Is Foreign Aid Beneficial for Sub-Saharan Africa? A Panel Data Analysis

Significant ambiguity surrounds the magnitude and sign of the effect of foreign aid on economic growth. Foreign aid can potentially augment scarce domestic capital to spur growth but foreign aid can also remove positive incentive to build wealth, stalling growth. This paper characterizes the effect of foreign aid on the growth of Sub-Saharan African countries after correcting endogeneity problems that plague the estimation. Foreign aid is found to be growth promoting given good governance and using fixed effects in a static panel framework. Data from twenty-one Sub-Saharan African countries spanning 1995-2003 was used in the estimation. The finding of a significant foreign aid-growth relationship is pertinent because it suggests that increased aid to Sub Saharan Africa is one way to achieve the UN’s Millennium goals. By lobbying for increased foreign aid, advocates are prescribing a necessary albeit insufficient medicine for Sub Saharan Africa’s economic problems.Food Security and Poverty,

The Crucible of Crisis: Three Presidents Confront the Perfect Storm

This article, based on interviews with the presidents of Dillard and Xavier Universities and Tougaloo College, examines their leadership in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The ways they led their communities reveal both points of commonality and discrete leadership styles and approaches

Success and Failure in the College Presidency

The author presents his observations on the state of college presidency in the U.S. He mentions several successful college presidents including Carleton College’s Rob Oden, New York University’s John Sexton and University of Pennsylvania’s Judith Rodin. He discusses the failure of Duke University’s president Richard Brodhead in handling the lacrosse team fiasco. He cites the need for presidents to become true leaders of faculty colleagues

Internal Journeys of College Presidents: Diary Reflections About Leadership and Values

The ideas and thoughts of college and university presidents are most frequently and primarily known through their public roles and rhetoric. Over the past few years nearly three dozen college and university presidents have written diaries for public view as part of the Journal of College and Character. These presidential reflections provide a unique and rare opportunity to gain a behind-the-scenes view of the contemporary presidency, and of the leadership and values of presidents. This article is based on research of the words and impressions of these presidents in these public diaries. Using the perspectives revealed by the presidents, the article assesses, analyzes, and compares and contrasts the major themes which emerge and the content of their reflections. This assessment contributes additional understanding of the presidency by developing an inside picture of presidential thought about the issues with which they regularly grapple. The diaries are an important lens presenting a significant set of accounts and vantage points about what presidents contemplate. We are able to obtain provisional answers to questions such as: What things create and cause unavoidable and sometimes constant tensions and pressures? What do we know about what presidents really think? What do we know about their private reflections about the curses and blessings of the great weight of responsibility they bear in leading colleges and universities? What are the things which concern these presidents as leaders and individuals? How are they trying to exert leadership to the nation\u27s campuses? The reflections in these diaries are of interest because they provide a glimpse of the internal journeys and musings of presidents. These presidents have used this medium to share thinking about the broader implications of what they are doing, how they are leading, what leadership itself is all about and what is required of the leader, not to mention the simple, routine things presidents face in day-to-day life. We also view a picture of remarkable moments and instances, revealing significant candor and disclosure in the stories of their leadership and aspects of presidential leadership much more from inside the ivory tower than that commonly and normally observable. The presidents thus contribute significantly to understandings of the office they hold, of the importance which the presidency continues to bear for the hopes and aspirations of our colleges and universities, and of the way in which presidents of today will shape the future of the college and university presidency itself

The College Presidency: An Interview with Stephen J. Nelson

College presidents continue to fill prominent critical roles in colleges and universities and society. Thus an examination of the reasons for their success and failure is vital. Four major criteria are presented as a baseline for fair judgments of presidents and their leadership. Current trends in the presidency and presidential selection are explored and presented in order to increase understanding about how presidents can best fit the demands of these important leadership posts

Using Dynamic in vivo Kinematics for Subject-Specific Calibration of Knee Ligament Parameters

In vivo clinical studies are the optimal way to investigate the biomechanical outcomes of new prosthetic devices. This particular style of testing can be difficult and, in certain cases, unethical to perform. The testing of unproven devices, surgical techniques, and materials put patients at risk from unanticipated outcomes in how these devices respond to the in vivo environment and patient-specific loading conditions. Biomechanical computational models were developed to provide validation to new devices prior to clinical testing. Computational models for use in optimizing knee prosthetics frequently include ligament representations, but these representations have inherent uncertainty due to wide intersubject variation across the population and difficulties in defining the subject-specific properties of the ligament. Typically, these parameters are tuned using a trial-and-error approach by experienced personnel or by adapting literature values. However, published values for ligament constants have been shown to vary greatly. Due to these issues, previous studies have recommended the use of a sensitivity analysis to validate input parameters and incorporate uncertainty into finite element (FE) analyses. FE simulations have been widely used in implant development, but this has largely been performed using subjects with a normal body mass index (BMI). Increasing BMI has been shown to negatively impact the outcomes of total knee arthroplasty (TKA) procedures. Better understanding of obesity’s impact on joint kinematics will help with design refinement for prosthetics used in obese individuals. The first objective of this study was to use dynamic, in vivo kinematics to bound subject-specific ligament parameters to a region that will produce physiological forces, thus removing some uncertainty associated with ligament properties. A Monte Carlo simulation was used to find the region of physiological properties for each subject across multiple dynamic activities. The resulting, subject-specific regions were then compared between cohorts of high BMI and normal BMI subjects. Significant differences were found between the bounding areas for these groups. Additionally, there were ligaments that had significant differences when age and gender were considered. This study indicates that there are likely cohort-specific differences in in vivo ligament properties. The secondary objective was to create a model database of three high BMI subjects as they perform five activities of daily living. Subject-specific, FE simulations were created for the three subjects using kinematics that were derived from experimental data of the subjects completing various exercises. Controllers were developed and tuned to apply the muscle forces, matching profiles generated from the kinematic data. The models correctly reflect the target profiles and are a crucial first step to analyze the outcomes of prosthetic devices in the obese population. Industry partners are currently using this model database to virtually implant prosthetic devices and measure how the resulting kinematics match the natural, non-implanted knee