The legal and social construction of value in government procurement markets

The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 introduces a social value duty. It requires public authorities in England and Wales, carrying out procurement activities, to ‘consider’ how such activities might ‘improve … economic, social and environmental well-being’. This article analyses qualitative, empirical data on how the social value duty has been interpreted and applied across local government in England. Although only a weak legal duty, this law has made a notable impact on practice. The article explains the changes brought about in practice under the social value duty, and seeks to understand why these changes have occurred. It does so by recognising local government procurement markets, as well as local government organisations themselves, as strategic action fields. In these fields, there are competing visions for social value. It is through conversations between actors that a common meaning comes to be attached to the law

Policies, norms and actions: groundwork for a framework

Constraints on computational agents' behaviour are studied both in work on policy- governed systems|usually as part of work on security or policy-based management in dis- tributed software engineering|and also in multi-agent systems research, where the terminol- ogy is generally one of `norms' and concepts drawn from deontic logic. Interaction between these treatments, and the research communities that study them, has not been as thorough as it might, for though the perpectives, methods and interests are sometimes di erent, there is a great deal of shared ground. In the current research report, we present a language and tools which can be used for reasoning about and studying the operation of both norms and policies on a multi-agent, or distributed, system. The language is based on one member, C+, of a family of knowledge representation formalisms studied in AI. We describe the types of domains that can be represented, the kinds of analysis tasks that are possible, and describe our current implementation (which is freely available for download). Future directions for this work are described

Security policy refinement using data integration: a position paper.

In spite of the wide adoption of policy-based approaches for security management, and many existing treatments of policy verification and analysis, relatively little attention has been paid to policy refinement: the problem of deriving lower-level, runnable policies from higher-level policies, policy goals, and specifications. In this paper we present our initial ideas on this task, using and adapting concepts from data integration. We take a view of policies as governing the performance of an action on a target by a subject, possibly with certain conditions. Transformation rules are applied to these components of a policy in a structured way, in order to translate the policy into more refined terms; the transformation rules we use are similar to those of global-as-view database schema mappings, or to extensions thereof. We illustrate our ideas with an example. Copyright 2009 ACM

New Directions in Deer Damage Management in Wisconsin

The question of responsibility for wildlife damage is a difficult one to answer, especially for damage caused by white-tailed deer. Some states have chosen, or been forced by political pressures, to assume the responsibility for wildlife damage, with or without some responsibility on the part of the agricultural producer who is sustaining the damage. According to a 1980 survey by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, only 10 states were bound by law to make payments for damage done by game species. Only Wisconsin included a nongame species (sandhill cranes) in their payment program. Other states offer abatement assistance, while some others are able to do little or nothing beyond providing advice

In Memory: James E. “Jim” Miller

This In Memory article honors the life and contributions of James E. “Jim” Miller

Public Involvement in Wildlife Damage Management: The Situation in Wisconsin

Wisconsin currently supports record populations of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), Canada geese (Branta canadensis), and wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo). These species are real or perceived causes of substantial wildlife damage, and many sectors of the public (i.e., farmers, motorists, suburbanites, etc.) are impacted. Thus public interest, both in a broad sense and in the form of special interest groups, is intense

A New Class of Non-Linear Stability Preserving Operators

We extend Br\"and\'en's recent proof of a conjecture of Stanley and describe a new class of non-linear operators that preserve weak Hurwitz stability and the Laguerre-P\'olya class.Comment: Fixed typos, spelling, and updated links in reference

Logical properties of nonmonotonic causal theories and the action language C+

The formalism of nonmonotonic causal theories (Giunchiglia, Lee, Lifschitz, McCain, Turner, 2004) provides a general-purpose formalism for nonmonotonic reasoning and knowledge representation, as well as a higher level, special-purpose notation, the action language C+, for specifying and reasoning about the e ects of actions and the persistence (`inertia') of facts over time. In this paper we investigate some logical properties of these formalisms. There are two motivations. From the technical point of view, we seek to gain additional insights into the properties of the languages when viewed as a species of conditional logic. From the practical point of view, we are seeking to nd conditions under which two di erent causal theories, or two di erent action descriptions in C+, can be said to be equivalent, with the further aim of helping to decide between alternative formulations when constructing practical applications. A condensed version of this paper appeared as `Some logical properties of nonmonotonic causal theories', Proc. Eighth International Conference on Logic Programming and Non-Monotonic Reasoning, LNCS, Springer