Poverty Lines as Context Deflators in the DRC. A methodology to account for contextual differences

In this paper we present a specific methodology to make spatial well-being and poverty assessments based on expenditure data to some extent sensitive to contextual aspects other than price differentials. The rationale behind this method coincides with the view expressed by the advocates of human development pointing to the irrelevance of (real) income levels for well-being measurement compared to an analysis of people?s ability to deploy this purchasing power in a very specific time and setting. Yet, in order to operationalize this principle, we opted to employ the ordinary technique of deflating nominal incomes, but in such a way that genuine comparability over different geographical entities comes within reach. Of course, the extent to which our methodology is able to achieve this goal, largely depend on the exact content and construction of the underlying deflators used. Given our research agenda to analyze the distribution of poverty and well-being in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), we decided to construct 56 regional poverty lines whose pair wise ratios in turn were used as a set of context deflators. The challenge of this exercise essentially boiled down to reconciling the two seemingly discordant –but highly appreciated– poverty line characteristics of „specificity? and „consistency?: i.e. how to give due attention to the myriad of local living conditions while still ensuring sufficient comparability. Although this theoretical discordance has been settled some time ago, methodological problems to align both features still remain cumbersome in practice. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper needs to be understood in addressing these methodological issues within the framework of a household and expenditure survey. As a natural starting point to deal with these issues, we screened the validity of the major criticisms raised against the Food Energy Intake (FEI) method. Indeed, this context-sensitive methodology for setting poverty lines is often condemned for generating inconsistent results, but –after closer scrutiny– not for every reason put forward in the literature. On the basis of these insights, we started to mould our own specific poverty line methodology in which we tried to accommodate the remaining pieces of critique. This resulted in a three-step FEI-like procedure where the anchoring device to ensure consistency between all 56 localities, was built upon the basic human functionings of being adequately nourished and sheltered. Finally, we applied this procedure to our data in order to discern the impact of our own methodology vis-à-vis other internally and externally computed approaches.

Network Model Selection for Task-Focused Attributed Network Inference

Networks are models representing relationships between entities. Often these relationships are explicitly given, or we must learn a representation which generalizes and predicts observed behavior in underlying individual data (e.g. attributes or labels). Whether given or inferred, choosing the best representation affects subsequent tasks and questions on the network. This work focuses on model selection to evaluate network representations from data, focusing on fundamental predictive tasks on networks. We present a modular methodology using general, interpretable network models, task neighborhood functions found across domains, and several criteria for robust model selection. We demonstrate our methodology on three online user activity datasets and show that network model selection for the appropriate network task vs. an alternate task increases performance by an order of magnitude in our experiments

COMMUNITY PREFERENCES FOR TYPES OF BUSINESSES: A CASE STUDY OF THREE COUNTIES

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

D.1.3 – Protocols for emergent localities

GDD_HCERES2020This report presents two contributions that illustrate the potential of emerging-locality protocols in large-scale decentralized systems, in two areas of decentralized social computing: recommendation, and eventual consistency of mutable data structures. The first contribution consists of a framework supporting the development of dynamically adaptive decen-tralised recommendation systems. Decentralised recommenders have been proposed to deliver privacy-preserving, personalised and highly scalable on-line recommendations. Current implementations tend, however, to rely on a hard-wired similarity metric that cannot adapt. This constitutes a strong limitation in the face of evolving needs. Our framework address this through a decentralised form of adaptation, in which individual nodes can independently select, and update their own recommendation algorithm, while still collectively contributing to the overall system's mission. Our second contribution addresses the growing demand for differentiated consistency requirements in large-scale applications. A large number of today's applications rely on Eventual Consistency, a consistency model that emphasizes liveness over safety. Designers generally adopt this consistency model uniformly throughout a distributed system due to its ability to scale as the number of users or devices grows larger. But this clashes with the need for differentiated consistency requirements. In this contribution, we address this need by introducing UPS, a novel consistency mechanism that offers differentiated eventual consistency and delivery speed by working in pair with a two-phase epidemic broadcast protocol. We propose a closed-form analysis of our approach's delivery speed, and we evaluate our complete protocol experimentally on a simulated network of one million nodes. To measure the consistency trade-off, we formally define a novel and scalable consistency metric operating at runtime

