Committee Assignments: Theories, Causes, and Consequences

Conventional wisdom suggests that a strong legislature is built on a strong internal committee system, both in terms of committee powers and the willingness of members to engage in committee work. Committee assignments are the behavioural manifestation of legislative organisation. Despite this, much remains unknown about how committee assignments happen and with what causes and consequences. Our focus in this article is on providing the context for, and introducing new research on, what we call the political economy of committee assignments - which members get selected to sit on which committees, why, and with what consequences

Physical and Socio Economic Affordability Elements that Regulate formal low cost housing tenure in Bauchi Metropolis

Purpose: The current practice housing policies of Nigeria did not highlight on the affordability of formal low cost houses. Low income earners don’t have sufficient income to buy a calorie of foods and meet basic necessities like clothing, rent, fuel, utilities, transport, communications, medical expenses, education, and on a broader sense, housing. Objectives of this study were (i) to investigate the current practices of housing policies in Bauchi Nigeria; (ii) to evaluate the affordability elements in Bauchi Nigeria, (iii) to study the relationship among the FLCH affordability elements in Bauchi Nigeria. Methodology employed includes descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation. Findings: The study found that there are no laws, sections or guidelines regulating the affairs of formal low cost housing. The design does not reflect user need; it did not conform to their culture, family background and size. No provision for public participation in the policy documents. Formal low cost houses are located at the peripheries of the town outside trekking distances which repel beneficiaries because of the awkward location. Residents have higher number of defendants, lower income and lower qualification. This study found that design, location, participation, highlight on affordability and family issues have prominent impact on affordability and hence be incorporated in policy document. It can therefore be clinch that formal low cost houses in Bauchi, are not affordable. Conclusively, these affordability elements should be upheld to ensure sustainable formal low cost housing affordability policy for the low income groups. The physical and socio-economic elements are the catalyst in the housing provision aspect. These elements can bridge the wide fissure being the basic features, essentials and the fundamentals of a good policy. Keywords: Affordability elements, formal low cost housing, housing policy issues, house ownershi

Investigating Housing Affordability Pursuant to Sustainable Development Mechanisms and the New Malaysian Housing Policy

Purpose – This paper will assess housing affordability and the Malaysian vision 2020 mission of attaining a fully developed nation status vide sustainable development mechanisms in the new Malaysian housing policy plan.Methodology/Design/Approach – This is a policy analysis paper which sieve ideas from housing policy and sustainable developments. It equally draws criteria which shall be used as an interim assessment of the policy proposals and programmes.Findings - The plan contains new policy directions, strategies and programmes that shall enable the country to emerge as a high-income nation. The development programmes were tuned to the six National Key Results Areas, outlined in the Government Transformation Programme, the National Key Economic programme Areas of the Economic Transformation Programme and the strategic economic reforms in the New Economic Model. The Plan details strategies towards a more focused role for the Government as a regulator and a catalyst while upholding the principles of 1 Malaysia: People First, Performance Now to ensure effective delivery of service.Originality/Value – This paper suggest a substantial and assessment of Malaysian new housing policy strategies and programmes. The subject matter relates to the national housing policies, systems and strategies set to ameliorate the impact of house deficit and forge the need for more affordable housing stock. Keywords Malaysia, Housing policy, Housing affordability, Sustainability indicators and mechanism

Insight of Poverty Income Line as a Determinant of Prudent Home Ownership in the 10th Malaysian Plan

Purpose – This paper will evaluate income line and relate same to housing affordability by the low income earners and the Malaysian vision 2020 mission of attaining a fully developed nation status vide sustainable development indices in the 10th Malaysian housing policy plan. The number of slum dwellers in the world has increased from 715 million in 1991 to 913 million in 2001, and to 998 million in 2005. Projections to 2020 suggest that the world will have up to 1.4 billion slum dwellers. Certainly, if the number of slum dwellers is increasing annually, it seems rather that best practiced housing policy is still deficient (United Nations Human development program 2006, p.16). Government officials are limited in the policy supported actions they are able to take in supporting the housing needs and aspirations of their citizenry. Design/Approach – This paper analyses and sieve ideas from housing programs and sustainable developments. It equally draws criteria which shall be used as an interim assessment of the policy proposals that will pave way for the low income earners to own their homes. Findings - The plan reserve policy programs for home ownership, strategies and programs that shall enable the country to emerge as a high-income nation. The development programs were tuned to the six National Key Results Areas, outlined in the Government Transformation Program, the National Key Economic program Areas of the Economic Transformation Program and the strategic economic reforms in the New Economic Model. The Plan details strategies towards a more focused role for the Government as a regulator and a catalyst for home ownership while upholding the principles of 1 Malaysia: People First, Performance Now to ensure effective delivery of service. But the poverty level has shoot from 3.8 to about 31% as suggested by Jayanath Appundurai. Equally, the RM800 set as the transition line from poverty is not sufficient; RM1886 is proposed to be more reasonable to meet the eight basic necessities. Keywords: Malaysia, Home ownership, Poverty income line and the new economic mode

