Motivating and Steering With Comparative Data

Several managerial strategies — particularly goal setting combined with performance feedback — can be very effective in improving an organization’s performance at outputfocused tasks. But can such strategies be adapted to achieve societal outcomes that are less operational and definable, more ambiguous and ambitious, perhaps more political? Can they be adapted to help steer social integration by, for example, enhancing social justice and strengthening citizenship? Recognizing how different kinds of targets, different kinds of feedback, and different kinds of reward structures affect team and individual motivation can help public officials design not only better strategies for directly producing output results, but also better strategies for indirectly fostering broader outcome purposes of, for example, social integration

Cutbacks vs. PerformanceStat: What's the Conflict? Financial Deficits and Attention

Reductions in any organization’s financial budget can cause reductions in the organization’s performance (its outputs and outcomes). It is not obvious, however, that the primary cause will be direct: Less money to spend means less can be done. Instead, the bigger impact may come through the opportunity costs created by the financial cuts on the time budget of the members of the leadership team. For the attention that they must pay to any budget reductions automatically reduces the attention that they can devote performance improvements — and to everything else. It isn’t the financial cuts themselves. Rather, it is that the deficit in the financial budget creates a deficit in the leadership team’s time budget. The funding deficit in the financial budget imposes an attention deficit in the time budget

Cops, Teachers, and the Art of the Impossible: Explaining the lack of diffusion of impossible job innovations

In their now classic Impossible Jobs in Public Management, Hargrove and Glidewell (1990) argue that public agencies with limited legitimacy, high conflict, low professional authority, and weak agency myths have essentially impossible jobs. Leaders of such agencies can do little more than cope, which is also a theme of James Q. Wilson (1989), among others. Yet in the years since publication of Impossible Jobs, one such position, that of police commissioner has proven possible. Over a sustained 17-year period, the New York City Police Department has achieved dramatic reductions in crime with relatively few political repercussions, as described by Kelling and Sousa (2001). A second impossible job discussed by Wilson and also by Frederick Hess (1999), city school superintendent, has also proven possible, with Houston and Edmonton having considerable academic success educating disadvantaged children. In addition, Atlanta and Pittsburgh enjoyed significant success in elementary schooling, though the gains were short-lived for reasons we will describe. More recently, under Michelle Rhee, Washington D.C. schools have made the most dramatic gains among city school systems. These successes in urban crime control and public schooling have not been widely copied. Accordingly, we argue that the real conundrum of impossible jobs is why agency leaders fail to copy successful innovations. Building on the work of Teodoro (2009), we will discuss how the relative illegitimacy of clients and inflexibility of personnel systems combine with the professional norms, job mobility and progressive ambition of agency leaders to limit the diffusion of innovations in law enforcement and schooling. We will conclude with ideas about how to overcome these barriers

The uncertain relationship between transparency and accountability

The concepts of transparency and accountability are closely linked: transparency is supposed to generate accountability. This article questions this widely held assumption. Transparency mobilises the power of shame, yet the shameless may not be vulnerable to public exposure. Truth often fails to lead to justice. After exploring different definitions and dimensions of the two ideas, the more relevant question turns out tobe: what kinds of transparency lead to what kinds of accountability, and under what conditions? The article concludes by proposing that the concept can be unpacked in terms of two distinct variants. Transparency can be either ‘clear’or‘opaque’, while accountability can be either‘soft’or‘hard’

Software for the frontiers of quantum chemistry:An overview of developments in the Q-Chem 5 package

This article summarizes technical advances contained in the fifth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program package, covering developments since 2015. A comprehensive library of exchange–correlation functionals, along with a suite of correlated many-body methods, continues to be a hallmark of the Q-Chem software. The many-body methods include novel variants of both coupled-cluster and configuration-interaction approaches along with methods based on the algebraic diagrammatic construction and variational reduced density-matrix methods. Methods highlighted in Q-Chem 5 include a suite of tools for modeling core-level spectroscopy, methods for describing metastable resonances, methods for computing vibronic spectra, the nuclear–electronic orbital method, and several different energy decomposition analysis techniques. High-performance capabilities including multithreaded parallelism and support for calculations on graphics processing units are described. Q-Chem boasts a community of well over 100 active academic developers, and the continuing evolution of the software is supported by an “open teamware” model and an increasingly modular design

Expanded encyclopaedias of DNA elements in the human and mouse genomes

All data are available on the ENCODE data portal: www.encodeproject. org. All code is available on GitHub from the links provided in the methods section. Code related to the Registry of cCREs can be found at https:// github.com/weng-lab/ENCODE-cCREs. Code related to SCREEN can be found at https://github.com/weng-lab/SCREEN.© The Author(s) 2020. The human and mouse genomes contain instructions that specify RNAs and proteins and govern the timing, magnitude, and cellular context of their production. To better delineate these elements, phase III of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Project has expanded analysis of the cell and tissue repertoires of RNA transcription, chromatin structure and modification, DNA methylation, chromatin looping, and occupancy by transcription factors and RNA-binding proteins. Here we summarize these efforts, which have produced 5,992 new experimental datasets, including systematic determinations across mouse fetal development. All data are available through the ENCODE data portal (https://www.encodeproject.org), including phase II ENCODE1 and Roadmap Epigenomics2 data. We have developed a registry of 926,535 human and 339,815 mouse candidate cis-regulatory elements, covering 7.9 and 3.4% of their respective genomes, by integrating selected datatypes associated with gene regulation, and constructed a web-based server (SCREEN; http://screen.encodeproject.org) to provide flexible, user-defined access to this resource. Collectively, the ENCODE data and registry provide an expansive resource for the scientific community to build a better understanding of the organization and function of the human and mouse genomes.This work was supported by grants from the NIH under U01HG007019, U01HG007033, U01HG007036, U01HG007037, U41HG006992, U41HG006993, U41HG006994, U41HG006995, U41HG006996, U41HG006997, U41HG006998, U41HG006999, U41HG007000, U41HG007001, U41HG007002, U41HG007003, U54HG006991, U54HG006997, U54HG006998, U54HG007004, U54HG007005, U54HG007010 and UM1HG009442

La evaluación de "ET CHOICES"

Este artículo es un excelente ejemplo de análisis de una política. Concretamente se analiza la evaluación de un programa del Departamento de Bienestar Público del Estado de Massachusetts. El artículo puede interesar tanto a los gestores o investigadores de políticas sociales similares como a los que tengan interés en la discusión de algunos problemas que suele presentar la evaluación de políticas. El argumento central es que no se puede evaluar en este caso con un experimento social, como insistentemente pedían algunos responsables politicos, dadas las características del programa. En último término, el autor acepta que no es posible determinar de forma definitiva en qué medida el programa ayuda a sus beneficiarios a salir de su situación de pobreza. Sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, entiende que los estudios realizados tanto por la misma administración como por institutos independientes, aportan suficiente evidencia empírica para, desde la perspectiva de gestor público -que es distinta a la del científico-evaluador-, determinar el valor del programa