Datacamp for library people

The question of how libraries can become curators and places for the public to use open data was up for discussion at recent conferences in British Columbia. On March 15, participants with a background in libraries, education, and information technology met for a half day un-conference to extend the conversation and target open data literacy among library people

Comments on the September 29, 2014 FSB Consultative Document, ‘Cross-Border Recognition of Resolution Action’

This CIGI Paper No. 51 was released on December 3, 2014 by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) as a response to the Financial Stability Board’s (FSB) Consultative Document, “Cross-Border Recognition of Resolution Action.” Principally authored by CIGI Senior Fellow Steven L. Schwarcz (who works with the think tank’s International Law Research Program), the Paper comments on the policy measures proposed by the FSB, an international body that monitors and makes recommendations about the global financial system, to address the cross-border legal uncertainties of troubled systemically important financial firms. In that context, the Paper explains why a statutory approach is more effective than a contractual approach at removing obstacles in cross-border resolutions of those firms, and thus a better method to achieve financial stability. The Paper also recommends that the FSB establish a working group on statutory mechanisms for the cross-border resolution of financial firms

Incomplete block designs with blocks of two plots

Various workers have shown that considerable economies in experimentation can be achieved by the use of identical twins, halves of leaves and halves of plants. The basic statistical principle enabling these economies is that of incomplete block designs. These make possible the comparison of treatments within pairs of identical twins, pairs of half-leaves or whatever grouping is used, so that experimental error arises only because of differences between individuals within the pairs. Extensive use of these natural groupings is possible only when the possible incomplete block designs have been enumerated. The purpose of this bulletin is to present what is essentially a complete array of incomplete block designs with blocks of two plots. The balanced incomplete block design requires (n-1) replications, where n is the number of treatments. Any design using a lesser number of replications must necessarily be unbalanced. Designs are presented which require (n-2), (n-3), ... , three replications, whenever such is possible, for any number of treatments between 6 and 12. These designs have been extracted from a pool of designs formed by (a) the class of partially balanced incomplete block designs with two classes of associates and (b) the class of circulant designs. The design chosen to cover each situation is the design which has the highest efficiency factor among all the designs in the pool applicable to the given situation. The tabulation of material necessary for the analysis of the respective designs is made to facilitate computations. The computations are exemplified by the inclusion of a worked example covering both the intrablock and interblock analysis

Governing International Securities Markets: IOSCO and the Politics of International Securities Market Standards

What explains the creation and strengthening of international securities market standards through the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO)? This thesis addresses this question by analyzing the creation and strengthening of four of IOSCO’s international securities market standards between 1991 and 2010 relating to the following issues: the governance of cross-border financial crime, the objectives and principles of domestic securities market regulation, the regulation of credit rating agencies, and the regulation of hedge funds. This thesis argues that the creation and strengthening of these standards is derived from the role and influence of three different political actors: the transgovernmental network of securities market regulators, domestic legislatures, and states. The role and influence of these different political actors differs across issue areas and across time. To account for the differentiated sources of international securities market standards, this thesis proposes a Principal-Agent (PA) analytical framework. Domestic legislatures (the principal) delegate to securities regulators (the agent) the authority to oversee and regulate domestic securities markets by granting regulators specific forms of statutory authority. Exercising discretion within this act of delegation, domestic securities regulators act together in a transgovernmental network to create and strengthen international securities market standards. They are prompted to act by threats to the integrity and stability of developed financial centers from under-regulated or ineffectively regulated foreign financial centers, as well as by new policy preferences of domestic legislatures seeking to regulate previously unregulated financial market actors. Domestic legislatures also use multiple agents to ensure that agents act consistent with their policy preferences: their concerns about the costs of under-regulated foreign jurisdictions can generate direct pressure from states on international financial regulatory institutions to strengthen the implementation of international financial standards. This thesis makes an empirical contribution to existing literature by analyzing previously understudied international securities market standards. This thesis also makes a theoretical contribution to both IPE literature and PA theory within International Organization (IO) literature. For IPE literature, this thesis establishes a theoretical framework that accounts for the differentiated role and influence of the transgovernmental network of securities market regulators, domestic legislatures, and states in the creation and strengthening of international securities market standards. For PA theory within IO literature, this thesis highlights the role of the principled professional interests of the transgovernmental network of securities market regulators in creating and strengthening international securities market standards

Why do Nurse Graduates Choose to Work in the Area of Mental Health?

The low numbers of nurses attracted to work in mental health is a concern particularly with the increased demand for mental health services. Strategies are required to increase recruitment to this less popular area of nursing to ensure that a high quality of care is provided for people suffering from mental illness. The World Health Organisation (2004) is aware that this area of health has been neglected and that it is time to promote mental health. This study aimed to examine the influences involved in nurses choosing to work in this area. A descriptive survey using a questionnaire was given to seven groups of new graduates enrolled in the New Graduate Mental Health Nursing programme through five educational institutes within New Zealand. At the time of writing there were no published studies around this topic in New Zealand. This study will attempt to inform nurses, the Nursing Council of New Zealand, tertiary institutions and the government of New Zealand that there is evidence that we need to develop and change practices to address the predicted workforce decline

Governing in a Polarized America: A Bipartisan Blueprint to Strengthen our Democracy

