Digital Democracy A summary report for practitioners

Thanks to digital technologies, today we can bank, read the news, study for a degree, and chat with friends across the world - all without leaving the comfort of our homes. But one area that seems to have remained impervious to these benefits is our model of democratic governance, which has remained largely unchanged since it was invented in the 20th century.There has been a failure to change, despite the fact that disillusionment with existing political institutions is widespread, trust in our elected representatives is chronically lacking and election turnout is low.1, 2 At the local level, councils are facing the challenges of increasing pressure on services with tougher demands for accountability from localresidents. Membership of political parties is significantly lower than a few decades ago. The rise of alternative social movements, both online and offline, is resulting in a move away from traditional forms of political participation. Recently, a small number of national parliaments, local government bodies and political parties have seen the potential for technology to help address these issues. Has the time for digital democracy finally come

Singular Continuous Spectrum for the Laplacian on Certain Sparse Trees

We present examples of rooted tree graphs for which the Laplacian has singular continuous spectral measures. For some of these examples we further establish fractional Hausdorff dimensions. The singular continuous components, in these models, have an interesting multiplicity structure. The results are obtained via a decomposition of the Laplacian into a direct sum of Jacobi matrices

Digital Democracy : The Tools Transforming Political Engagement

This paper shares lessons from Nesta's research into some of the pioneering innovations in digital democracy which are taking place across Europe and beyond.Key findings:Digital democracy is a broad concept and not easy to define. The paper provides a granular approach to help encompass its various activities and methods (our 'typology of digital democracy').Many initiatives exist simply as an app, or web page, driven by what the technology can do, rather than by what the need is.Lessons from global case studies describe how digital tools are being used to engage communities in more meaningful political participation, and how they are improving the quality and legitimacy of decision-making.Digital democracy is still young. Projects must embed better methods for evaluation of their goals if the field is to grow

Exploring the complexities of understanding vulnerability and adult safeguarding within Christian Faith organisations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report the findings from a study exploring the understanding of vulnerability and adult safeguarding within Christian faith based settings. The article concludes with recommendations for practitioners involved in safeguarding adults in faith based Christian settings. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers a survey (n=3182) into understanding of vulnerability and adult safeguarding for individuals who attend Church regularly or work in a Christian organisation Findings - This paper is the first to be undertaken with a UK sample and highlights a range of factors informing adult safeguarding practice within Christian organisations. This includes:- complexity linked to understanding vulnerability and its role in safeguarding activity; lack of clarity about what to do with a safeguarding adult concern, and the need for safeguarding training pertinent to the particular needs of faith based settings. Research limitations/implications - As there is currently a dearth of research in this area this paper makes a valuable contribution to the developing knowledge base around safeguarding and vulnerability within faith based organisations. Practical implications - Professionals need to develop increased understanding of the complexities involved in safeguarding activity, and specifically how those working in the wider context of supporting vulnerable adults make sense of safeguarding processes and procedures. Social implications – It is important that all organisations, including faith based settings, working with adults have an understanding of their roles and responsibilities with respect to safeguarding those at risk of harm. Originality - This paper is the first UK study to consider safeguarding adults at risk of harm in Christian faith context

Additive Multi-Index Gaussian process modeling, with application to multi-physics surrogate modeling of the quark-gluon plasma

The Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) is a unique phase of nuclear matter, theorized to have filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. A critical challenge in studying the QGP is that, to reconcile experimental observables with theoretical parameters, one requires many simulation runs of a complex physics model over a high-dimensional parameter space. Each run is computationally very expensive, requiring thousands of CPU hours, thus limiting physicists to only several hundred runs. Given limited training data for high-dimensional prediction, existing surrogate models often yield poor predictions with high predictive uncertainties, leading to imprecise scientific findings. To address this, we propose a new Additive Multi-Index Gaussian process (AdMIn-GP) model, which leverages a flexible additive structure on low-dimensional embeddings of the parameter space. This is guided by prior scientific knowledge that the QGP is dominated by multiple distinct physical phenomena (i.e., multiphysics), each involving a small number of latent parameters. The AdMIn-GP models for such embedded structures within a flexible Bayesian nonparametric framework, which facilitates efficient model fitting via a carefully constructed variational inference approach with inducing points. We show the effectiveness of the AdMIn-GP via a suite of numerical experiments and our QGP application, where we demonstrate considerably improved surrogate modeling performance over existing models

