Formalising responsibility modelling for automatic analysis

Modelling the structure of social-technical systems as a basis for informing software system design is a difficult compromise. Formal methods struggle to capture the scale and complexity of the heterogeneous organisations that use technical systems. Conversely, informal approaches lack the rigour needed to inform the software design and construction process or enable automated analysis. We revisit the concept of responsibility modelling, which models social technical systems as a collection of actors who discharge their responsibilities, whilst using and producing resources in the process. Responsibility modelling is formalised as a structured approach for socio-technical system requirements specification and modelling, with well-defined semantics and support for automated structure and validity analysis. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by two case studies of software engineering methodologies

The Private Lands Opportunity: The Case for Conservation Incentives

Outlines a number of opportunities available for enlisting the participation of landowners as partners in conservation as part of an effort to meet the nation's conservation goals

Knowledge Economy Immigration: A Priority for U.S. Growth Policy

Offers economic and political arguments for facilitating immigration of highly educated, skilled workers as a way to support long-term knowledge-based economic growth. Proposes granting green cards to math and science graduates of qualified U.S. colleges

Intelligent fault management for the Space Station active thermal control system

The Thermal Advanced Automation Project (TAAP) approach and architecture is described for automating the Space Station Freedom (SSF) Active Thermal Control System (ATCS). The baseline functionally and advanced automation techniques for Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) will be compared and contrasted. Advanced automation techniques such as rule-based systems and model-based reasoning should be utilized to efficiently control, monitor, and diagnose this extremely complex physical system. TAAP is developing advanced FDIR software for use on the SSF thermal control system. The goal of TAAP is to join Knowledge-Based System (KBS) technology, using a combination of rules and model-based reasoning, with conventional monitoring and control software in order to maximize autonomy of the ATCS. TAAP's predecessor was NASA's Thermal Expert System (TEXSYS) project which was the first large real-time expert system to use both extensive rules and model-based reasoning to control and perform FDIR on a large, complex physical system. TEXSYS showed that a method is needed for safely and inexpensively testing all possible faults of the ATCS, particularly those potentially damaging to the hardware, in order to develop a fully capable FDIR system. TAAP therefore includes the development of a high-fidelity simulation of the thermal control system. The simulation provides realistic, dynamic ATCS behavior and fault insertion capability for software testing without hardware related risks or expense. In addition, thermal engineers will gain greater confidence in the KBS FDIR software than was possible prior to this kind of simulation testing. The TAAP KBS will initially be a ground-based extension of the baseline ATCS monitoring and control software and could be migrated on-board as additional computation resources are made available

Discouraging Federal actions that reduce the value of private property: evaluating procedural and financial approaches

A regulatory taking occurs when a court concludes that a government action has taken private property for a public use without paying just compensation to the owner--a violation of the fifth amendment. Often, the remedy is a monetary award whose value is determined by the court. ; In recent years there has been considerable interest in creating a statutory complement to the constitutional law of takings. Some believe that a statutory scheme, using procedural financial approaches, would discourage federal regulatory activities that reduce the value of privately owned property. The procedural approach would require federal agencies to evaluate the property value effects of proposed actions before undertaking them. The financial approach would require that federal agencies pay from their own budgets for any compensation awards that result from their decisions. ; This paper compares the existing procedural and financial approaches to the ones proposed. It describes the model of agency incentives and the regulatory environment implicitly assumed by these proposals and compares them to the literature on regulatory decision making and administrative law. Finally, the paper discusses some of the institutional factors likely to affect the outcome of the proposed reforms, including the role of the courts in enforcing analysis requirements, the extent of agency discretion, and the federal budget process.Environmental protection

Building a coherent risk measurement and capital optimisation model for financial firms

This paper was presented at the conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century" as part of session 5, "International capital allocation at financial institutions." The conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 26-27, 1998, was designed to encourage a consensus between the public and private sectors on an agenda for capital regulation in the new century.Risk ; Econometric models ; Bank capital ; Financial institutions

The Fiscal Effects of Aid in Ghana

aid, fungibility, fiscal response, impulse response

Bootstrap methods for the empirical study of decision-making and information flows in social systems

Abstract: We characterize the statistical bootstrap for the estimation of information theoretic quantities from data, with particular reference to its use in the study of large-scale social phenomena. Our methods allow one to preserve, approximately, the underlying axiomatic relationships of information theory—in particular, consistency under arbitrary coarse-graining—that motivate use of these quantities in the first place, while providing reliability comparable to the state of the art for Bayesian estimators. We show how information-theoretic quantities allow for rigorous empirical study of the decision-making capacities of rational agents, and the time-asymmetric flows of information in distributed systems. We provide illustrative examples by reference to ongoing collaborative work on the semantic structure of the British Criminal Court system and the conflict dynamics of the contemporary Afghanistan insurgency