Determinants of Income Inequality and its Effects on Economic Growth: Evidence from African Countries

Income distribution, Income inequality, Economic growth

Aid Effort and its Determinants

determinants of aid efforts, generosity, ODA, DAC, donors, G7

Congestion offsets: Transforming cities by letting buses compete

Cities around the world have been unable to keep up with demand for road space, and as a result suffer from congestion. This paper argues that the consequence of this congestion has been not just poorly performing roads, but a structurally inefficient urban transport solution, due to the impact of congestion on bus services. As a way of controlling congestion, road pricing has been rejected by most cities because it is difficult to sell to the public and difficult to deploy. An examination of both the strengths and weaknesses of road pricing is used as a basis from which to develop an alternative method of congestion control, namely congestion offsets. This approach treats roads as a commons, and does not argue for the creation of a market for road space, as road pricing does. It is argued that congestion offsets would allow congestion to be controlled in a simple and fair manner, thereby enabling buses to emerge as a real competitor to cars in urban areas. The historical absence of congestion control in cities has allowed massive distortions to build up; cities have become awash with both cars and bitumen. Congestion offsets would allow these distortions to be slowly unwound, thus helping to transform cities more into how, it is argued, they should have always been

Who Sees Corruption? The Bases of Mass Perceptions of Political Corruption in Latin America

The capacity of citizens to see political corruption where it exists and to link such perceptions to evaluations of public officials constitutes an important test of political accountability. Although past research has established that perceived corruption influences political judgments, much less is known regarding the critical prefatory matter of who sees corruption. This article develops a multifaceted theoretical framework regarding the possible bases of perceived corruption. Experiential factors - personal experience and vicarious experience with bribery - mark the starting point for our account. We then incorporate psychological dispositions that may colour judgments about corruption and that may strengthen or weaken the links between experiences and perceptions. Expectations derived from this framework are tested in a series of multi-level models, with data from over 30,000 survey respondents from 17 nations and 84 regions in the Americas

Terminal Sterilization of Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) Allografts: A Systematic Review of Outcomes

Introduction. Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are common and reconstruction can be completed with either autograft or allograft tissue. However, there is concern about an increased failure rate with allograft tissue. The purpose of this study was to systematically review the available evidence to determine the effect of irradiation and level of dose on the failure rates of allograft in ACL reconstruction. Methods. A literature search was performed using PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science from January 2000 to September 2013. Inclusion criteria consisted of the following: (1) primary, unilateral, single-bundle allograft ACL procedure, (2) studies with data documenting graft type and terminal sterilization technique, (3) subjective assessments of outcome, and (4) objective assessments of outcome. Studies without reported subjective and objective outcomes and those pertaining to revision ACL reconstruction were excluded. Failures were defined and compared between irradiated and non-irradiated grafts, as well as between grafts irradiated with 1.2 - 1.8 Mrad and those with 2.0 - 2.5 Mrad. Results. Of the 242 articles identified via initial search, 17 studies met the final inclusion criteria. A total of 1,090 patients were evaluated in this study, all having undergone unilateral primary ACL reconstruction with allograft tissue with 155 failures. The failure rate between non-irradiated (98/687, 14.7%) and irradiated (57/408, 14.0%) was not statistically significant (p = 0.86). Grafts in the high-dose irradiation group (27/135, 20.0%) had a statistically significant higher (p < 0.001) rate of failure than those in the low-dose irradiation group (30/273, 10.6%). Conclusion. The irradiation of an allograft increases the risk of failure after an ACL reconstruction but the use of lower doses of radiation decreases that risk

Net Returns for Grain Sorghum and Corn under Alternative Irrigation Systems in Western Kansas

This study evaluates seven irrigation systems for use in production of grain sorghum and corn. These systems are medium pressure center-pivot (MPCP), low pressure center-pivot (LPCP), low drift nozzle center-pivot (LDN) , low energy precision application center-pivot (LEPA), furrow flood (FF) , surge flood (SF), and subsurface drip (SD). After-tax net present value estimates from investing in and using each system over a 10-year period to produce grain sorghum and corn are compared. The surge flood system, has the highest net returns under typical conditions for irrigation of both grain sorghum and corn. The furrow flood system generates the next highest net returns for both crops, followed by the subsurface drip system. The medium pressure center-pivot system is the least profitable for both crops. Of the center-pivot systems, the low pressure system has the highest net return, but is followed very closely by the low drift nozzle system. The results of the sensitivity analysis indicate that the net return estimates and ranking of the subsurface drip system are very sensitive to the yield response to irrigation. Lower than average crop prices also have a substantial impact on the ranking of this system. The original investment cost is also an important determinant of its net return.Crop Production/Industries,

Automated and Participative Decision Support in Computer-aided Credibility Assessment

History has shown that inaccurate assessments of credibility can result in tremendous costs to businesses and society. This study uses Signal Detection Theory (SDT) to improve the accuracy of credibility assessments through combining automated and participatory decision support. Participatory decision support is also proposed to encourage acceptance of the decision aid’s recommendation. A new hybrid decision aid is designed to perform automated linguistic analysis and elicit and analyze perceptual cues (i.e., indirect cues) from an observer. The results suggest that decision aids that collect both linguistic and indirect cues perform better than decision aids that collect only one type of cue. Users of systems that collect linguistic cues experience improved credibility assessment accuracy; yet, users of systems that collect both types of cues or only indirect cues do not experience higher accuracy. However, collecting indirect cues increases the user’s acceptance of decision-aid recommendations

Southern ocean dynamics and biogeochemistry in a changing climate: introduction and overview

The Southern Ocean has a unique place in our climate system. It is a region of extremes, where the world's strongest ocean currents, the strongest wind regime, the most extensive sea ice cover, and the largest ice sheets interact (for example, see the recent review by Rintoul and Naveira Garabato, 2013). In addition, it houses a very productive ecosystem that sequesters a significant fraction of the anthropogenic CO2 in the ocean (Sabine et al., 2004; Takahashi et al., 2012). Studying the Southern Ocean has proven to be a significant challenge, for several reasons. Among those are the logistical difficulties of making observations in these remote and vast parts of the world, due also to the harsh weather conditions and extensive sea ice cover in winter months. But arguably a more important factor is the immense complexity of the Southern Ocean climate system, where so many tightly coupled components interact on so many temporal and spatial scales. A case in point is the surprising expansion of winter sea ice in the Weddell Sea in recent years, amidst significant warming trends (Barthélemy et al., 2012; Mathiot et al., 2010; Stössel et al., 2011).S.M. Downes was supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (Grant CE110001028). W. Weijer was supported by the Regional and Global Climate Modeling program of the US Department of Energy Office of Science

Receptivity Studies on a Swept-Wing Model

A series of flight tests was performed using a swept-wing model mounted on a Cessna O-2 aircraft. The crossflow waves on the airfoil were excited by pneumatic spanwise-periodic distributed roughness elements (DREs). The objective of the experiment was to determine the roughness receptivity i.e. the relationship between roughness height and the amplitude of the unstable crossflow wave. The local skin-friction variation was measured using an array of calibrated and temperature-compensated hotfilm sensors. The amplitudes of the disturbance shear stress were compared to the amplitudes of the DREs. It was found that there is a relationship between the shear stress and DRE amplitude that needs to be studied more before any definitely conclusions can be made. It was also found that the sensitivity of the crossflow to DREs is highly dependent on the freestream turbulence levels