A graphical multi-fidelity Gaussian process model, with application to emulation of heavy-ion collisions

With advances in scientific computing and mathematical modeling, complex scientific phenomena such as galaxy formations and rocket propulsion can now be reliably simulated. Such simulations can however be very time-intensive, requiring millions of CPU hours to perform. One solution is multi-fidelity emulation, which uses data of different fidelities to train an efficient predictive model which emulates the expensive simulator. For complex scientific problems and with careful elicitation from scientists, such multi-fidelity data may often be linked by a directed acyclic graph (DAG) representing its scientific model dependencies. We thus propose a new Graphical Multi-fidelity Gaussian Process (GMGP) model, which embeds this DAG structure (capturing scientific dependencies) within a Gaussian process framework. We show that the GMGP has desirable modeling traits via two Markov properties, and admits a scalable algorithm for recursive computation of the posterior mean and variance along at each depth level of the DAG. We also present a novel experimental design methodology over the DAG given an experimental budget, and propose a nonlinear extension of the GMGP via deep Gaussian processes. The advantages of the GMGP are then demonstrated via a suite of numerical experiments and an application to emulation of heavy-ion collisions, which can be used to study the conditions of matter in the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. The proposed model has broader uses in data fusion applications with graphical structure, which we further discuss

STRATEGIC ASPECTS OF QUALITY: A THEORETICAL ANALYSIS

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72352/1/j.1937-5956.2001.tb00090.x.pd

A gyerekszegénység csökkentése továbbra is kulcskérdés

A tanulmány a „Legyen jobb a gyermekeknek” Nemzeti Stratégia kistérségi alkalmazási kísérletéről szól. Bemutatja, hol tart ma a 2006 nyarán a szükségletek, a helyi erőforrások és a fogadókészség számbavételével elindított Szécsényi Gyerekesély Program, melyek a kitűzött céljai, valamint összefoglalja az eddigi történéseket, eredményeket és nehézségeket. A 2007 májusában országgyűlési határozatként elfogadott Nemzeti Stratégia egyes területein vannak előrelépések, komplex országos szintű megvalósítása azonban – főképpen a források szűkösségének következtében – nem problémamentes. Ezért is fontos, hogy egy hátrányos helyzetű kistérségben, a gyakorlatban szerzett tapasztalatok alapján lehessen továbbgondolni a gyermekszegénység csökkentésének feladatait. Az írás röviden beszámol a Nemzeti Stratégia hátteréről, aktuális lehetőségeiről és korlátairól, majd a helyi alkalmazási kísérlet elveit, fejlesztési területeit, tágabb vonatkozásban egy hátrányos helyzetű kistérség – az ország számos más területére jellemző – kedvezőtlen helyzetét tárgyalja

PDBTM: Protein Data Bank of transmembrane proteins after 8 years

The PDBTM database (available at http://pdbtm .enzim.hu), the first comprehensive and up-to-date transmembrane protein selection of the Protein Data Bank, was launched in 2004. The database was created and has been continuously updated by the TMDET algorithm that is able to distinguish between transmembrane and non-transmembrane proteins using their 3D atomic coordinates only. The TMDET algorithm can locate the spatial positions of transmembrane proteins in lipid bilayer as well. During the last 8 years not only the size of the PDBTM database has been steadily growing from ~400 to 1700 entries but also new structural elements have been identified, in addition to the well-known a-helical bundle and b-barrel structures. Numerous ‘exotic’ transmembrane protein structures have been solved since the first release, which has made it necessary to define these new structural elements, such as membrane loops or interfacial helices in the database. This article reports the new features of the PDBTM database that have been added since its first release, and our current efforts to keep the database up-to-date and easy to use so that it may continue to serve as a fundamental resource for the scientific community

Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) Interventions: An Evidence-Based Practice Project

This Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) project examined the following question: What are the characteristics and effectiveness of trauma-informed care (TIC) approaches on health and participation (well-being, quality of life) outcomes for populations who have experienced trauma