Poverty and development : the Human Development Report and the World Development Report, 1990

After the"adjustment decade"of the 1980s, attention in the 1990s seems to be turning once again to longer-term issues of development - particularly of poverty alleviation. Just as the 1980s were heralded by a series of reports on adjustment, so the 1990s have seen two major reports on poverty: World Development Report 1990: Poverty, by the World Bank, and Human Development Report 1990 by the UNDP. The author presents an overview of conceptual issues and the best policies for alleviating poverty, based on a review of these two reports. He poses basic questions on the definition and measurement of poverty, looks at what has actually happened to poverty in developing countries in the last three decades, and reviews policies to help alleviate poverty. The consensus represented in these two reports, he concludes, offers hope that the polarization of policy analysts into"camps"is a thing of the past - and that policies for the 1990s can be built on fundamental agreement about the basics: (a) that poverty alleviation requires growth, but growth is not enough; (b) that growth must be broad-based and labor-intensive, and must go hand in hand with targeted basic social expenditures; and (c) that the international community must do its share, by supporting these efforts in the 1990s through greatly increased capital flows to development countries.Poverty Assessment,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Governance Indicators

Topic-dependent sentiment analysis of financial blogs

While most work in sentiment analysis in the financial domain has focused on the use of content from traditional finance news, in this work we concentrate on more subjective sources of information, blogs. We aim to automatically determine the sentiment of financial bloggers towards companies and their stocks. To do this we develop a corpus of financial blogs, annotated with polarity of sentiment with respect to a number of companies. We conduct an analysis of the annotated corpus, from which we show there is a significant level of topic shift within this collection, and also illustrate the difficulty that human annotators have when annotating certain sentiment categories. To deal with the problem of topic shift within blog articles, we propose text extraction techniques to create topic-specific sub-documents, which we use to train a sentiment classifier. We show that such approaches provide a substantial improvement over full documentclassification and that word-based approaches perform better than sentence-based or paragraph-based approaches

CASTOR status and evolution

In January 1999, CERN began to develop CASTOR ("CERN Advanced STORage manager"). This Hierarchical Storage Manager targetted at HEP applications has been in full production at CERN since May 2001. It now contains more than two Petabyte of data in roughly 9 million files. In 2002, 350 Terabytes of data were stored for COMPASS at 45 MB/s and a Data Challenge was run for ALICE in preparation for the LHC startup in 2007 and sustained a data transfer to tape of 300 MB/s for one week (180 TB). The major functionality improvements were the support for files larger than 2 GB (in collaboration with IN2P3) and the development of Grid interfaces to CASTOR: GridFTP and SRM ("Storage Resource Manager"). An ongoing effort is taking place to copy the existing data from obsolete media like 9940 A to better cost effective offerings. CASTOR has also been deployed at several HEP sites with little effort. In 2003, we plan to continue working on Grid interfaces and to improve performance not only for Central Data Recording but also for Data Analysis applications where thousands of processes possibly access the same hot data. This could imply the selection of another filesystem or the use of replication (hardware or software).Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 2 pages, PDF. PSN TUDT00

Understanding the quit smoking journeys of Ngāti Raukawa women : barriers and supports : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

The purpose of this thesis was to record the journeys of 6 Ngāti Raukawa women who had tried to quit smoking and to identify the barriers and supports which the women experienced during quitting. A key focus of this thesis was to examine the barriers and supports for quitting which occurred within the marae, hapū and iwi environments of these women. A qualitative research approach using kaupapa Māori and Māori-centred research methods were used. The objective was achieved by undertaking in-depth qualitative interviews which identified issues around smoking and quitting within the participants daily lives, namely at work, home and in other social situations and compared these with other studies. This study extends the knowledge base about Māori women and smoking by contributing and extending the information available to influence policies and strategies at all levels, but more specifically at hapū, marae, iwi and Māori. The prominence of addressing hapū, marae and iwi issues is a unique aspect of this thesis. The participants experiences were reflective of the literature, however factors which impacted on smoking and quitting within Ngāti Raukawa hapū, marae and iwi settings were exacerbated given that in these instances cultural influences combined with other environmental factors to bring about high smoking rates. At the same time this study also showed that there is the potential to reduce smoking rates within these same settings although this will require a concerted effort from hapū, marae and iwi. What is required is a change in policy and behaviour across the whole community

PLAN-IT: Scheduling assistant for solar system exploration

A frame-based expert scheduling system shell, PLAN-IT, is developed for spacecraft scheduling in the Request Integration Phase, using the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby (CRAF) mission as a development base. Basic, structured, and expert scheduling techniques are reviewed. Data elements such as activity representation and resource conflict representation are discussed. Resource constraints include minimum and maximum separation times between activities, percentage of time pointed at specific targets, and separation time between targeted intervals of a given activity. The different scheduling technique categories and the rationale for their selection are also considered

Human Capital Policy

This paper considers alternative policies for promoting skill formation that are targetted to different stages of the life cycle. We demonstrate the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills that are formed early in the life cycle in accounting for racial, ethnic and family background gaps in schooling and other dimensions of socioeconomic success. Most of the gaps in college attendance and delay are determined by early family factors. Children from better families and with high ability earn higher returns to schooling. We find only a limited role for tuition policy or family income supplements in eliminating schooling and college attendance gaps. At most 8% of American youth are credit constrained in the traditional usage of that term. The evidence points to a high return to early interventions and a low return to remedial or compensatory interventions later in the life cycle. Skill and ability beget future skill and ability. At current levels of funding, traditional policies like tuition subsidies, improvements in school quality, job training and tax rebates are unlikely to be effective in closing gaps.

A critical evaluation of training needs for child protection in UK sport

Child protection is a relatively new topic in sport about which there was no professional education until the mid-1990s. This paper presents the findings from a study of delegates attending twelve, regional, one-day National Coaching Foundation courses for policy makers in sport during 1997 and 1998 (n= 235). The course was designed to give delegates a basic awareness of the different forms of child abuse and protection and was intended to help them develop appropriate policies and procedures for child protection. Results point to a serious training gap around child protection in sport: whereas sports personnel, at both junior and senior levels, are committed to improving child protection policy and practice they appear to lack the confidence, knowledge or organisational systems for doing this effectively

Ownership versus Environment: Why are Public Sector Firms Inefficient?

In this paper we disentangle the sources of public sector inefficiency using 1982-1995 panel data on manufacturing firms in Indonesia. We consider two leading hypotheses: (1) public sector enterprises are inefficient due to monitoring problems and (2) public sector enterprises are inefficient because of the environment in which they operate, as measured by the soft budget constraint. The two models are nested in a production function framework and the empirical results provide support for the second hypothesis. Public sector enterprises are inefficient because of their access to soft loans; public sector ownership has no independent impact on productivity growth. The finding that ownership per se does not matter, but environment does, holds when we control for fixed effects and when we allow for the endogeneity of government loans. Interestingly, private sector firms with access to government loans did not perform more poorly than other private sector enterprises. Another dimension of the environment, i.e. import penetration, also matters; public sector enterprises that have been shielded from import competition are inferior performers.