Regional Address Registries, Governance and Internet Freedom

Regional Internet Address Registries (RIRs) are private, nonprofit and transnational governance entities that evolved organically with the growth of the Internet to manage and coordinate Internet Protocol addresses. The RIR's management of Internet address resources is becoming more contentious and more central to global debates over Internet governance. This is happening because of two transformational problems: 1) the depletion of the IPv4 address space; and 2) the attempt to introduce more security into the Internet routing system. We call these problems "transformational" because they raise the stakes of the RIR's policy decisions, make RIR processes more formal and institutionalized, and have the potential to create new, more centralized control mechanisms over Internet service providers and users. A danger in this transition is that the higher stakes and centralized control mechanisms become magnets for political contention, just as ICANN's control of the DNS root did. In order to avoid a repeat of the problems of ICANN, we need to think carefully about the relationship between RIRs, governments, and Internet freedom. In particular, we need to shield RIRs from interference by national governments, and strengthen and institutionalize their status as neutral technical coordinators with limited influence over other areas of Internet governance

Designing water institutions : market failures and institutional response

To foster economic efficiency, says the author, rights to water resources must be both secure and flexible. Designing institutions to deal with the physical peculiarities of water in a way that establishes sensible incentives and efficient resource use is complicated. Basically, establishing security in water rights requires protecting water users against intrusion by others. This is challenging, since water users are naturally interdependent. Security does not mean that one must be guaranteed an exact amount of water all the time. Rather, it means knowing the probability of water availability and being certain about allocation procedures under changing circumstances. Economic efficiency in water allocation in response to short-term supply changes (such as droughts) requires that economically sensitive sectors take precedence over less sensitive or more adaptive sectors. This can be accomplished through markets or administratively (by government agenciesor private water user groups). In a market scheme, rights must be differentiated according to the probability of receiving water in times of shortage. Those with high-value uses can then either acquire high-probability rights permanently or negotiate an option to be exercised only in drought years. There is less agreement among experts about how to design institutions to provide flexible water allocation in response to long-run changes in demand. Certainly no one interested in economic efficiency would suggest either a complete ban on transfers or completely unrestrained transfers. The difficulty is to ensure that water transactions allow economic development do not impose externalities on other water users. Market mechanisms for water transfer can entail substantial transaction costs, which threaten to delay or stymie transfers altogether. Moreover, third-party and community effects continue to concern those involved in water transfers. Local citizens and officials raise issues about the distribution of economic activity rather than its aggregate level (economic efficiency). Perhaps these issues are negligible when the amount of water transferred is small in proportion to total supply. But when the transfer threatens a community's economic base, these concerns deserve more consideration. Successful water institutions require a delicate interplay between administrative and market control. Institutions establish the basis for markets and can assure competitive conditions. Water agencies will always be involved in allocation, given the economies of scale in centralized water management. The challenge for water professionals is to structure institutions so that they foster sound economic development.Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Water Conservation,Water and Industry,Water Use

High-performance and hardware-aware computing: proceedings of the second International Workshop on New Frontiers in High-performance and Hardware-aware Computing (HipHaC\u2711), San Antonio, Texas, USA, February 2011 ; (in conjunction with HPCA-17)

High-performance system architectures are increasingly exploiting heterogeneity. The HipHaC workshop aims at combining new aspects of parallel, heterogeneous, and reconfigurable microprocessor technologies with concepts of high-performance computing and, particularly, numerical solution methods. Compute- and memory-intensive applications can only benefit from the full hardware potential if all features on all levels are taken into account in a holistic approach

Low-Overhead Migration of Read-Only and Read-Mostly Data for Adapting Applications to Hybrid Memory Systems

Memory systems containing different types of memory with varying capacity, latency, and bandwidth are rapidly becoming mainstream. Conventional memory management techniques do not suffice for these systems; they require alternative strategies to appropriately and effectively adapt application memory placement to these heterogeneous memory tiers. Software-based placement and movement strategies are the most desirable due to their flexibility and ease of adoption by end-users. However, there are substantial sources of overhead present when synchronizing low-level data movement with the operating system and running applications.This thesis proposes a novel method of reducing these memory movement overheads on hybrid memory systems. Many data objects are only written to early in their life cycle (i.e. shortly after allocation) and are effectively read-only after these initial writes. If this read-only and read-mostly data is duplicated across memory tiers, as opposed to moved, the application, in many cases, is able to avoid certain types of transfer overhead, such as page table entry (PTE) and MMU cache (TLB) synchronization stalls.This work describes the design and implementation of a kernel module, mtier that implements this optimization on memory that has been explicitly marked as read-only. Our evaluation demonstrates that this approach has the potential to substantially reduce data movement overheads, especially in applications that are multi-threaded and require frequent movement of data, allowing a flexible, software based approach for memory management in hybrid systems

