Digital resilience in higher education

Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution’s ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada’s Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing

Lessons Learned from the Pioneers 10/11 for a Mission to Test the Pioneer Anomaly

Analysis of the radio-metric tracking data from the Pioneer 10/11 spacecraft at distances between 20--70 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun has consistently indicated the presence of an anomalous, small, constant Doppler frequency drift. The drift is a blue-shift, uniformly changing with rate a_t = (2.92 +/- 0.44) x 10^(-18) s/s^2. It can also be interpreted as a constant acceleration of a_P = (8.74 +/- 1.33) x 10^(-8) cm/s^2 directed towards the Sun. Although it is suspected that there is a systematic origin to the effect, none has been found. As a result, the nature of this anomaly has become of growing interest. Here we discuss the details of our recent investigation focusing on the effects both external to and internal to the spacecraft, as well as those due to modeling and computational techniques. We review some of the mechanisms proposed to explain the anomaly and show their inability to account for the observed behavior of the anomaly. We also present lessons learned from this investigation for a potential deep-space experiment that will reveal the origin of the discovered anomaly and also will characterize its properties with an accuracy of at least two orders of magnitude below the anomaly's size. A number of critical requirements and design considerations for such a mission are outlined and addressed.Comment: 11 pages, invited talk given at ``35th COSPAR Scientific Assebly,'' July 18-24, 2004, Paris, Franc

Loop Equations and bootstrap methods in the lattice

Pure gauge theories can be formulated in terms of Wilson Loops correlators by means of the loop equation. In the large-N limit this equation closes in the expectation value of single loops. In particular, using the lattice as a regulator, it becomes a well defined equation for a discrete set of loops. In this paper we study different numerical approaches to solving this equation. Previous ideas gave good results in the strong coupling region. Here we propose an alternative method based on the observation that certain matrices $\hat{\rho}$ of Wilson loop expectation values are positive definite. They also have unit trace (\hat{\rho}\succeq 0, \mbox{tr} \hat{\rho}=1), in fact they can be defined as density matrices in the space of open loops after tracing over color indices and can be used to define an entropy associated with the loss of information due to such trace S_{WL}=-\mbox{tr}[ \hat{\rho}\ln \hat{\rho}]. The condition that such matrices are positive definite allows us to study the weak coupling region which is relevant for the continuum limit. In the exactly solvable case of two dimensions this approach gives very good results by considering just a few loops. In four dimensions it gives good results in the weak coupling region and therefore is complementary to the strong coupling expansion. We compare the results with standard Monte Carlo simulations.Comment: LaTeX, 46 pages, 17 figures. v2: References adde

Agricultural Trade Reform Under the Doha Agenda: Some Key Issues

A successful agreement on agriculture is essential for an overall agreement under the WTOÂ’s Doha trade negotiations. Reaching agreement has been difficult, and as of August 2007, much still remains to be done if a successful agreement is to be reached. We consider three of the most controversial areas of the agricultural negotiations: the relative importance of domestic support, market access and export subsidies; three market access issues of sensitive-product exceptions sought for all countries, the additional special product exceptions sought for developing countries, the proposed special safeguard mechanism; and the domestic support issue. We show that decisions made on reform in these areas will have a critical influence on whether the negotiations achieve their objectives of promoting trade reform and reducing poverty.Trade policy, WTO, Doha Development Agenda, multilateral negotiations, computable general equilibrium modeling

Export restrictions and price insulation during commodity price booms

For individual countries, variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices. If this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market, its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility. This study shows the nature of the resulting collective action problem, with the policy being ineffective on average in stabilizing domestic prices while increasing the volatility of the income transfers from terms-of-trade changes. A simple approach to assessing the contribution of insulation to the price increases is developed and used with new estimates of agricultural distortions to assess its contribution to the price spikes in 1972-74 and 2006-08 for rice and wheat. The analysis suggests that 45 percent of the increase in rice prices in 2006-08, and 30 percent of the increase in wheat prices, was due to insulating behavior. One sign of progress since 1972-74 was a substantial reduction in the extent of price-insulating behavior by the industrial countries. This provides little stabilizing benefit in the rice market because countries not classifying themselves at the World Trade Organization as developing account for only 3 percent of world rice consumption. But it does offer some benefit for the wheat market where non-developing countries account for 27 percent of consumption.Markets and Market Access,Emerging Markets,Access to Markets,E-Business,Commodities

Agricultural trade reform and the Doha development agenda

Anderson and Martin examine the extent to which various regions, and the world as a whole, could gain from multilateral trade reform over the next decade. They use the World Bank's linkage model of the global economy to examine the impact first of current trade barriers and agricultural subsidies, and then of possible outcomes from the World Trade Organization's Doha round. The results suggest moving to free global merchandise trade would boost real incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (and in Cairns Group countries) proportionately more than in other developing countries or high-income countries. Real returns to farm land and unskilled labor and real net farm incomes would rise substantially in those developing country regions, thereby alleviating poverty. A Doha partial liberalization could take the world some way toward those desirable outcomes, but more so the more agricultural subsidies are disciplined and applied tariffs are cut.TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Assessment,World Trade Organization

Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda

This paper examines the extent to which various regions, and the world as a whole, could gain from multilateral trade reform over the next decade. The World BankÂ’s LINKAGE model of the global economy is employed to examine the impact first of current trade barriers and agricultural subsidies, and then of possible outcomes from the WTOÂ’s Doha round. The results suggest moving to free global merchandise trade would boost real incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (and in Cairns Group countries) proportionately more than in other developing countries or high-income countries. Real returns to farm land and unskilled labor, and real net farm incomes, would rise substantially in those developing country regions, thereby helping to reduce poverty. A Doha partial liberalization could take the world some way towards those desirable outcomes, but more so the more agricultural subsidies are disciplined and applied tariffs are cut, and the more not just high-income but also developing countries choose to engage in the process of reform.Trade policy, WTO, Doha Development Agenda, multilateral negotiations, computable general equilibrium modeling.

Seeking a solution of the Pioneer Anomaly

The 1972 and 1973 launched Pioneer 10 and 11 were the first missions to explore the outer solar system. They achieved stunning breakthroughs in deep-space exploration. But around 1980 an unmodeled force of \sim 8 \times 10^{-8} cm/s^2, directed approximately towards the Sun, appeared in the tracking data. It later was unambiguously verified as not being an artifact. The origin remains unknown (although radiant heat remains a likely cause). Increasing effort has gone into understanding this anomaly. We review the situation and describe programs to resolve the issue.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, invited talk at the Fourth Meeting on CPT and Lorentz Symmetry, 8-11 Aug. 2007, held at Indiana Universit