Beyond Buildings:Social Bargaining and Effective Access to Public Services

Physical access to public services frequently does not guarantee people’s needs will be met — what we term effective access. Such discrepancies result in part from social bargaining: the extent to which citizens can leverage connections with street-level service providers. Survey data from 34 African countries shows citizens with greater social bargaining capacity enjoy greater effective access, in contrast to citizens who pay bribes. Data from 70,000 households in Tanzania further demonstrates that parents with greater social bargaining capacity have more opportunities to interact with school officials — and that their children are more likely to achieve relevant learning outcomes

Comparison of Rubik’s Cube Solving Methods Made for Humans

This study analyzed and compared four different methods of solving a Rubik’s Cube. Those four methods being the method on Rubik’s official website, the CFOP method, the Roux method and the ZZ method. The factors that were considered were the number of moves each method requires for solving a Rubik’s Cube, how many algorithms they require as well as how concrete or intuitive they are. Our conclusion is that the CFOP, Roux, and ZZ method are fairly equivalent when it comes to move span, but CFOP has the lowest average number of moves used to solve a Rubik’s Cube. CFOP has more concrete algorithms and cases while both Roux and ZZ are more intuitive, ZZ uses fewer types of moves than Roux however. The solution on Rubik’s official website does not compare, at its best it uses as many moves as the others do at their worst. It is however concrete and uses few algorithms for each part

Corruption fights back:Localizing transparency and EITI in the Nigerian “penkelemes”

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This study explores how the global transparency norm is localized in the Nigerian extractive industry. Transparency is theorised as a process which can be analysed in terms of rules, interactions, power games and context. Nigeria is conceptualized as a ‘penkelemes’ – a concept which denotes how traditions, norms and practices are intertwined with a system of corruption, kinship and patronage networks. Three main insights emerge. First, the complex motives and ability of local actors to balance demands for transparency from the international community with participation in the corrupt local political system determines which international norms they adopt. Second, the struggle for power over the transparency process determines the local understanding of transparency. Third, the link between transparency and corruption is paradoxical. Corruption conditions the enactment of transparency but even this corrupted transparency is useful in fighting corruption. Thus, transparency becomes part of the problem as well as part of the solution