The challenges of aid dependency and economic reform: Africa and the Pacific

Abstract Jim Adams delivered the 2013 Harold Mitchell Development Policy Lecture on November 14, 2013. The Harold Mitchell Development Policy Lecture Series, of which this is the second, has been created to provide a new forum at which the most pressing development issues can be addressed by the best minds and most influential practitioners of our time. The 2012 Harold Mitchell Development Policy Lecture was delivered by Emilia Pires and is available as Devpolicy Discussion Paper 26. Jim Adams retired in 2012 after 37 years at the World Bank. His last assignment was as the Vice President for East Asia and the Pacific from 2007 – 2012, where he worked on and travelled extensively in the Pacific island region. He spent almost half of his career working on Africa, leading the Bank’s program as the Regional Director in Kenya in the late 1980s and as Country Director in Tanzania and Uganda from 1995-2002. From 2002 to 2007 he served as the head of operational policy in the Bank, overseeing a program directed at making the Bank more responsive to its clients’ needs. In his lecture Jim focuses on how effective economic reform emerged in Africa and related institutional and capacity issues. Drawing on this and his Pacific experience, he puts forward a number of proposals that could be taken up by governments and aid donors in the Pacific to accelerate economic reform and support the emergence of improved government institutions and policy making capacity. &nbsp

M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

Chem# - Semantically Enriched Linked Open Chemical Data

The problem: Vast quantities of chemical data (e.g. crystal structures, NMR spectra, experimental reports) are generated every day. The majority of this data is never published, and the data that is published is fragmented,trapped in legacy formats and difficult to discover. The solution: Semantically Enriched Linked Open Chemical Data: browsable, searchable, discoverable and interpretable by humans and machines alike, using standardized extensible data formats (Chemical Markup Language) and technologies (HTTP, RDF).Funded by JISC

Planetary Science Strategy for Technology Investment

This presentation was part of the session : Current OutlookSixth International Planetary Probe WorkshopSignificant investment has been made in years past on advancing the state of the art of technology to meet the demands of future NASA missions and initiatives. Recently however, NASA's investment pool has dwindled forcing a targeted approach to technology investment. This talk will discuss the changing face of technology investment strategies to assure a solid future for Planetary Science for both competed and directed missions

CREME96 Update/Replacement Efforts

This talk concerns the plans to update the CREME96 model that is currently available on the WWW. The talk states the reasons for updating C REME. It describes the updates that are planned, including the single event prediction paradigm, the method of radiation transport through the spacecraft to the electronic component of interest and the planned updates to models for the space radiation environment. It also revi ews user suggestions received do date for the update

User Acceptance of Mobile Payments: A Theoretical Model for Mobile Payments

Mobile payment refers to the use of mobile devices to conduct payment transactions. Users can use mobile devices for remote and proximity payments; moreover, they can purchase digital contents and physical goods and services. It offers an alternative payment method for consumers. However, there are relative low adoption rates in this payment method. This research aims to identify and explore key factors that affect the decision of whether to use mobile payments. Two well-established theories, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT), are applied to investigate user acceptance of mobile payments. Survey data from mobile payments users will be used to test the proposed hypothesis and the model

Report from JEM-EUSO in the US

This slide presentation reviews the current status of interest in NASA for the Japanese Experiment Module-Extreme Universe Space Observatory (JEM-EUSO). It reviews the decadal survey performed by the National Research Council (NRC), the Technology Innovation Program, and plans for proposals to fund the experiment

Trusted CI Experiences in Cybersecurity and Service to Open Science

This article describes experiences and lessons learned from the Trusted CI project, funded by the US National Science Foundation to serve the community as the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. Trusted CI is an effort to address cybersecurity for the open science community through a single organization that provides leadership, training, consulting, and knowledge to that community. The article describes the experiences and lessons learned of Trusted CI regarding both cybersecurity for open science and managing the process of providing centralized services to a broad and diverse community.Comment: 8 pages, PEARC '19: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, July 28-August 1, 2019, Chicago, IL, US

Life on the Fringe: Muskoxen in the Alaskan Arctic

The Arctic is experiencing some of the most dramatic temperature changes on the planet. Species at the edge of their range often confront conditions that differ from those in the center–to the extent that the persistence of peripheral populations might be more challenged if bioclimatic factors rule. An indisputable Arctic-adapted species are muskoxen (Ovibos moschatus) which occur at their historic southwestern terminus in Arctic Alaska. We instigated a multi-year project to assess sources of variation in demography, attendant life-histories, and vital rates by contrasting populations on National Park Service and adjacent lands at Bering Land Bridge and Cape Krusenstern. A major challenge of Arctic work is expense; in lieu of handling large numbers of animals, we present a simple non-invasive method to predict body mass in young and sub-adults. We used photogrammetry to document head sizes at known distances and angles on more than 300 wild muskoxen from four age cohorts( 1 to 3 yrs, and older). With head size parameters calibrated on captive individuals, 85 percent of the variance in body mass was explained for animals < 4 yrs of age. Accuracy diminished at > 65 meters and as animals reached puberty, the latter because nutrients allocated for skeletal growth are re-directed to meet reproductive demands. We believe that our ability to associate changes in mass/yr with abiotic and biological factors and survival will enhance opportunities to test hypotheses about causes and correlates of variation in population persistence