Resources, Capabilities, and Routines in Public Organization

States, state agencies, multilateral agencies, and other non-market actors are relatively under-studied in the strategic entrepreneurship literature. While important contributions examining public decision makers have been made within the agency-theoretic and transaction-cost traditions, there is little research that builds on resource-based, dynamic capabilities, and behavioral approaches to organizations. Yet public organizations can be usefully characterized as stocks of physical, organizational, and human resources; they interact with other organizations in pursuing a type of competitive advantage; they can possess excess capacity, and may grow and diversify in part according to Penrosean (dynamic) capabilities and behavioral logic. Public organizations may be managed as stewards of resources, capabilities, and routines. This paper shows how resource-based, (dynamic) capabilities, and behavioral approaches shed light on the nature and governance of public organizations and suggests a research agenda for public entrepreneurship that reflects insights gained from applying strategic management theory to public organization.

Toward a Theory of Public Entrepreneurship

This paper explores innovation, experimentation, and creativity in the public domain and in the public interest. Researchers in various disciplines have studied public entrepreneurship, but there is little research specifically on the nature, incentives and constraints of public entrepreneurship to innovate in the public interest. We begin by extending concepts of the entrepreneurial firm to include greater interactions in the public domain, and then turn to the role of entrepreneurial firms in fostering institutional change. This focus points toward opportunities for integrating transaction-costs, political and international business theories to achieve a more refined institutional theory of firm-government interactions that incorporates entrepreneurial agency as a principal mechanism for innovating in the fulfillment of public and private interests.

rCUR: an R package for CUR matrix decomposition

BACKGROUND: Many methods for dimensionality reduction of large data sets such as those generated in microarray studies boil down to the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Although singular vectors associated with the largest singular values have strong optimality properties and can often be quite useful as a tool to summarize the data, they are linear combinations of up to all of the data points, and thus it is typically quite hard to interpret those vectors in terms of the application domain from which the data are drawn. Recently, an alternative dimensionality reduction paradigm, CUR matrix decompositions, has been proposed to address this problem and has been applied to genetic and internet data. CUR decompositions are low-rank matrix decompositions that are explicitly expressed in terms of a small number of actual columns and/or actual rows of the data matrix. Since they are constructed from actual data elements, CUR decompositions are interpretable by practitioners of the field from which the data are drawn. RESULTS: We present an implementation to perform CUR matrix decompositions, in the form of a freely available, open source R-package called rCUR. This package will help users to perform CUR-based analysis on large-scale data, such as those obtained from different high-throughput technologies, in an interactive and exploratory manner. We show two examples that illustrate how CUR-based techniques make it possible to reduce significantly the number of probes, while at the same time maintaining major trends in data and keeping the same classification accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: The package rCUR provides functions for the users to perform CUR-based matrix decompositions in the R environment. In gene expression studies, it gives an additional way of analysis of differential expression and discriminant gene selection based on the use of statistical leverage scores. These scores, which have been used historically in diagnostic regression analysis to identify outliers, can be used by rCUR to identify the most informative data points with respect to which to express the remaining data points

The politics of IMF–EU cooperation : institutional change from the Maastricht Treaty to the launch of the Euro

How do regional changes affect the process of global governance? This article addresses this question by examining how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) responded to the challenges presented by Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) between the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and the launch of the euro in 1999. Based on primary research from the IMF archives, the article illustrates how the IMF's efforts to reconfigure its relationship with European institutions evolved gradually through a logic of incremental change, despite initial opposition from member states. The article concludes that bureaucratic actors within international organizations will take advantage of informal avenues for promoting a new agenda when this fits with shared conceptions of an organization's mandate. The exercise of informal influence by advocates for change within an international organization can limit the options available to states in formal decision-making processes, even when these options cut across state preferences

Effect of water-wall interaction potential on the properties of nanoconfined water

