Second generation governance indicators

This paper summarizes progress made in a DfID-funded World Bank initiative to test and develop policy-relevant, politically acceptable, quantitative indicators of governance. There are two major components involved in the process of generating indicators that are practical means of reform. Political acceptability is key in developing neutral quantitative benchmarks of good governance that can be embraced by reformers. In addition to political acceptability, measuring governance must be comprehensive and institutionally specific so that reformers know which institutions to reform and how to do so. This paper explores some of the most promising second generation indicators of good governance and elaborates on how they are being used in World Bank operations

Non-compliance in marine reserves: measuring the drivers of behavior among recreational fishermen within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (GBRMP) provides outstanding ecological, cultural, social, and economic services to the number of communities that use it. Most of the park is regulated via a zoning system designed to protect its biodiversity and ensure the sustainable use of its resources (GBRMPA, 2004). Like any social institution, zoning regulations rely heavily on compliance in order to be effective. Recreational fishing on the GBRMP accounts for most of the noncompliance behavior associated with zoning (Arias and Sutton, 2013). Thus, understanding fishers compliance behavior is central to understanding how to best manage these areas. Using results from a survey conducted on recreational fishermen over a period of four weeks, this study explores the attitudes and beliefs of fishers on the GBRMP. It also uses data on fishers’ consumptive orientation and the importance of fishing to their lifestyle to determine if differences among fishers in these categories lead to different perceived social norms. Finally, It assesses the perceived level of the legitimacy of authorities on the GBRMP, and how that perception influences compliance behavior. I find that the mean perceived norm among fishers on the GBRMP is that about 8.35% of fishers practice noncompliance. Fishers with a higher consumptive orientation tend to estimate higher levels of noncompliance than those with a lower consumptive orientation. Additionally, fishers who say that fishing is their most important activity are more likely to perceive a more compliant norm than those who do not consider fishing to be the most important activity to them. Finally, fishers tend to personally identify with marine parks personnel, and have a strong personal moral obligation to abide by zoning regulations. There seems to be a fairly strong perceived social norm positively affecting fishers’ decisions to comply with zoning regulations

Public officials and their institutional environment - an analytical model for assessing the impact of institutional change on public sector performance

To perform well, public officials must be confident enough about the future, to be able to see a relationship between their efforts, and an eventual outcome. Their expectations are shaped by their institutional environment. If the rules are not credible, or are unlikely to be enforced, of if they expect policies to be contradicted, or resources to flow unpredictably, results will be uncertain, so there is little point in working purposefully. The authors present an analytical framework, used to design a series of surveys of public officials'views of their institutional environment, and to analyze the information generated in fifteen countries. They describe how survey results help map public sector's strengths, and weaknesses, and offer an approach to identifying potential payoffs from reforms. The framework emphasizes how heterogeneous incentives, and institutional arrangements are within he public sector. It emphasizes how important it is for policymakers to base decisions on information (not generalizations) that suggests what is most likely to work, and where. In building on the premise that public officials'actions - and hence their organization's performance - depend on the institutional environment in which they find themselves, this framework avoids simplistic anti-government positions, bur doesn't defend poor performance. Some public officials perform poorly, and engage in rent seeking, but some selfless, and determined public officials, work hard under extremely difficult conditions. This framework offers an approach for understanding both bad performance, and good, and for presenting the results to policymakers in a format that leadsto more informed choices, about public sector reform. Types of reforms discussed include strengthening the credibility of rules for evaluation, for record management, for training, and for recruitment; ensuring that staff support government policy; preventing political interference, or micro-management; assuring staff that they will be treated fairly; and, making government policies consistent.Public Health Promotion,Decentralization,Educational Sciences,Enterprise Development&Reform,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Educational Sciences,National Governance,Governance Indicators,Poverty Assessment,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

Second generation governance indicators

This paper summarizes progress made in a DfID-funded World Bank initiative to test and develop policy-relevant, politically acceptable, quantitative indicators of governance. There are two major components involved in the process of generating indicators that are practical means of reform. Political acceptability is key in developing neutral quantitative benchmarks of good governance that can be embraced by reformers. In addition to political acceptability, measuring governance must be comprehensive and institutionally specific so that reformers know which institutions to reform and how to do so. This paper explores some of the most promising second generation indicators of good governance and elaborates on how they are being used in World Bank operations.governance, institutions, development

