45,158 research outputs found
Do institutional arrangements make a difference to transport policy and implementation? Lessons for Britain
This paper describes local government decision-making in transport in three areas of the UK, London, West Yorkshire and Edinburgh, in which major changes in local government decision-making structures have taken place over the last decade, and between which arrangements are now very different. The research discusses whether institutional change has had a beneficial or adverse effect, and whether any of the current structures provides a more effective framework for policy development and implementation. The results show that although the sites share a broadly common set of objectives there are differences in devolved responsibilities and in the extent to which various policy options are within the control of the bodies charged with transport policy delivery. The existence of several tiers of government, coupled with the many interactions required between these public sector bodies and the predominantly private sector public transport operators appears to create extra transactional barriers and impedes the implementation of the most effective measures for cutting congestion. There is, however, a compelling argument for the presence of an overarching tier of government to organise travel over a spatial scale compatible with that of major commuter patterns. The extent to which such arrangements currently appear to work is a function of the range of powers and the funding levels afforded to the co-ordinating organisation
Supreme Court Nomination John G. Roberts: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong., Sept. 15, 2005 (Statement of Peter B. Edelman, Prof. of Law, Geo. U. L. Center)
Higgs bundles and the real symplectic group
We give an overview of the work of Corlette, Donaldson, Hitchin and Simpson
leading to the non-abelian Hodge theory correspondence between representations
of the fundamental group of a surface and the moduli space of Higgs bundles. We
then explain how this can be generalized to a correspondence between character
varieties for representations of surface groups in real Lie groups G and the
moduli space of G-Higgs bundles. Finally we survey recent joint work with
Bradlow, Garc\'ia-Prada and Mundet i Riera on the moduli space of maximal
Sp(2n,R)-Higgs bundles.Comment: 12 page
- …