Monetary Policy Today: Sixteen Questions and about Twelve Answers

My assignment is to survey the main questions swirling around monetary policy today. I emphasize three words in this sentence, each for a different reason. “Main” is because one person’s side issue is another’s main issue. So I had to be both selective and judgmental in compiling my list, else this paper would have been even longer than it is. “Policy” indicates that I have restricted myself to issues that are truly relevant to real-world policymakers, thus omitting many interesting but purely academic issues. “Today” means that I focus on current issues, thus passing over some illustrious past issues. All these omissions still leave a rather long list; so I will treat some issues quite briefly.

The method of data envelopment analysis as a tool for compiling a rating list

The paper presents the method of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as a tool for compiling rating lists in tasks of ordering elements of assemblages. We describe the differences that result from applying a one-dimensional model and multi-dimensional model, where in the latter a so-called partial order is created for incomparable elements in the assemblage being ordered. The example used to illustrate the issues discussed is the analysis of teaching results in a student group.DEA method, ordering of assemblages, partial order, rating classes

Balancing SoNaR: IPR versus Processing Issues in a 500-Million-Word Written Dutch Reference Corpus

In The Low Countries, a major reference corpus for written Dutch is beingbuilt. We discuss the interplay between data acquisition and data processingduring the creation of the SoNaR Corpus. Based on developments in traditionalcorpus compiling and new web harvesting approaches, SoNaR is designed tocontain 500 million words, balanced over 36 text types including bothtraditional and new media texts. Beside its balanced design, every text sampleincluded in SoNaR will have its IPR issues settled to the largest extentpossible. This data collection task presents many challenges because everydecision taken on the level of text acquisition has ramifications for the levelof processing and the general usability of the corpus. As far as thetraditional text types are concerned, each text brings its own processingrequirements and issues. For new media texts - SMS, chat - the problem is evenmore complex, issues such as anonimity, recognizability and citation right, allpresent problems that have to be tackled. The solutions actually lead to thecreation of two corpora: a gigaword SoNaR, IPR-cleared for research purposes,and the smaller - of commissioned size - more privacy compliant SoNaR,IPR-cleared for commercial purposes as well

Design strategies for low embodied energy and greenhouse gases in buildings: analyses of the IEA Annex 57 case studies

This paper introduces the IEA Annex 57 case study method, consisting of a format for describing individual case studies and an evaluation matrix covering all case studies. Sample case studies are used to illustrate the method and the evaluation matrix through a first preliminary analysis. In compiling and evaluation existing, transparent case studies we have taken a stakeholder perspective. By so doing it is intended to identify fordecision makers the key issues affecting EE/EC in buildings. Analysis in this paper focuses on one of the six case study themes, building design strategies for EE/EC mitigation and references cases covering e.g. material selection, building shape, construction stage strategies and strategies to handle the trade-off between embodied and operational impacts in net-zero emission building design

Joining up health and bioinformatics: e-science meets e-health

CLEF (Co-operative Clinical e-Science Framework) is an MRC sponsored project in the e-Science programme that aims to establish methodologies and a technical infrastructure forthe next generation of integrated clinical and bioscience research. It is developing methodsfor managing and using pseudonymised repositories of the long-term patient histories whichcan be linked to genetic, genomic information or used to support patient care. CLEF concentrateson removing key barriers to managing such repositories ? ethical issues, informationcapture, integration of disparate sources into coherent ?chronicles? of events, userorientedmechanisms for querying and displaying the information, and compiling the requiredknowledge resources. This paper describes the overall information flow and technicalapproach designed to meet these aims within a Grid framework

Copyright and mass social authorship: a case study of the making of the Oxford English dictionary

Social authorship ventures involving masses of volunteers like Wikipedia are thought to be a phenomenon enabled by digital technology, presenting new challenges for copyright law. By contrast, the case study explored in this article uncovers copyright issues considered in relation to a nineteenth century social authorship precedent: the seventy-year process of compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary instigated by the not-for-profit Philological Society in 1858 which involved thousands of casually organised volunteer readers and sub-editors. Drawing on extensive original archival research, the article uses the case study as a means of critically reflecting on the claims of existing interdisciplinary literature concerning copyright and ‘authorship’: unlike the claims of the so-called Romanticism thesis, the article argues that copyright law supported an understanding of NED authorship as collaborative and democratic. Further, in uncovering the practical solutions which lawyers considered in debating issues relating to title and rights clearance, the article uses the nineteenth century experience as a vantage point for considering how these issues are approached today: despite the very different context, the copyright problems and solutions debated in the nineteenth century demonstrate remarkable continuity with those considered in relation to social authorship projects today

[Review of] Rebecca R. Martin. Libraries and the Changing Face of Academia: Responses to Growing Multicultural Populations

With great anticipation I sat down to read Rebecca R. Martin\u27s work about academic libraries services to multicultural populations in the United States. I had hoped to read about reasoned and responsible approaches to this current hot topic. What I found instead was an anthology of the politically correct chatter pulled from the last ten years of library literature. Martin\u27s book raises no new issues for the academic library administrator. Libraries And The Changing Face of Academia is a tame discussion of a serious issue that has kept academic librarians wringing their hands over the past decade. Rebecca Martin does do a good job of compiling this library literature into one volume. That is the problem with this work. She strings together all of the discussion and does not make any new statements