U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report 2003: Outcome Goal 2.1 – Increase Compliance with Worker Protection Laws

he document provides an assessment of Outcome Goal 2.1 of the 2003 U.S. Department of Labor Annual Report, which aims to increase compliance with worker protection laws through programs and agencies seeking to enforce minimum standards for wages and working conditions

ICT Governance: Towards Federalized Structure and Solution

The ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Governance means actively identifying the service needs of the Government and her customers and to focus on planning and delivering these services to meet availability, performance, and security requirements. It also aims at managing service level agreements to meet agreed-upon security, quality and cost targets. Successful operation of an ICT unit of the government would require it to be fully integrated with the complete lifecycle of Government’s processes, improving service quality and Government agility. The paper identifies appropriate international standards for ICT Governance, and ICT Management around which solutions for ICT governance should be built.ict; governance; management; service delivery

Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses different IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed

Fiscal responsibility laws for subnational discipline : the Latin American experience

This paper discusses fiscal responsibility laws in Latin America, with special attention to their provisions for fiscal discipline by subnational governments. It discusses why and when such laws might be useful-to help resolve the coordination problem in getting diverse governments to avoid overusing the common national credit market and to help individual governments make a time-consistent commitment for fiscal prudence. It examines the cases of Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina, as well as the case of Mexico where other types of laws and regulations aim to achieve the same objectives of solidifying incentives for fiscal discipline at all levels of government. Fiscal responsibility laws are found to be useful in some cases, although the experience is not long enough to be certain, but they are clearly not necessary in every case, nor always sufficient to assure fiscal stability.Urban Economics,Banks&Banking Reform,Public&Municipal Finance,Public Sector Economics&Finance,National Governance,National Governance,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Urban Economics,Public&Municipal Finance

SLA-Oriented Resource Provisioning for Cloud Computing: Challenges, Architecture, and Solutions

Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented, enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management, computational risk management, and autonomic resource management into a market-based resource management system to target the rapidly changing enterprise requirements of Cloud computing. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of SLA-oriented resource management. The proposed architecture supports integration of marketbased provisioning policies and virtualisation technologies for flexible allocation of resources to applications. The performance results obtained from our working prototype system shows the feasibility and effectiveness of SLA-based resource provisioning in Clouds.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Conference Keynote Paper: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2011, IEEE Press, USA), Hong Kong, China, December 12-14, 201

On the Fast Track to Ending the AIDS Epidemic: Report of the Secretary-General

The global commitment to ending the AIDS epidemic, as set forth in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, represents an unparalleled opportunity to end one of the most devastating modern-day health challenges and also to build on the momentum of the AIDS response in order to accelerate results across the sustainable development agenda.Even when confronted with the vast scale of the global AIDS epidemic, the response to HIV has never lost sight of the value and experience of each individual affected, their hopes and frustrations and their right to health and well-being. I have had the privilege of spending time with people engaged in the AIDS response, including people living with HIV. I have learned about their difficulties in getting access to the antiretroviral medicines that keep them alive and about the fear and stigma they live with each day. Many have also expressed their unwavering belief that we can end this epidemic. Their stories of courage and hope embody the resolve of all those involved in the AIDS response. Today, we can appreciate the remarkable progress we have made together, but also how far we have to go to ensure that no one is left behind.The AIDS response has delivered more than results. It has delivered the aspiration and the practical foundation, including the medical advancements, interventions and partnerships, to end the epidemic by 2030. All that truly remains, the missing link that will determine whether fast-track targets will be met or missed, is the political commitment to implement our proven tools adequately and equitably