Speaking Stata: Problems with tables, Part II

Three user-written commands are reviewed as illustrations of different approaches to tabulation problems, each one step beyond what is possible to do directly through official Stata. tabcount is a wrapper for tabdisp written to produce tables that show how often specified values occur or specified conditions are satisfied so that, in particular, tables may include explicit zeros whenever desired. makematrix is designed for situations in which a table of results may be compiled by populating a matrix. matrix list or list maythenbeusedtodisplay the table. groups shows frequencies of combinations of values using list. Users should find these commands to be helpful additions to the toolkit. Programmers may be interested in examples of the wrapper approach, calculating the values to be tabulated before passing them to a workhorse display command. This is the second of two papers on this topic. Copyright 2003 by StataCorp LP.tables, matrices, tabcount, makematrix, groups, tabdisp, list

Improving on Kyoto: Greenhouse Gas Control as the Purchase of a Global Public Good

One way to obtain a global public good is to set up an institution to buy it, with the nations of the world contributing to the cost according to whatever sharing arrangements make political sense. An example would be the purchase of the services of national armed forces to carry out peacekeeping, with the cost separately apportioned. In these notes I suggest a way to exploit this approach to limiting accumulations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The “service” that produces the control is the reduction, by nations, in the levels of emissions over time from what they would otherwise choose, also known as the “business as usual” emissions path. In the scheme as envisioned, which could be used in a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, the fact that all nations are sellers of reductions ameliorates the enforcement problems typical of commitments to particular emission paths. Another difference from the Kyoto-style system: In the scheme sketched here, the distributive of burdens is explicit, rather than implicit in the allowable emission amounts. The conflation of distributive and allocational issues is, arguably, an unnecessary source of contention in the design of institutions to control anthropogenic effects on the climate system.

Lost in translation: a multi-level case study of the metamorphosis of meanings and action in public sector organisational innovation

This paper explores the early implementation of an organisational innovation in the UK National Health Service (NHS) - Treatment Centres (TCs) - designed to dramatically reduce waiting lists for elective care. The paper draws on case studies of eight TCs (each at varying stages of their development) and aims to explore how meanings about TCs are created and evolve, and how these meanings impact upon the development of the organisational innovation. Research on organisational meanings needs to take greater account of the fact that modern organisations like the NHS are complex multi-level phenomena, comprising layers of interlacing networks. To understand the pace, direction and impact of organisational innovation and change we need to study the interconnections between meanings across different organisational levels. The data presented in this paper show how the apparently simple, relatively unformed, concept of a TC framed by central government, is translated and transmuted by subsequent layers in the health service administration, and by players in local health economies and, ultimately in the TCs themselves, picking up new rationales, meanings, and significance as it goes. The developmental histories of TCs reveal a range of significant re-workings of macro policy with the result that there is considerable diversity and variation between local TC schemes. The picture is of important disconnections between meanings, that in many ways mirror Weick’s (1976) ‘loosely coupled systems’. The emergent meanings and the direction of micro-level development of TCs appear more strongly determined by interactions within the local TC environment, notably between what we identify as groups of ‘idealists’, ‘pragmatists’, ‘opportunists’ and ‘sceptics’ than by the framing (Goffman 1974) provided by macro and meso organisational levels. While this illustrates the limitations of top down and policy-driven attempts at change, and highlights the crucial importance of the front-line local ‘micro-systems’ (Donaldson & Mohr, 2000) in the overall scheme of implementing organisational innovations, the space or headroom provided by frames at the macro and meso levels can enable local change, albeit at variable speed and with uncertain outcomes

THE EFFECTS OF RELATIONS IN FARMING TRADE WITH USA ON EEC AGRICULTURAL POLICIES

Agricultural and Food Policy,

MUSTANG: 90 GHz Science with the Green Bank Telescope

MUSTANG is a 90 GHz bolometer camera built for use as a facility instrument on the 100 m Robert C. Byrd Green Bank radio telescope (GBT). MUSTANG has an 8 by 8 focal plane array of transition edge sensor bolometers read out using time-domain multiplexed SQUID electronics. As a continuum instrument on a large single dish MUSTANG has a combination of high resolution (8") and good sensitivity to extended emission which make it very competitive for a wide range of galactic and extragalactic science. Commissioning finished in January 2008 and some of the first science data have been collected.Comment: 9 Pages, 5 figures, Presented at the SPIE conference on astronomical instrumentation in 200

Productivity of Rural Credit: A Review of Issues and Some Recent Literature

The policy intervention in agriculture has been credit driven. This is even more pronounced in the recent interventions made by the State, in doubling agricultural credit, providing subvention and putting an upper cap on interest rates for agricultural loans, the package announced for distressed farmers. We use existing literature and data to argue that the causality of agricultural output with increased doses of credit cannot be clearly established. We argue that Indian agriculture is undergoing fundamental change wherein the technology and inputs are moving out of the hands of the farmers to external suppliers. This, over a period of time may have resulted in the de-skilling of farmers and without adequate public investments in support services and without appropriate risk mitigation products has created a near-crisis in agriculture. Thus, we argue that policy interventions have to be necessarily patient and holistic. Looking specifically at the rural financial markets, using some primary data we argue that it is necessary to understand the rural financial markets from the demand side. We conclude the paper by identifying some directions in which the policy intervention could move, keeping the overall rural economy in view rather than being unifocal about agriculture.

Using information-gap decision theory for water resources planning under severe uncertainty

PublishedJournal ArticleWater resource managers are required to develop comprehensive water resources plans based on severely uncertain information of the effects of climate change on local hydrology and future socio-economic changes on localised demand. In England and Wales, current water resources planning methodologies include a headroom estimation process separate from water resource simulation modelling. This process quantifies uncertainty based on only one point of an assumed range of deviations from the expected climate and projected demand 25 years into the future. This paper utilises an integrated method based on Information-Gap decision theory to quantitatively assess the robustness of various supply side and demand side management options over a broad range of plausible futures. Findings show that beyond the uncertainty range explored with the headroom method, a preference reversal can occur, i. e. some management options that underperform at lower uncertainties, outperform at higher levels of uncertainty. This study also shows that when 50 % or more of the population adopts demand side management, efficiency related measures and innovative options such as rainwater collection can perform equally well or better than some supply side options The additional use of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis shifts the focus away from reservoir expansion options, that perform best in regards to water availability, to combined strategies that include innovative demand side management actions of rainwater collection and greywater reuse as well efficiency measures and additional regional transfers. This paper illustrates how an Information-Gap based approach can offer a comprehensive picture of potential supply/demand futures and a rich variety of information to support adaptive management of water systems under severe uncertainty. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.The authors are grateful to three anonymous referees for their detailed comments. Any errors remain our own. Brett Korteling is supported by the University of Exeter’s Climate Change and Sustainable Futures theme. South West Water are thanked for their generosity in terms of their time and data. Suraje Dessai was supported by the ARCC-Water project funded by EPSRC (EP/G061181/1) and the EQUIP project funded by NERC (NE/H003509/1)