The Impact of Government Policies on Urban Employment in Small Economies

[Excerpt] Most of the policies intended to affect urban employment are not specifically employment policies nor are they specifically urban. Rather, the amount of urban employment, the composition of that employment, and the returns from it are determined by a whole host of policies. To review them all in a short paper is an impossible undertaking. The criterion by which I decided which policies to consider is policy-relevance, asking which set of policies is apt to have the largest impact on employment

Probabilistic Model Checking for Energy Analysis in Software Product Lines

In a software product line (SPL), a collection of software products is defined by their commonalities in terms of features rather than explicitly specifying all products one-by-one. Several verification techniques were adapted to establish temporal properties of SPLs. Symbolic and family-based model checking have been proven to be successful for tackling the combinatorial blow-up arising when reasoning about several feature combinations. However, most formal verification approaches for SPLs presented in the literature focus on the static SPLs, where the features of a product are fixed and cannot be changed during runtime. This is in contrast to dynamic SPLs, allowing to adapt feature combinations of a product dynamically after deployment. The main contribution of the paper is a compositional modeling framework for dynamic SPLs, which supports probabilistic and nondeterministic choices and allows for quantitative analysis. We specify the feature changes during runtime within an automata-based coordination component, enabling to reason over strategies how to trigger dynamic feature changes for optimizing various quantitative objectives, e.g., energy or monetary costs and reliability. For our framework there is a natural and conceptually simple translation into the input language of the prominent probabilistic model checker PRISM. This facilitates the application of PRISM's powerful symbolic engine to the operational behavior of dynamic SPLs and their family-based analysis against various quantitative queries. We demonstrate feasibility of our approach by a case study issuing an energy-aware bonding network device.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Fatal Gaps: How Missing Records in the Federal Background Check System Put Guns in the Hands of Killers

This report analyzes newly released FBI data showing millions of records identifying seriously mentally ill people and drug abusers are missing from the NICS database because of lax state reporting. The data also show that 52 of 61 federal agencies that are required to submit records have not done so. The 50-state analysis identifies which states are best and worst at reporting, and examines the strategies that have helped some states succeed

Taxation

This Briefing Note examines the evolution of the tax burden over the last 50 years. It then looks at the proposals in the parties' manifestos. * Net taxes and National Insurance contributions have risen from 34.8% of national income in 1996ֹ7 to 36.3% in 2004ְ5. According to Treasury projections, these will rise to 38.5% of national income in 2008ְ9. This would be the highest level since 1984ָ5. * Total government revenues have averaged 38.4% of national income under the two Labour governments, compared with 40.6% over the 18 years of Conservative government from 1979 to 1997. According to Treasury forecasts, revenues will equal 39.3% of national income in 2005ְ6, rising to 40.6% by 2009ֱ0. This would be the highest level since 1988ָ9. * Over Labourҳ two parliaments since 1997, current receipts have risen by 3.5% a year on average, in real terms, while national income rose by 2.8% on average, leaving national income minus tax to rise at 2.4% on average. * Of the total ò8.5 billion revenue increase seen since 1996ֹ7, ñ9.1 billion was due to discretionary changes to the tax system, with the remainder being due to the impact of the economy on overall revenues. The largest discretionary change occurred in the first Budget after the 2001 election (the Spring 2002 Budget), which increased taxes to yield an additional ù.9 billion by 2005ְ6. * Between 1997 and 2005, the UK saw one of the highest increases in revenues among OECD countries, although the UK remains a low-tax economy compared with EU countries

Jus Ad Bellum after 9/11: A State of the Art Report

An examination of the applicability of conventional and revisionist just war principles to the global war on terror

EbbRT: a customizable operating system for cloud applications

Efficient use of hardware requires operating system components be customized to the application workload. Our general purpose operating systems are ill-suited for this task. We present Genesis, a new operating system that enables per-application customizations for cloud applications. Genesis achieves this through a novel heterogeneous distributed structure, a partitioned object model, and an event-driven execution environment. This paper describes the design and prototype implementation of Genesis, and evaluates its ability to improve the performance of common cloud applications. The evaluation of the Genesis prototype demonstrates memcached, run within a VM, can outperform memcached run on an unvirtualized Linux. The prototype evaluation also demonstrates an 14% performance improvement of a V8 JavaScript engine benchmark, and a node.js webserver that achieves a 50% reduction in 99th percentile latency compared to it run on Linux

The international trading order at the crossroads

As economic theory shows and experience underlines, international trade and the specialization associated herewith is one important source of economic growth, employment creation and technological innovation in participating countries. In awareness of this potential for increasing economic prosperity throughout the world, the architects of the international trading system, which was to emerge from the ashes of World War II, envisaged a framework of rules leading to, and securing, open markets. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which came into being in 1948, laid down such trade rules, basically the principles of non-discrimination and multilateralism in world trade. The aim was not to establish free trade, without any government intervention. What was meant is liberal trade, in which governments may interfere, but using price measures which are transparent and do not rule out competition (i.e. non-prohibitive tariffs rather than quantitative restrictions or subsidies). Adherence by the member countries to the principles of multilateralism and non-discrimination was expected to give rise to the production of an international public good: stability and predictability of trade rules.