Modelling leadership and institutional factors in endogenous regional development.

Theories and approaches to endogenous growth and regional development tend to neglect or at best underplay the role of leadership and the way institutional factors are considered is usually simplistic. This paper builds on work the authors have been developing over the last year or so to develop a model framework of regional economic development that explicitly incorporates leadership and institutional factors along with the consideration of resource endowments and market fit and of entrepreneurship. An approach to operationalizing the model is proposed.

Some challenges for regional science research

Regional scientists have long faced challenges in developing the\ud interdisciplinary field where their focus is on the spatial context of social, economic and environmental phenomena, and dealing with spatial data presents considerable methodological challenges. This article discusses the evolution of Regional Science, the critiques it has received and the challenges it has confronted. It addresses specifically some contemporary challenges that relate to methodological issues, such as: how to measure and model endogenous regional growth performance; the limitations of using "de jure" regions rather than "functional" regions as the spatial framework in regional analysis; the need to making greater use of unit record data and integrating those data into generalised spatial frameworks; and making use of the opportunities offered by «big data» in urban and regional analysis.Los científicos regionalistas se han enfrentado a numerosos desafíos en el desarrollo del ámbito interdisciplinario en el que analizan el contexto espacial de los fenómenos sociales, económicos y medioambientales, y asimismo tratar con amplias bases de datos plantea desafíos metodológicos considerables.\ud Este artículo estudia la evolución de la Ciencia Regional, las críticas que ha recibido y los retos con los que se ha enfrentado. Analiza específicamente algunos retos contemporáneos relacionados con problemas metodológicos como: de qué forma medir y los logros del modelo de crecimiento endógeno regional;\ud los límites de la utilización de regiones "de iure" más que regiones "funcionales" como base espacia en el análisis regional; la necesidad de realizar un mayor uso de microdatos o datos por unidad y de integrarlos en estructuras espaciales más generales; y las oportunidades que ofrece la utilización de «big data» en el\ud análisis urbano y regional

A planar quasi-optical SIS receiver for array applications

A planar, quasi-optical SIS receiver operating at 230 GHz is described. The receiver consists of a 2 x 5 array of half wave dipole antennas with ten niobium-aluminum oxide-niobium SIS junctions on a quartz dielectric-filled parabola. The 1.4 GHz intermediate frequency is coupled from the mixer via coplanar strip transmission lines and 4:1 balun transformers. The receiver is operated at 4.2 K in a liquid helium immersion cryostat. We report accurate measurements of the performance of single receiver elements. A mixer noise temperature of 89 K DSB, receiver noise temperature of 156 K DSB, and conversion loss of 3 dB into a matched load have been obtained

United Nations Police Evolution, Present Capacity and Future Tasks

政治学 / Political Science and International RelationsUnited Nations policing in the context of peace operations evolved rapidly during the 1990s after three decades of serving as a minor adjunct to the principal, military, purposes of UN peacekeeping. After the end of the Cold War, UN policing became a recognized component of operations, but lacked doctrine, administrative structure, quality assurance in recruitment or adequate training. Each is being addressed with some urgency at present, as UN police deployments head toward 15,000 officers. Although Headquarters police support capacity has grown, the United Nations still has proportionately far fewer people at Headquarters supporting deployed personnel than do developed states, such as Australia, that deploy international police contingents. The objectives of UN police operations meanwhile remain a matter of debate: to stabilize post-conflict public security while others rebuild local police capacity or to engage actively in capacity-building and associated institutional reform. UN police support programs need to partner with development institutions that can offer the budget support for local infrastructure, equipment, and salaries that UN peacekeeping budgets cannot fund. UN programs also may need to take more account of extensive “informal” justice and security institutions in many of the post-conflict states where they work.Prepared for the GRIPS State Building Workshop 2010: Organizing Police Forces in Post-Conflict Peace-Support Operations, January 27-28th, 201

Liderazgo e instituciones factores endógenos del desarrollo de la economía regional

