will probably thrive no matter what happens outside the I-285 perimeter. Communities outside the boundaries of the ten-county Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) area will enjoy the temporary fruits of being the next ring of new suburban development. Caught between the Atlanta magnet and the sprawling communities outside the ARC, ARC's suburban communities may bear the worst of the downside effects of the current regional decision-making structure. In the end, though, it is all of North Georgia that loses as congestion, pollution, rising taxes, and reduced quality of life diminish its attractiveness to economic development

The President\u27s Task Force on 21st Century Policing: Final Report

The task force recommendations are presented under six topics: Building Trust and Legitimacy, Policy and Oversight, Technology and Social Media, Community Policing and Crime Reduction, Officer Training and Education, and Officer Safety and Wellness. Each of the recommendations in these topic areas include suggested action steps. One of two overarching recommendations is that the President support the establishment of a National Crime and Justice Task Force to examine all areas of criminal justice and pose reforms. As a corollary to this recommendation, the second overarching recommendation is that the President support programs that take a comprehensive and inclusive look at community-based initiatives that address core issues such as poverty, education, and health and safety. The basic principle underlying the task force\u27s recommendations is that Trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve is essential in a democracy. It is key to the stability of our communities, the integrity of our criminal justice system, and the safe and effective delivery of policing services. There are a total of 59 recommendations for research, action, and further study. Together they are designed to bring long-term improvement in the ways law enforcement agencies interact with and bring positive change to their communities Some proposals are designated for immediate action. The task force held seven listening sessions, which were conducted in Washington, DC; Phoenix, AZ; and Cincinnati, OH. These sessions involved approximately 100 individuals from diverse stakeholder groups. Appended listing of session witnesses, biographies of task force members, and individuals and organizations that submitted written testimon

Automated and Participative Decision Support in Computer-aided Credibility Assessment

History has shown that inaccurate assessments of credibility can result in tremendous costs to businesses and society. This study uses Signal Detection Theory (SDT) to improve the accuracy of credibility assessments through combining automated and participatory decision support. Participatory decision support is also proposed to encourage acceptance of the decision aid’s recommendation. A new hybrid decision aid is designed to perform automated linguistic analysis and elicit and analyze perceptual cues (i.e., indirect cues) from an observer. The results suggest that decision aids that collect both linguistic and indirect cues perform better than decision aids that collect only one type of cue. Users of systems that collect linguistic cues experience improved credibility assessment accuracy; yet, users of systems that collect both types of cues or only indirect cues do not experience higher accuracy. However, collecting indirect cues increases the user’s acceptance of decision-aid recommendations

Online Tensor Methods for Learning Latent Variable Models

We introduce an online tensor decomposition based approach for two latent variable modeling problems namely, (1) community detection, in which we learn the latent communities that the social actors in social networks belong to, and (2) topic modeling, in which we infer hidden topics of text articles. We consider decomposition of moment tensors using stochastic gradient descent. We conduct optimization of multilinear operations in SGD and avoid directly forming the tensors, to save computational and storage costs. We present optimized algorithm in two platforms. Our GPU-based implementation exploits the parallelism of SIMD architectures to allow for maximum speed-up by a careful optimization of storage and data transfer, whereas our CPU-based implementation uses efficient sparse matrix computations and is suitable for large sparse datasets. For the community detection problem, we demonstrate accuracy and computational efficiency on Facebook, Yelp and DBLP datasets, and for the topic modeling problem, we also demonstrate good performance on the New York Times dataset. We compare our results to the state-of-the-art algorithms such as the variational method, and report a gain of accuracy and a gain of several orders of magnitude in the execution time.Comment: JMLR 201

Towards Sustainable Fisheries Management: International Examples of Innovation

Fisheries change often carries its own financial rewards. Many reforms and changes which support conservation also result in higher profits and revenue streams for the involved businesses. This makes fisheries a potentially attractive investment arena for many commercial investors, once reform projects are properly structured and agreed upon between conservationists and the involved businesses. As commercial investors and social investors become more involved in the field of fisheries, the scale of the impacts that can be achieved is expected to expand. Foundations in the field are now looking to support this transition from fisheries conservation as a purely philanthropic investment to a blended conservation and business investment by encouraging non-profits, social change leaders and business entrepreneurs to create innovatively structured projects that can both build value for private investors and improve the speed and scale of fisheries conservation impacts. This report aims to support this transition, by providing information about and high-lighting the work of those at the forefront of innovative fisheries finance

Employment Action Plan : 2002

"The UK Employment Action Plan 2002 was produced after extensive consultation and agreement across Government Departments and agencies responsible for the employment, economic and social fields. Beyond Government, the production of the Plan involves a wide range of stakeholders. This year the main external partners were the CBI, TUC, CEEP UK and the Regional Development Agencies (the main strategic coordinators of local activity in England). The Devolved Administrations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have made their own separate contributions" -- page 3

A toolbox of strategies to reduce single-occupant vehicle trips and increase alternate mode usage in Arizona

abstract: The report provides a suite of recommended strategies to reduce single-occupant vehicle traffic in the urban areas of Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, which are presented as a travel demand management toolbox. The toolbox includes supporting research on how to deliver, monitor, and fund implementation of the strategies, and a framework for the development of performance measures to assess their effectiveness. The research effort included studies of travel behavior in Phoenix and Tucson, reviews of best-practice measures nationally, and those in use in Arizona today, and interviews with local and national TDM professionals.Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-67)