The Politics of Policy Anomalies: Bricolage and the Hermeneutics of Paradigms

10.2139/ssrn.230045582183-20

Bringing the provinces back in: Re-evaluating the relevance of province-building to theories of Canadian federalism and multi-level governance

Three decades have passed since Canadian political scientists last seriously engaged with the concept of province-building. Popular in the 1970s as a means for explaining patterns of policy-making and constitutional politics in Canada, the currency of province-building met an abrupt end after its analytical use was questioned by Young, Faucher and Blais in 1984. Thirty years on, this discussion piece revisits their critique and, far from finding the idea void of empirical validity or theoretical utility, suggests that province-building continues to best capture the general structure of policy formulation and implementation in Canada and provides lessons for how to examine matters of authority and decision-making in multi-level settings

Predicting Temporal Patterns In The Environment: Toward Primitive Mechanisms Of Learning, Memory, And Generalization

Across a wide range of cognitive tasks, recent experience influences subsequent behavior. For example, when individuals repeatedly perform a speeded two-alternative choice task, response latencies vary dramatically based on the immediately preceding sequence. These sequential dependencies (SDs) have been interpreted as adaptation to the statistical structure of an uncertain, changing environment (e.g., Jones & Sieck, 2003; Mozer, Kinoshita, & Shettel, 2007; Yu & Cohen, 2009), and can shed light on how individuals learn and represent structure in binary stimulus sequences. Heretofore, theories have posited that SDs arise from rapidly (exponentially) decaying memory traces of various environmental statistics (e.g., Cho et al., 2002; Yu & Cohen, 2009).

We present a series of experiments and a model that place SDs on a fundamentally different foundation. We show that: (1) decay of recent experience can follow a power function curve, not an exponential, linking the SD literature
to a rich literature on human declarative memory; (2) the simple trace-based mechanism underlying existing accounts is inadequate, but incremental memory adjustments may be explained via error correction, linking the SD literature to the rich literature on human associative learning; and (3) distinct but interacting subsystems are found in the brain that jointly predict upcoming environmental events. 

We conducted three behavioral studies with EEG recordings of individuals performing discrimination of spatial location and motion coherence. Identifying the onset of the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) in an event-related EEG analysis, we are able to decompose the total response latency into two intervals—pre and post LRP onset—and to examine SDs in stimulus and response processing separately. We find evidence for two distinct mechanisms, one reflecting incremental learning of stimulus repetition rate (i.e., the probability that successive
stimuli will match), and the other reflecting incremental learning of response baserates. The data cannot be explained by a model that assumes these rates are based on independent traces, and calls for an account in which the two rates jointly predict future stimuli via error-correction learning. 

By manipulating the autocorrelation structure of the sequences (from a positive to a negative autocorrelation, indicated on the graphs by blue and red lines, respectively), we obtained evidence for incremental learning occurring over hundreds of trials, which is parsimoniously explained by a memory with power function decay. Together, the results highlight a tension between the two broad and well established classes of trace-based memory models and learning models based on error correction. Two attempts at reconciling these approaches via modeling are discussed

Mount Carmel Area Community Center: Recommendations for Board Structure, Funding, and Programming

The Mount Carmel Area Community Center is a new initiative in Mount Carmel, PA to create a new community space to support community connections and development. In this report, a student consultant team reviews and provides recommends on the following points: ● Summarize the MCACC’s current organizational structure and established mission, vision, and goals ● Provide a comprehensive breakdown of the current Board structure, fundraising, and programming activities/strategies ● Address organizational gaps or limitations that have prevented the MCACC Board of Directors from moving forward in their current plans in the three identified areas of board structure, fundraising, and programming ● Create a new timeline for the project that takes into account the data gathered and presented throughout this document ● Propose a set of recommendations to the MCACC Board to aid in their ability to generate progress toward their established end goal Students produced this report as part of the course Managing for Sustainability (MORS 400), a senior capstone course in Management taught by Prof. Neil Boyd. Also attached here are the powerpoint slides that accompany the final report. This is the third report in a series investigating the development of the Mount Carmel Area Community Center. The second report, Mount Carmel Area Community Center: Plan of Action, can be accessed at: https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/coal-region-student/28

Omecamtiv mecarbil in chronic heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, GALACTIC‐HF: baseline characteristics and comparison with contemporary clinical trials

Aims: The safety and efficacy of the novel selective cardiac myosin activator, omecamtiv mecarbil, in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) is tested in the Global Approach to Lowering Adverse Cardiac outcomes Through Improving Contractility in Heart Failure (GALACTIC‐HF) trial. Here we describe the baseline characteristics of participants in GALACTIC‐HF and how these compare with other contemporary trials. Methods and Results: Adults with established HFrEF, New York Heart Association functional class (NYHA) ≥ II, EF ≤35%, elevated natriuretic peptides and either current hospitalization for HF or history of hospitalization/ emergency department visit for HF within a year were randomized to either placebo or omecamtiv mecarbil (pharmacokinetic‐guided dosing: 25, 37.5 or 50 mg bid). 8256 patients [male (79%), non‐white (22%), mean age 65 years] were enrolled with a mean EF 27%, ischemic etiology in 54%, NYHA II 53% and III/IV 47%, and median NT‐proBNP 1971 pg/mL. HF therapies at baseline were among the most effectively employed in contemporary HF trials. GALACTIC‐HF randomized patients representative of recent HF registries and trials with substantial numbers of patients also having characteristics understudied in previous trials including more from North America (n = 1386), enrolled as inpatients (n = 2084), systolic blood pressure < 100 mmHg (n = 1127), estimated glomerular filtration rate < 30 mL/min/1.73 m2 (n = 528), and treated with sacubitril‐valsartan at baseline (n = 1594). Conclusions: GALACTIC‐HF enrolled a well‐treated, high‐risk population from both inpatient and outpatient settings, which will provide a definitive evaluation of the efficacy and safety of this novel therapy, as well as informing its potential future implementation

Canadian Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective

This thesis utilizes an institutional theory of economic organization and technological innovation called regime theory to explain the origins, operation, and outcomes of industrial policy in Canada. The first part of the thesis elaborates the theory using formal logic, spatial modelling techniques, and game theory. The second part evaluates cross-national quantitative evidence in support of the theory and undertakes three detailed case studies involving shipbuilding, agricultural biotechnology, and green energy manufacturing. Consistent with the varieties of capitalism literature, it is demonstrated that liberal political economies are institutionally-poised toward radical innovation but struggle with late innovation. The introductory chapter defines industrial policy, explains why the study of industrial policy is important, details the argument of the thesis, summarizes the methods used, and lays out how the thesis is organized. The second chapter engages with the literature on collective action and entrepreneurship to advance three components of regime theory: a theory of regime origins, a theory of regime operation, and a theory of regime outcomes. The third chapter introduces the structure of the economy and state of technological development as situational variables, consideration of which yields four archetypical models of industrial policy and ten predictive hypotheses about the causes and consequences of industrial policy coordination. Chapter 3 concludes with a summary of the propositions and implications of the theory. The fourth chapter analyzes three cases studies —aluminum shipbuilding industrial policy in British Columbia; federal-provincial biotechnology policy in support of the canola industry; and Ontario’s green energy industrial strategy— and evaluates the ability of regime theory to explain industrial policy in Canada. The fifth and final chapter summarizes the theory and evidence presented in the thesis and discusses the inferences that can be drawn from the findings.Ph.D