744 research outputs found
Designing Redress: A Study About Grievances Against Public Bodies
How grievances against public bodies are resolved is important not only for the individuals concerned and the decision-makers complained about but also to the whole system of government. People need to have confidence that when things go wrong, they will be put right. There is a general public interest in that being done in accordance with constitutional principles and in ways that are effective and efficient. Over many years, a great variety of different ?mechanisms? for dealing with grievances have been created, ranging from internal complaints processes through to the work of external bodies (including ombudsmen, tribunals and courts). This project has focused on how mechanisms are designed. The study explores how different mechanisms can be thought of as relating to each other. It also looks at the various reasons why mechanisms have to be designed. Drawing on interviews with people involved in the design process and analysis of public information, a map of where the activity of designing redress has been created. Evaluating the ?administrative justice landscape?, two particular deficiencies emerge: there is no strong political or official leadership in relation to how mechanisms ought to be designed and the system is fragmented, with many different people, in various organisations all contributing to design activities. Might a toolkit of guiding principles for designing redress be one way of achieving a better design process and outcomes? A number of principles are proposed in this report, and the authors hope to engage stakeholders in a debate about how this might best be taken forward
The Value and Effects of Judicial Review: The Nature of Claims, their Outcomes and Consequences
The use of informal resolution approaches by ombudsmen in the UK and Ireland: A mapping study
This report presents findings of an empirical research project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, designed to produce a descriptive mapping study on the use of informal resolution by ombudsmen. Its focus is on the use of informal resolution approaches as alternatives to investigation and determination/decision.
The use of informal and early resolution techniques by ombudsmen and other complaint handlers is an under-studied area but one which is gaining importance in light of several developments in the field of administrative justice generally, and the European Union ADR Directive, to be implemented by 2015. This directive looks set to overhaul complaint handling in the private sector by requiring the government to ensure that an ADR scheme is available in all contractual disputes between a consumer and a business (although neither consumer nor business will be obliged to use the service).
This report sets out the analysis of the responses received from 48 ombudsman and complaint-handling organisations in UK and Ireland that are (or were at the relevant time) members of the Ombudsman Association
Size reconstructibility of graphs
The deck of a graph is given by the multiset of (unlabelled) subgraphs
. The subgraphs are referred to as the cards of .
Brown and Fenner recently showed that, for , the number of edges of a
graph can be computed from any deck missing 2 cards. We show that, for
sufficiently large , the number of edges can be computed from any deck
missing at most cards.Comment: 15 page
Logarithmic corrections in the free energy of monomer-dimer model on plane lattices with free boundaries
Using exact computations we study the classical hard-core monomer-dimer
models on m x n plane lattice strips with free boundaries. For an arbitrary
number v of monomers (or vacancies), we found a logarithmic correction term in
the finite-size correction of the free energy. The coefficient of the
logarithmic correction term depends on the number of monomers present (v) and
the parity of the width n of the lattice strip: the coefficient equals to v
when n is odd, and v/2 when n is even. The results are generalizations of the
previous results for a single monomer in an otherwise fully packed lattice of
dimers.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Experimenting with Cigarettes and Physical Activity Among Mexican Origin Youth: A Cross Sectional Analysis of the Interdependent Associations Among Sensation Seeking, Acculturation, and Gender
Sensation seeking tendencies tend to manifest during adolescence and are associated with both health-compromising behaviors and health-enhancing behaviors. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship between sensation seeking and physical activity, a health-enhancing behavior, and between sensation seeking and experimenting with cigarettes, a health compromising-behavior, among a cohort of Mexican origin adolescents residing in the United States with different levels of acculturation. Methods: In 2009, 1,154 Mexican origin youth (50.5% girls, mean age 14.3 years (SD = 1.04)) provided data on smoking behavior, physical activity, linguistic acculturation, and sensation seeking. We conducted Pearson's chi(2) tests to examine the associations between categorical demographic characteristics (i.e. gender, age, country of birth and parental educational attainment) and both cigarette experimentation and physical activity and Student's t-tests to examine mean differences on the continuous variables (i.e. sensation seeking subscale) by the behaviors. We examined mean differences in the demographic characteristics, acculturation, and both behaviors for each of the sensation seeking subscales using analysis of variance (ANOVA). To examine relationships between the sensation seeking subscales, gender, and both behaviors, at different levels of acculturation we completed unconditional logistic regression analyses stratified by level of acculturation. Results: Overall, 23.3% had experimented with cigarettes and 29.0% reported being physically active for at least 60 minutes/day on at least 5 days/week. Experimenting with cigarettes and being physically active were more prevalent among boys than girls. Among girls, higher levels of sensation seeking tendencies were associated with higher levels of acculturation and experimentation with cigarettes, but not with physical activity. Among boys, higher levels of sensation seeking tendencies were associated with higher levels of acculturation, experimenting with cigarettes and being physically active. Conclusions: Our results suggest that interventions designed to prevent smoking among Mexican origin youth may need to address social aspects associated with acculturation, paying close attention to gendered manifestations of sensation seeking.National Cancer Institute CA105203, CA126988Caroline W. Law Fund for Cancer PreventionDan Duncan Family Institute for Cancer Prevention and Risk AssessmentCenter for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research in Underserved Population
Inclusive One Jet Production With Multiple Interactions in the Regge Limit of pQCD
DIS on a two nucleon system in the regge limit is considered. In this
framework a review is given of a pQCD approach for the computation of the
corrections to the inclusive one jet production cross section at finite number
of colors and discuss the general results.Comment: 4 pages, latex, aicproc format, Contribution to the proceedings of
"Diffraction 2008", 9-14 Sep. 2008, La Londe-les-Maures, Franc
Adjacency Matrices of Configuration Graphs
In 1960, Hoffman and Singleton \cite{HS60} solved a celebrated equation for
square matrices of order , which can be written as where , , and are the identity matrix, the
all one matrix, and a --matrix with all row and column sums equal to
, respectively. If is an incidence matrix of some configuration
of type , then the left-hand side is an adjacency matrix of the non--collinearity
graph of . In certain situations, is also an
incidence matrix of some configuration, namely the neighbourhood
geometry of introduced by Lef\`evre-Percsy, Percsy, and Leemans
\cite{LPPL}.
The matrix operator can be reiterated and we pose the problem of
solving the generalised Hoffman--Singleton equation . In
particular, we classify all --matrices with all row and column sums
equal to , for , which are solutions of this equation. As
a by--product, we obtain characterisations for incidence matrices of the
configuration in Kantor's list \cite{Kantor} and the
configuration #1971 in Betten and Betten's list \cite{BB99}
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