Resurrecting Health Care Rate Regulation

Our excess health care spending in the United States is driven largely by our high health care prices. Our prices are so high because they are undisciplined by market forces, in a health care system rife with market failures, which include information asymmetries, noncompetitive levels of provider market concentration, moral hazard created by health insurance, multiple principal-agent relationships with misaligned incentives, and externalities from unwarranted price variation and discrimination. These health care market failures invite a regulatory solution. An array of legal and policy solutions are typically advanced to control our health care prices and spending, including: (1) market solutions that focus on transparency and consumerism to discipline health care prices; (2) antitrust enforcement to promote competition in the provider market; (3) consumer protections that protect individual uninsured or underinsured patients from unfair prices; (4) health care payment and delivery reforms that alter financial incentives of health care providers to reduce overutilization and improve efficiency; and (5) regulation of provider payment rates. The literature on these health care policy approaches reflects the fragmentation of the U.S. health care system, typically considering each approach in isolation, and it is difficult to make sense of an a la carte menu of approaches. This Article sets forth an analytic framework to simultaneously and comprehensively evaluate all the policy solutions to discipline health care prices by measuring each solution for its ability to address the health care market failures. Applying this policy-against-market-failure analysis leads to the following conclusion: only one solution—rate regulation—is capable of addressing the widespread and growing provider monopoly problem. More politically popular market approaches such as price transparency and payment and delivery reforms can correct the market failures from information asymmetries and principal-agent problems, but because they do not address the market power of providers, they will be ineffective to control health care prices and spending without accompanying rate regulation. It is time to resurrect rate regulation and place it squarely in the center of any policy strategy to control health care prices and spending

Lamron 2, 1974-04-04

Student newspaper includes campus, local and national news stories and photographs. For additional information about this collection see: http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/studentnewspapers

The Cost of High Prices: Embedding an Ethic of Expense into the Standard of Care

In the midst of rapid and radical change of America’s health care system, the country’s crown jewel public health insurance program, Medicare, faces an intensifying cost crisis due to a past of uncontrolled prices and a future of booming enrollment. A cost challenge garnering particular media attention is pharmaceutical drug pricing for Medicare Part B. Historically, congressional action has hamstrung Medicare’s ability to limit costs, and as a result, the program is increasingly forced to pass on drug costs—through copays and coinsurance—to its elderly beneficiaries. Public outrage has followed recent stories of pharmaceutical companies seeking to increase their prices, and policymakers have called for increased regulation. Nevertheless, there may be better solutions to Medicare’s pharmaceutical drug cost crisis. Recognition of “financial toxicity”—the effect of a pharmaceutical drug’s price on the mortality of the patient undergoing treatment—provides a potential new foothold for health care regulation. Like other side effects, if the price of a pharmaceutical drug negatively impacts rates of survival, then the cost of the drug could be an important component of clinical decision making and, presumably, the standard of care. Linking the cost of a drug to its clinical efficacy could dramatically impact which drugs providers choose, giving Medicare a new tool in its efforts to become a better gatekeeper of the public fisc without relying on bureaucratic hard power or legal enforcement. Using the burgeoning field of new governance, this Article focuses on how law and policy could shift to reflect the new understanding of financial toxicity. Arguing that the phenomenon finally provides a connection between cost and quality, this Article examines the instantiation of cost within the ethic of care. This route may provide an opening for a limitation on the ever-increasing price of pharmaceutical drugs and provide a powerful, yet unarticulated, legal signal that drugs that cost too much negatively impact the quality of care that American patients receive

Mergers of the Utah Cooperative Association in Post-War Utah, 1940-1970

Agricultural historians have long grappled with the causes leading to the dissolution of the farming community and their disassociation with their lands. Cooperatives were key to maintaining this relationship. The cooperative economic model sustained farmers to shape, negotiate and create a place for themselves in the 20th century agrarian landscape. Long time agricultural leaders like W.B. Robins worked to bolster cooperative ideologies and prevent integration into large scale American agribusiness between 1940 and 1970. This plan B paper examines a series of failed mergers that Robins had intended to thwart the decline of the Utah Cooperative Association (UCA). W.B. Robins’s career as General Manager of the UCA provides a lens to examine why the cooperative mergers failed and their context to the larger decline of the Utah cooperative movement. Examining why the mergers failed sets the foundation for answering the following questions. First, what economic conditions existed that made the mergers necessary? Second, what political ideologies were exposed between competing capitalist and socialist farm organizations. Lastly, what part did religious influence of Mormon ideologies play to threaten the continuity of cooperatives and Utah agriculture as a whole? In answering these questions, this paper makes two important contributions. It updates and explains the local history of farmer cooperatives in Utah after 1940, and builds on the work of historians Hal S. Barron and Keilor Stevens, by exploring the era when Utah agriculturalists resisted and accommodated market changes. To uncover the merger history of the UCA and its manager W.B. Robins I marry archival and secondary sources together to illustrates the history of farmer co-operatives throughout Utah and the movement’s longstanding connection with Utah State University

Community \u3ci\u3eAcequias\u3c/i\u3e in Colorado\u27s Rio Culebra Watershed: A Customary Commons in the Domain of Prior Appropriation

This article presents an account of the landscape and water institutions of the acequia communities of Colorado\u27s Rio Culebra watershed. The physical and social landscape of the Culebra watershed, a product of water institutions introduced by Hispano settlers in the years immediately following the Mexican War, and the persistence of those institutions after the introduction of the system of prior appropriation, offers an instance of a successful engagement of community water institutions in the creation of a sustainable and resource-rich watershed landscape. The ultimate goals of this article are threefold. First, the article describes the acequialandscape and its social, cultural, and legal norms, to reveal the necessity of a multicultural perspective on water rights and water use in one community in the American West. Second, we explore the lessons that the history and waterways of Hispano irrigation communities offer to policymakers seeking to adapt water law and water institutions to support community well being and the flourishing of the natural environment. Third, this paper explores the ecological principles on display in the Culebra acequia communities, and the requirements for maintaining acequia institutional arrangements so as to promote the survival of a landscape that is collectively managed for optimum watershed functionality