MICSIM : Concept, Developments and Applications of a PC-Microsimulation Model for Research and Teaching

It is the growing societal interest about the individual and its behaviour in our and 'modern' societies which is asking for microanalyses about the individual situation. In order to allow these microanalyses on a quantitative and empirically based level microsimulation models were developed and increasingly used for economic and social policy impact analyses. Though microsimulation is known and applied (mainly by experts), an easy to use and powerful PC microsimulation model is hard to find. The overall aim of this study and of MICSIM - A PC Microsimulation Model is to describe and offer such a user-friendly and powerful general microsimulation model for (almost) any PC, to support the impact microanalyses both in applied research and teaching. Above all, MICSIM is a general microdata handler for a wide range of typical microanalysis requirements. This paper presents the concept, developments and applications of MICSIM. After some brief remarks on microsimulation characteristics in general, the concept and substantive domains of MICSIM: the simulation, the adjustment and aging, and the evaluation of microdata, are described by its mode of operation in principle. The realisations and developments of MICSIM then are portrayed by the different versions of the computer program. Some MICSIM applications and experiences in research and teaching are following with concluding remarks.Economic and Social Policy Analyses, Microsimulation (dynamic and static), Simulation, Adjustment and Evaluation of Microdata, PC Computer Program for Microanalyses in General

A Flawed Compass: A Human Rights Analysis of the Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety

On April 20th, 2007, Canada\u27s Minister of Public Safety announced the appointment of a Panel charged with the task of reviewing the operations of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC). . The mandate of the Review Panel was to provide the Minister of Public Safety with advice on a broad range of complex topics that have been problematic for CSC over many years. The Review Panel presented its final report on October 31, 2007. The report entitled “A Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety”, contains 109 recommendations organized around strengthening five key areas: 1) Offender Accountability; 2) Eliminating Drugs from Prison; 3) Employability / Employment; 4. Physical Infrastructure; and 5. Eliminating Statutory Release; Moving to Earned Parole. The Government officially responded to the Report in Budget 2008, investing $478.8 million over five years to initiate the implementation of a new vision and set the foundation to strengthen the federal correctional system and enable CSC to respond comprehensively to the Panel’s recommendations. Our purpose in writing this report is to subject the Roadmap’s recommendations and CSC\u27s transformation agenda to the kind of scrutiny that such far-reaching changes in the Canadian federal correctional system demands and the Canadian public deserves. Our report is intended to present a counterpoint to the Roadmap, one marked by a review of correctional and legal history, a consideration of the relevant reports of royal commissions, task forces and academic research and an analysis of the human rights standards and jurisprudence applicable to correc-tions, all of which is entirely absent from the Roadmap. On the basis of what we consider a stronger historical and legal foundation, one anchored in an unwavering commitment to human rights in prison, we will discuss the merits, limitations and the true costs for both public safety and human dignity of implementation of the Panel’s recommendations for correctional pro-grams and services. We will show that the Panel\u27s analysis reveals such fundamental misunderstandings and misinterpretation of the Canadian correctional context that both its observations and recommendations are indelibly flawed. The authors, Michael Jackson and Graham Stewart, consider the following issues in their critique of the Review Panel\u27s Roadmap: a) Faulty Premises; Human Rights and Corrections; the Panel’s proposed Amendments to the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (CCRA); the Nature of Prisoners’ Rights; Conditions of Confinement; Segregation\u27 Gangs; Drugs in Prison; Earned Parole; Employment and Employability; Education; Aboriginal Offenders; Physical Infrastructure and Regional Complexes; and finally, Rhetoric and Reality. The authors conclude the Roadmap was a dangerous exercise in creating major “transformative” policy virtually overnight by a largely unqualified group under a heavy cloud of political expediency. Surely these factors alone warrant that the report be set aside as a failed experiment in public policy. That it was accepted in its entirety without any apparent internal critical review or public consultation as the future for CSC is alarming. The Roadmap seeks to move the Correctional Service of Canada away from an unequivocal commitment to respect and protect the human rights of prisoners as the centerpiece of its operations. It is a flawed moral and legal compass. It points in the wrong direction; a direction that, tragically and inevitably, will bring yet more chapters in an already overburdened history of abuse and mismanagement of correctional authority through disregard of human dignity

Fourth Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 90)

The proceedings of the SOAR workshop are presented. The technical areas included are as follows: Automation and Robotics; Environmental Interactions; Human Factors; Intelligent Systems; and Life Sciences. NASA and Air Force programmatic overviews and panel sessions were also held in each technical area

Management of passive countersurveillance in the R & D environment

Existing management procedures that are pertinent to research and development activities within the Government are presented. The main focus of this effort is on the Mobility Equipment Research and Development Center’s Countersurveillance and Topographic Division, and highlights the relevant plans, documents, programs, and reporting systems utilized by the Army and the Department of Defense. An in-depth examination is made on the need for Countersurveillance in the Army. The Army’s existing Countersurveillance research and development missions and programs are reviewed. A detailed investigation and analysis is performed on current management concepts and techniques that are utilized in research and development endeavors. Those administrative procedures that are directly applicable to the Countersurveillance and Topographic Division and its environment are specifically discussed. The main activities covered in this managerial evaluation are: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling --Abstract, page ii

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India