Practical Innovations in Accountability: Comparative Constituency Feedback

This is a tool for obtaining feedback on a program's perception by various stakeholders (it can be applied at different points along the development value chain, between funders and grantees, and between organizations and their primary constituents). It uses a questionnaire to collect perceptions from organizations' constituents on key aspects of the organizations' performance. The questionnaire is administered simultaneously to a comparable constituency group for a cohort of similar organizations

Creating the Missing Feedback Loop

This article describes how agricultural development agencies can implement feedback systems to hear systematically from the intended beneficiaries of their work. Feedback systems relate to debates on reforming accountability, participatory monitoring and evaluation and social accountability. Based on reasoning and the best available evidence, the article argues that in most projects, quantified summaries of smallholder farmers’ views can be collected. The data can provide real?time performance indicators which create incentives for staff to focus on the priorities of intended beneficiaries. If acted on, this can improve impact and sustainability. Feedback processes can also be inherently empowering. Leading examples are discussed as are three major challenges: ethical issues, practical issues and management incentives. The article concludes that feedback systems can create an organisational link between participatory processes and management systems. As such, they can make a substantial contribution to improving performance

I Want You, Dearie

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/4717/thumbnail.jp

The State of Health Insurance in California: Findings From the 2009 California Health Interview Survey

Analyzes sources of coverage and uninsurance rates by county, effects of declines in income and employer-sponsored insurance, disparities, access to and affordability of care, role of public insurance, and projected impact of federal healthcare reform

On the ecological approach to Information and control for roboticists

The ongoing and increasingly important trend in robotics to conceive designs that decentralize control is paralleled by currently active research paradigms in the study of perception and action. James Gibson’s ecological approach is one of these paradigms. Gibson’s approach emerged in part as a reaction to representationalist and computationalist approaches, which devote the bulk of their resources to the study of internal processes. The ecological approach instead focuses on constraints and ambient energy patterns in the animal‐environment coalition. The present article reviews how the emphasis on the environment by ecological psychologists has given rise to the concepts of direct perception, higher order information, active information pick up, informationbased control laws, prospective control, and direct learning. Examples are included to illustrate these concepts and to show how they can be applied to the construction of robots. Action is described as emergent and self‐organized. It is argued that knowledge about perception, action, and learning as it occurs in living organisms may facilitate the construction of robots, more obviously so if the aim is to construct (to some extent) biologically plausible robots.This material is based upon work supported by grant FFI2009‐13416‐C02‐02 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation

Juries in U.S. Patent Cases: A Comparative Portrait of the Boundaries of Democracy

“It is clear that juries will necessarily differ in ‘competence,’ but it is at best incongruous to suggest that a society that sends its citizens routinely into space could never produce a jury competent to determine a case some judge might consider too ‘complex’ for people with ‘common experience’ to decide.