Direct Versus Indirect Measurement of Digit Ratio (2D:4D): A Critical Review of the Literature and New Data

Digit ratio (2D:4D: the relative lengths of the second and fourth digits) is widely used as a correlate of prenatal sex steroids. There are two common methods of measuring 2D:4D, the direct method and the indirect method. The modern interest in 2D:4D began 16 years ago when finger lengths were measured directly, but many studies now report 2D:4D calculated from indirectly measured fingers from photocopies or scans. However, there are concerns about the accuracy of the latter in comparison to the former. The purpose of this article was twofold: to review these concerns and to add new data to the debate. Our review shows that in 2005, directional effects in indirect 2D:4D were reported such that direct 2D:4D > indirect 2D:4D. This finding was challenged by a 2006 report that direct 2D:4D was lower (not higher) than indirect 2D:4D for male right-hand 2D:4D. Two further studies from the same group have claimed that indirect 2D:4D may be lower, higher, or comparable to direct 2D:4D. More recent comparisons of direct 2D:4D versus indirect 2D:4D and a meta-analysis of Chinese studies have replicated the finding of direct 2D:4D > indirect 2D:4D. We considered an additional sample and found significant direct 2D:4D > indirect 2D:4D for three of four ratios. The overall literature is discussed within the context of standards of research (sample size) and publishing (clarity of report). It is concluded that direct 2D:4D does tend to be greater than indirect 2D:4D. Implications for comparative studies and other aspects of research in 2D:4D are discussed

Identifying stochastic oscillations in single-cell live imaging time series using Gaussian processes

Multiple biological processes are driven by oscillatory gene expression at different time scales. Pulsatile dynamics are thought to be widespread, and single-cell live imaging of gene expression has lead to a surge of dynamic, possibly oscillatory, data for different gene networks. However, the regulation of gene expression at the level of an individual cell involves reactions between finite numbers of molecules, and this can result in inherent randomness in expression dynamics, which blurs the boundaries between aperiodic fluctuations and noisy oscillators. Thus, there is an acute need for an objective statistical method for classifying whether an experimentally derived noisy time series is periodic. Here we present a new data analysis method that combines mechanistic stochastic modelling with the powerful methods of non-parametric regression with Gaussian processes. Our method can distinguish oscillatory gene expression from random fluctuations of non-oscillatory expression in single-cell time series, despite peak-to-peak variability in period and amplitude of single-cell oscillations. We show that our method outperforms the Lomb-Scargle periodogram in successfully classifying cells as oscillatory or non-oscillatory in data simulated from a simple genetic oscillator model and in experimental data. Analysis of bioluminescent live cell imaging shows a significantly greater number of oscillatory cells when luciferase is driven by a {\it Hes1} promoter (10/19), which has previously been reported to oscillate, than the constitutive MoMuLV 5' LTR (MMLV) promoter (0/25). The method can be applied to data from any gene network to both quantify the proportion of oscillating cells within a population and to measure the period and quality of oscillations. It is publicly available as a MATLAB package.Comment: 36 pages, 17 figure

Niche Sociality: Approaching Adversity in Everyday Life

How should sociologists understand the everyday lives of those living in adversity, coping with the experience of structural violence? In this article, focusing on the urban experience, we suggest a perspective on ‘everyday life’ that can encompass corporeal, mental, relational and social dimensions, which we term ‘niche sociality’. First, we use Gibson’s niches and affordances to enrich the post-representationalist understanding of human beings as embodied/cultural/environmentally embedded organisms. Second, we enrich Gibson’s niches and affordances with theories for ‘small-scale’ sociality drawn from social practice theory and interaction ritual chains. Third, we illustrate the productivity of these ideas throughout the article, by grounding our conceptual work in empirical examples that analyse the everyday lives and mental life of migrant workers in Shanghai. Niche sociality, we argue, is a way of framing the experience of the everyday, a perspective that could – perhaps should – provoke novel ecosocial studies of adversity