This paper proposes that a virtuous circle for the sustainable development of a city or region is achieved through a process whereby proactive and strong leadership and effective institutions enhance the capacity and capability of a place to better use its resource endowments and gain an improved market fit in becoming competitive and being entrepreneurial. It is proposed that the performance of a city or region at a point in time and the path of its economic development over time may be represented by its position in a Regional Competitiveness Performance Cube. The paper proposes a new model framework whereby a city or region’s economic development and performance is an outcome dependent on how its resource endowments and market fit as quasi-independent variables are mediated by the interaction between leadership, institutions, and entrepreneurship as intervening variables. The experiences of a number of case study cities from a variety of settings in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia are explored within that framework.Este artículo propone que un círculo virtuoso para el desarrollo sostenible de una ciudad o región se logra a través de un proceso por el que el liderazgo proactivo y fuerte y las instituciones efectivas refuerzan la capacidad y aptitud de un lugar para hacer un mejor uso de sus dotaciones de recursos y lograr un mercado mejorado que consiga ser competitivo y emprendedor. Se propone que el funcionamiento de una ciudad o región en un punto en el tiempo y la trayectoria de su desarrollo económico a lo largo del tiempo puede representarse por su posición en un Cubo de resultados de Competitividad Regional. El artículo propone una nueva estructura de modelo donde el desarrollo económico y funcionamiento de una ciudad o región sea un resultado dependiente de cómo sus dotaciones de recursos y mercado ajustadas como variables cuasi-independientes son mediadas por la interacción entre el liderazgo, instituciones y espíritu empresarial como variables intervinientes. Las experiencias de un cierto número de casos de estudio de ciudades dentro de una variedad de lugares en EE.UU., Europa, Asia y Australia se exploran dentro de esa estructura

Estimating Transmission from Genetic and Epidemiological Data: A Metric to Compare Transmission Trees

Reconstructing who infected whom is a central challenge in analysing epidemiological data. Recently, advances in sequencing technology have led to increasing interest in Bayesian approaches to inferring who infected whom using genetic data from pathogens. The logic behind such approaches is that isolates that are nearly genetically identical are more likely to have been recently transmitted than those that are very different. A number of methods have been developed to perform this inference. However, testing their convergence, examining posterior sets of transmission trees and comparing methods’ performance are challenged by the fact that the object of inference—the transmission tree—is a complicated discrete structure. We introduce a metric on transmission trees to quantify distances between them. The metric can accommodate trees with unsampled individuals, and highlights differences in the source case and in the number of infections per infector. We illustrate its performance on simple simulated scenarios and on posterior transmission trees from a TB outbreak. We find that the metric reveals where the posterior is sensitive to the priors, and where collections of trees are composed of distinct clusters. We use the metric to define median trees summarising these clusters. Quantitative tools to compare transmission trees to each other will be required for assessing MCMC convergence, exploring posterior trees and benchmarking diverse methods as this field continues to mature

Sediment and fluvial particulate carbon flux from an eroding peatland catchment

Erosion and the associated loss of carbon is a major environmental concern in many peatlands and remains difficult to accurately quantify beyond the plot scale. Erosion was measured in an upland blanket peatland catchment (0.017 km2) in northern England using Structure‐from‐Motion (SfM) photogrammetry, sediment traps and stream sediment sampling at different spatial scales. A net median topographic change of –27 mm yr–1 was recorded by SfM over the 12‐month monitoring period for the entire surveyed area (598 m2). Within the entire surveyed area there were six nested catchments where both SfM and sediment traps were used to measure erosion. Substantial amounts of peat were captured in sediment traps during summer storm events after two months of dry weather where desiccation of the peat surface occurred. The magnitude of topographic change for the six nested catchments determined by SfM (mean value: 5.3 mm, standard deviation: 5.2 mm) was very different to the areal average derived from sediment traps (mean value: –0.3 mm, standard deviation: 0.1 mm). Thus direct interpolation of peat erosion from local net topographic change into sediment yield at the catchment outlet appears problematic. Peat loss measured at the hillslope scale was not representative of that at the catchment scale. Stream sediment sampling at the outlet of the research catchment (0.017 km2) suggested that the yields of suspended sediment and particulate organic carbon were 926.3 t km–2 yr–1 and 340.9 t km–2 yr–1 respectively, with highest losses occurring during the autumn. Both freeze–thaw during winter and desiccation during long periods of dry weather in spring and summer were identified as important peat weathering processes during the study. Such weathering was a key enabler of subsequent fluvial peat loss from the catchment