Standardisation of the description of patellofemoral motion and comparison between different techniques.

Accepted versio

Local Government: How does it fit into the post 2015 MDG agenda?

A complex process of global consultation is currently under way to discuss the shape of the MDGs Post 2015. The aim of this paper is to address the question of where Local Government (LG) should fit into this debate, as a modest contribution to the ongoing consultation process. The paper is structured as follows: the first section describes in more detail the global consultation process on the Post 2015 agenda; the second describes how Local Government relates to the current MDGs; the third section explores how some of the consultation documents see the role of LG before considering what the role of LG could be in the new agenda. The final section speculates on more radical roles for LG, in terms of what we should be asking for, and suggests new roles for LG in partnerships with other civil society organizations in poverty reduction

Symbolic politics, legalism and implementation: the case of street vendors in India

This paper is concerned with attempts to manage street vendors in India. Firstly it traces the evolution of attempts at management, through guidelines introduced in 2002, to the 2014 Act which is legally enforceable. The act has not yet been implemented but the State of Madhya Pradesh has implemented its own act which is almost identical. This has been successfully implemented at an administrative level but on the ground nothing has changed. It is suggested that this reflects the importance of symbolic politics and problems of implementation.

New Aid Modalities and Local Government: Are they supporting or hindering processes of decentralization?

This commentary reviews contemporary changes in aid modalities and their impact on processes of decentralization. The main change in aid delivery and disbursement considered is towards a greater emphasis on general budget support (GBS) and sector wide approaches (SWAPs). This includes considering the broad questions of firstly, the impact of emphasising GBS on local government and governance systems, and secondly, the extent to which processes of decentralization can fit in with this new approach

The Art of Mediating Civil Lawsuits

Bearing in mind the definition of the word art, the Author proceeds with a mixture of trepidation and bravado in committing to print his description of the unanalyzable. What follows is the Author\u27s sharing of the methods with which he approaches and conducts his role as a mediator of civil lawsuits, crediting most, if not all, he has learned to his trainer, Steve Brutsche (1947-1991), and to the hundreds of lawyers who have appeared as advocates in mediations he has conducted over the past nineteen years. The discussion will generally follow the chronological flow of a typical day of mediation and will direct particular attention to the close of the session

Cortical Learning of Recognition Categories: A Resolution of the Exemplar Vs. Prototype Debate

Do humans and animals learn exemplars or prototypes when they categorize objects and events in the world? How are different degrees of abstraction realized through learning by neurons in inferotemporal and prefrontal cortex? How do top-down expectations influence the course of learning? Thirty related human cognitive experiments (the 5-4 category structure) have been used to test competing views in the prototype-exemplar debate. In these experiments, during the test phase, subjects unlearn in a characteristic way items that they had learned to categorize perfectly in the training phase. Many cognitive models do not describe how an individual learns or forgets such categories through time. Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) neural models provide such a description, and also clarify both psychological and neurobiological data. Matching of bottom-up signals with learned top-down expectations plays a key role in ART model learning. Here, an ART model is used to learn incrementally in response to 5-4 category structure stimuli. Simulation results agree with experimental data, achieving perfect categorization in training and a good match to the pattern of errors exhibited by human subjects in the testing phase. These results show how the model learns both prototypes and certain exemplars in the training phase. ART prototypes are, however, unlike the ones posited in the traditional prototype-exemplar debate. Rather, they are critical patterns of features to which a subject learns to pay attention based on past predictive success and the order in which exemplars are experienced. Perturbations of old memories by newly arriving test items generate a performance curve that closely matches the performance pattern of human subjects. The model also clarifies exemplar-based accounts of data concerning amnesia.Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency SyNaPSE program (Hewlett-Packard Company, DARPA HR0011-09-3-0001; HRL Laboratories LLC #801881-BS under HR0011-09-C-0011); Science of Learning Centers program of the National Science Foundation (NSF SBE-0354378

Incidence and mechanism of the pivot shift. An in vitro study.

Accepted versio