Much of the understanding of bulk liquids has progressed through study of the limiting case in which molecules interact via purely repulsive forces, such as a hard-core potential. In the same spirit, we report progress on the understanding of confined water by examining the behavior of water-like molecules interacting with planar walls via purely repulsive forces and compare our results with those obtained for Lennard-Jones (LJ) interactions between the molecules and the walls. Specifically, we perform molecular dynamics simulations of 512 water-like molecules which are confined between two smooth planar walls that are separated by 1.1 nm. At this separation, there are either two or three molecular layers of water, depending on density. We study two different forms of repulsive confinements, when the interaction potential between water-wall is (i) $1/r^9$ and (ii) WCA-like repulsive potential. We find that the thermodynamic, dynamic and structural properties of the liquid in purely repulsive confinements qualitatively match those for a system with a pure LJ attraction to the wall. In previous studies that include attractions, freezing into monolayer or trilayer ice was seen for this wall separation. Using the same separation as these previous studies, we find that the crystal state is not stable with $1/r^9$ repulsive walls but is stable with WCA-like repulsive confinement. However, by carefully adjusting the separation of the plates with $1/r^9$ repulsive interactions so that the effective space available to the molecules is the same as that for LJ confinement, we find that the same crystal phases are stable. This result emphasizes the importance of comparing systems only using the same effective confinement, which may differ from the geometric separation of the confining surfaces.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figure

Ambiguity, multiple streams, and EU policy

The multiple streams framework draws insight from interactions between agency and institutions to explore the impact of context, time, and meaning on policy change and to assess the institutional and issue complexities permeating the European Union (EU) policy process. The authors specify the assumptions and structure of the framework and review studies that have adapted it to reflect more fully EU decision-making processes. The nature of policy entrepreneurship and policy windows are assessed to identify areas of improvement. Finally, the authors sketch out a research agenda that refines the logic of political manipulation which permeates the lens and the institutional complexity which frames the EU policy process

Space VLBI at Low Frequencies

At sufficiently low frequencies, no ground-based radio array will be able to produce high resolution images while looking through the ionosphere. A space-based array will be needed to explore the objects and processes which dominate the sky at the lowest radio frequencies. An imaging radio interferometer based on a large number of small, inexpensive satellites would be able to track solar radio bursts associated with coronal mass ejections out to the distance of Earth, determine the frequency and duration of early epochs of nonthermal activity in galaxies, and provide unique information about the interstellar medium. This would be a "space-space" VLBI mission, as only baselines between satellites would be used. Angular resolution would be limited only by interstellar and interplanetary scattering.Comment: To appear in "Astrophysical Phenomena Revealed by Space VLBI", ed. H. Hirabayashi, P. Edwards, and D. Murphy (ISAS, Japan

Sequence alignment, mutual information, and dissimilarity measures for constructing phylogenies

Existing sequence alignment algorithms use heuristic scoring schemes which cannot be used as objective distance metrics. Therefore one relies on measures like the p- or log-det distances, or makes explicit, and often simplistic, assumptions about sequence evolution. Information theory provides an alternative, in the form of mutual information (MI) which is, in principle, an objective and model independent similarity measure. MI can be estimated by concatenating and zipping sequences, yielding thereby the "normalized compression distance". So far this has produced promising results, but with uncontrolled errors. We describe a simple approach to get robust estimates of MI from global pairwise alignments. Using standard alignment algorithms, this gives for animal mitochondrial DNA estimates that are strikingly close to estimates obtained from the alignment free methods mentioned above. Our main result uses algorithmic (Kolmogorov) information theory, but we show that similar results can also be obtained from Shannon theory. Due to the fact that it is not additive, normalized compression distance is not an optimal metric for phylogenetics, but we propose a simple modification that overcomes the issue of additivity. We test several versions of our MI based distance measures on a large number of randomly chosen quartets and demonstrate that they all perform better than traditional measures like the Kimura or log-det (resp. paralinear) distances. Even a simplified version based on single letter Shannon entropies, which can be easily incorporated in existing software packages, gave superior results throughout the entire animal kingdom. But we see the main virtue of our approach in a more general way. For example, it can also help to judge the relative merits of different alignment algorithms, by estimating the significance of specific alignments.Comment: 19 pages + 16 pages of supplementary materia