Bringing Up Baltimore: One City's Approach to Strengthening its Most Vulnerable Families

In 2008, the city of Baltimore undertook a first-of-its-kind effort. First, it sought to transition its home visiting programs into using only evidence-based program models. Second, the city worked to build a unified system of services. And finally, it moved to establish procedures to measure the results. Like the many policymakers across the country considering similar shifts, leaders in Baltimore were searching for better outcomes for children and families and continued support from public and private funder who, in recent years, had increasingly sought greater effectiveness and accountability.Using the existing research base, leaders found that properly implemented home visiting could effectively improve birth outcomes, provide family support, and enhance the health of young children as part of a larger comprehensive plan. As a result of this process, policymakers agreed that home visiting should continue in the city -- not as it had, as disparate programs with no central strategy, but rather as an aligned system implementing proven practices.City officials designed a new home visiting system that includes two federally approved, rigorously evaluated, evidence-base models -- Nurse Family Partnership and Healthy Families America -- which they believed could reach those expectant mothers most at risk for low-birth-weight babies, preterm births, infant mortality, and child abuse and neglect. They also developed a central system to identify, engage, and enroll targeted mothers and provide a single point of entry into the home visiting system. This brief offers an overview of the Baltimore experience and identifies the eight steps that were key to the city's successful transition:1. Get leadership buy-in.2. Conduct a needs assessment.3. Select evidence-based programs.4. Implement evidence-based programs and create a unified system.5. Provide staff with training and technical assistance.6. Establish a central triage and referral process.7. Establish a monitoring and reporting system.8. Monitor implementation and outcomes

What's the big idea? A critical exploration of the concept of social capital and its incorporation into leisure policy discourse

Starting from the overwhelming welcome that Putnam's (2000) treatise on social capital has received in government circles, we consider its relative merits for examining and understanding the role for leisure in policy strategies. To perform this critique we identify some of the key points from Putnam's work and also illustrate how it has been incorporated into a body of leisure studies literature. This is then extended to a discussion of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of his approach and its link to civic communitarianism. We suggest that the seduction of the 'niceness' of Putnam's formulation of social capital not only misses the point of the grimness of some people's lives but it also pays little attention to Bourdieu's point that poorer community groups tend to be at the mercy of forces over which they have little control. We argue that if the poor have become a silent emblem of the ways in which the state has more and more individualised its relationship with its citizens, it is they who also tend to be blamed for their own poverty because it is presumed that they lack social capital. This in turn encourages 'us' to determine what is appropriate for 'them'. As a critical response to this situation, we propose that Bourdieu's take on different forms of 'capital' offers more productive lines for analysis. From there we go on to suggest that it might be profitable to combine Bourdieu's sociology with Sennett's recent interpretation of 'respect' to formulate a central interpretive role for community leisure practitioners - recast as cultural intermediaries - if poorer community groups are to be better included. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

Representation in Westminster in the 1990s : The ghost of Edmund Burke

Why are 'trustee' notions of representation still invoked in the UK House of Commons in the 1990s? In answering this question this article analyses the premises of Burkean theory and the arguments that these premises are of little relevance in the late twentieth century. Despite these dismissals of trusteeship, Burkean ideas are still articulated in the Commons some 200 years after they were first voiced. The idea of trusteeship can prove extremely useful to justify the actions of representatives when those actions conflict with constituency 'opinion', party policy or the wishes of interest groups. Examples of the occasions when Burkean notions have been invoked in the 1990s are provided

Strengthening Workforce Policy: Applying the Lessons of the Jobs Initiative to Five Key Challenges

Reviews Casey's Jobs Initiative in six cities; identifies difficulties in addressing issues of demographic changes, inefficiencies, mismatched needs, inconsistent performance measures, and funding; and shares insights and policy recommendations