Who deserves aid? Equality of opportunity, international aid and poverty reduction

We build and implement a normative procedure to allocate international aid based on equality of opportunity concerning the risk of poverty. This is an alternative to Collier and Dollar’s proposal (2001) which stresses the impact of aid on worldwide poverty reduction. The big problem with their approach, as regards distributive justice, is that it leaves very great inequality in poverty risk between inhabitants of countries with widely varying structural disadvantages. We draw on post-welfarist theories of social justice, especially those of John Roemer. However our proposal is very different to that of Llavador and Roemer (2001), which has serious methodological errors and reaches contradictory conclusions. Our proposed allocations, like those of Collier and Dollar, differ from current aid allocation by giving more to the poorest countries. Apart from this agreement, our equality of opportunity principle takes account of structural disadvantages to growth rather than quality of past policies. Our kind of allocation shares out poverty risks much more fairly among the world’s population, while reducing global poverty almost as effectively as Collier and Dollar\'s.International aid, Equality of Opportunity, Poverty Reduction

EMPLOYEE PERCEPTIONS OF STRESSORS AT WORK: AN ATTACHMENT PERSPECTIVE

The current study applied an attachment perspective to elucidate how individuals appraise stressors at work. Attachment theory proposes that individuals’ interactions with a caregiver shape their expectations and beliefs about the world, themselves, and others and predict how individuals behave. Attachment at work is a budding research topic because it informs the social aspect of work relationships, such as the leader-subordinate dyad. However, few studies have explored the potential of attachment security as a job resource. Our findings demonstrated strong support for our predictions about the relationship between transformational leadership, employee perceptions of demands and resources, and the potential explanatory role of attachment security. Moreover, findings were consistent with theoretical foundations in attachment research that identify leaders as attachment figures but also flesh out the relationship between transformational leadership and job characteristics by providing attachment security as an explanatory mechanism utilized by transformational leaders. This study contributes to the recently budding area of attachment research in the organizational literature and offers managers an attachment framework to provide resources for employees to mitigate work stress

Engineering Crowdsourced Stream Processing Systems

A crowdsourced stream processing system (CSP) is a system that incorporates crowdsourced tasks in the processing of a data stream. This can be seen as enabling crowdsourcing work to be applied on a sample of large-scale data at high speed, or equivalently, enabling stream processing to employ human intelligence. It also leads to a substantial expansion of the capabilities of data processing systems. Engineering a CSP system requires the combination of human and machine computation elements. From a general systems theory perspective, this means taking into account inherited as well as emerging properties from both these elements. In this paper, we position CSP systems within a broader taxonomy, outline a series of design principles and evaluation metrics, present an extensible framework for their design, and describe several design patterns. We showcase the capabilities of CSP systems by performing a case study that applies our proposed framework to the design and analysis of a real system (AIDR) that classifies social media messages during time-critical crisis events. Results show that compared to a pure stream processing system, AIDR can achieve a higher data classification accuracy, while compared to a pure crowdsourcing solution, the system makes better use of human workers by requiring much less manual work effort

The State of Human Development Data and Statistical Capacity Building in Developing Countries

human development, human rights

Introduction. Academia, Scholarship and the Challenge of Hindutvaism: Making Sense of India’s Authoritarian Turn

Academia, science, and freedom of speech are under assault in India. This is not a metaphor: scholars and students are being attacked in many ways, including physically. As a journal specialized on South Asia, we consider that our core mission—producing scientific knowledge about societies—is also being threatened. This situation prompted the SAMAJ editorial board to bring together academics to reflect on this current state of affairs. Our main objective is to show that the social sciences p..

Dilepton Production in Nucleon-Nucleon Interactions

Starting from a realistic one--boson--exchange--model fitted to the amplitudes of elastic nucleon--nucleon scattering and the process $NN\rightarrow N\Delta$ we perform a fully relativistic and gauge invariant calculation for the dilepton production in nucleon--nucleon collisions, including the important effect of propagating the $\Delta$--resonance. We compare the results of our calculations with the latest experimental data on dilepton production. We also show how to implement various electromagnetic formfactors for the hadrons in our calculations without loosing gauge--invariance and discuss their influence on dilepton spectra.Comment: 24 pages, figures will be sent on reques