The Bipartisan Policy Center launched the Commission on Political Reform in 2013 to investigate the causes and consequences of America's partisan political divide and to advocate for specific reforms that will improve the political process and that will work in a polarized atmosphere.The commission met at public and private institutions across the country to hear from interested citizens, political leaders, and issue experts about the problems and potential solutions. It is clear that Americans are concerned about the lack of civil discourse and the increasing inability of the U.S. political system to grapple with the nation's biggest challenges. These shortcomings put the nation at risk of losing its standing in the world.This report, Governing in a Polarized America: A Bipartisan Blueprint to Strengthen our Democracy, is the culmination of the commission's public and private deliberations, butit is not the end of its work. Our recommendations provide a realistic path forward to strengthen U.S. democracy. The commission does not pretend to have discovered the cure to all that ails democracy. But, 29 Americans have come together as part of our commission to embrace a truly bipartisan reform agenda.The commission identifies reforms in three specific areas: the electoral process, the process by which Congress legislates and manages its own affairs, and the ability of Americans to plug into the nation's civic life through public service. We chose to focus on three broad areas of reform, because the polarization in the United States runs deeply through its institutions, affects the ways Americans elect political leaders and how the institutions of government operate, and even puts in danger Americans' deep-seated desire to serve their nation

Significance of soil organic phosphorus to plant growth

The first indication that soils contain organic phosphorus was obtained in 1844 by Mulder (20), in experiments wherein he could not obtain phosphorus-free preparations of certain soil organic matter fractions. Since the time of Mulder, a number of investigations have dealt specifically with the problem of soil organic phosphorus, and it is now generally recognized that a portion of the soil phosphorus occurs in organic forms. The distribution of organic phosphorus in different soil types and groups has been investigated in only a preliminary way, but it has become apparent that the quantities of organic phosphorus are correlated with the quantities of soil organic matter. In Iowa and other North Central states, there are extensive areas of soils that contain relatively large quantities of both substances

The development of virtual leaf surface models for interactive agrichemical spray applications

This project constructed virtual plant leaf surfaces from digitised data sets for use in droplet spray models. Digitisation techniques for obtaining data sets for cotton, chenopodium and wheat leaves are discussed and novel algorithms for the reconstruction of the leaves from these three plant species are developed. The reconstructed leaf surfaces are included into agricultural droplet spray models to investigate the effect of the nozzle and spray formulation combination on the proportion of spray retained by the plant. A numerical study of the post-impaction motion of large droplets that have formed on the leaf surface is also considered

Relations between Modern Mathematics and Poetry: Czesław Miłosz; Zbigniew Herbert; Ion Barbu/Dan Barbilian

This doctoral thesis is an examination of the relationship between poetry and mathematics, centred on three twentieth-century case studies: the Polish poets Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) and Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), and the Romanian mathematician and poet Dan Barbilian/Ion Barbu (1895-1961). Part One of the thesis is a review of current scholarly literature, divided into two chapters. The first chapter looks at the nature of mathematics, outlining its historical developments and describing some major mathematical concepts as they pertain to the later case studies. This entails a focus on non-Euclidean geometries, modern algebra, and the foundations of mathematics in Europe; the nature of mathematical truth and language; and the modern historical evolution of mathematical schools in Poland and Romania. The second chapter examines some existing attempts to bring together mathematics and poetry, drawing on literature and science as an academic field; the role of the imagination and invention in the languages of both poetics and mathematics; the interest in mathematics among certain Symbolist poets, notably Mallarmé; and the experimental work of the French groups of mathematicians and mathematician-poets, Bourbaki and Oulipo. The role of metaphor is examined in particular. Part Two of the thesis is the case studies. The first presents the ethical and moral stance of Czesław Miłosz, investigating his attitudes towards classical and later relativistic science, in the light of the Nazi occupation and the Marxist regimes in Poland, and how these are reflected in his poetry. The study of Zbigniew Herbert is structured around a wide selection of his poetic oeuvre, and identifying his treatment of evolving and increasingly more complex mathematical concepts. The third case study, on Dan Barbilian, who published his poetry under the name Ion Barbu, begins with an examination of the mathematical school at Göttingen in the 1920s, tracing the influence of Gauss, Riemann, Klein, Hilbert and Noether in Barbilian’s own mathematical work, particularly in the areas of metric spaces and axiomatic geometry. In the discussion, the critical analysis of the mathematician and linguist Solomon Marcus is examined. This study finishes with a close reading of seven of Barbu’s poems. The relationship of mathematics and poetry has rarely been studied as a coherent academic field, and the relevant scholarship is often disconnected. A feature of this thesis is that it brings together a wide range of scholarly literature and discussion. Although primarily in English, a considerable amount of the academic literature collated here is in French, Romanian, Polish and some German. The poems themselves are presented in the original Polish and Romanian with both published and working translations appended in the footnotes. In the case of the two Polish poets, one a Nobel laureate and the other a multiple prize-winning figure highly regarded in Poland, this thesis is unusual in its concentration on mathematics as a feature of the poetry which is otherwise much-admired for its politically-engaged and lyrical qualities. In the case of the Romanian, Dan Barbilian, he is widely known in Romania as a mathematician, and most particularly as the published poet Ion Barbu, yet his work is little studied outside that country, and indeed much of it is not yet translated into English. This thesis suggests at an array of both theoretical and specific starting points for examining the multi-stranded and intricate relationship between mathematics and poetry, pointing to a number of continuing avenues of further research