An Analysis of Preliminary and Post-Discussion Priority Scores for Grant Applications Peer Reviewed by the Center for Scientific Review at the NIH

There has been the impression amongst many observers that discussion of a grant application has little practical impact on the final priority scores. Rather the final score is largely dictated by the range of preliminary scores given by the assigned reviewers. The implication is that the preliminary and final scores are the same and the discussion has little impact. The purpose of this examination of the peer review process at the National Institutes of Health is to describe the relationship between preliminary priority scores of the assigned reviewers and the final priority score given by the scientific review group. This study also describes the practical importance of any differences in priority scores. Priority scores for a sample of standard (R01) research grant applications were used in this assessment. The results indicate that the preliminary meeting evaluation is positively correlated with the final meeting outcome but that they are on average significantly different. The results demonstrate that discussion at the meeting has an important practical impact on over 13% of the applications

How large should whales be?

The evolution and distribution of species body sizes for terrestrial mammals is well-explained by a macroevolutionary tradeoff between short-term selective advantages and long-term extinction risks from increased species body size, unfolding above the 2g minimum size induced by thermoregulation in air. Here, we consider whether this same tradeoff, formalized as a constrained convection-reaction-diffusion system, can also explain the sizes of fully aquatic mammals, which have not previously been considered. By replacing the terrestrial minimum with a pelagic one, at roughly 7000g, the terrestrial mammal tradeoff model accurately predicts, with no tunable parameters, the observed body masses of all extant cetacean species, including the 175,000,000g Blue Whale. This strong agreement between theory and data suggests that a universal macroevolutionary tradeoff governs body size evolution for all mammals, regardless of their habitat. The dramatic sizes of cetaceans can thus be attributed mainly to the increased convective heat loss is water, which shifts the species size distribution upward and pushes its right tail into ranges inaccessible to terrestrial mammals. Under this macroevolutionary tradeoff, the largest expected species occurs where the rate at which smaller-bodied species move up into large-bodied niches approximately equals the rate at which extinction removes them.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 2 data table

UncLe-SLAM: Uncertainty Learning for Dense Neural SLAM

We present an uncertainty learning framework for dense neural simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Estimating pixel-wise uncertainties for the depth input of dense SLAM methods allows re-weighing the tracking and mapping losses towards image regions that contain more suitable information that is more reliable for SLAM. To this end, we propose an online framework for sensor uncertainty estimation that can be trained in a self-supervised manner from only 2D input data. We further discuss the advantages of the uncertainty learning for the case of multi-sensor input. Extensive analysis, experimentation, and ablations show that our proposed modeling paradigm improves both mapping and tracking accuracy and often performs better than alternatives that require ground truth depth or 3D. Our experiments show that we achieve a 38\% and 27\% lower absolute trajectory tracking error (ATE) on the 7-Scenes and TUM-RGBD datasets respectively. On the popular Replica dataset using two types of depth sensors, we report an 11\% F1-score improvement on RGBD SLAM compared to the recent state-of-the-art neural implicit approaches. Source code: https://github.com/kev-in-ta/UncLe-SLAM.Comment: ICCV 2023 Workshop. 20 pages, 9 figure

Revisiting stigmergy in light of multi-functional, biogenic, termite structures as communication channel

Termite mounds are fascinating because of their intriguing composition of nu- merous geometric shapes and materials. However, little is known about these structures, or of their functionalities. Most research has been on the basic com- position of mounds compared with surrounding soils. There has been some targeted research on the thermoregulation and ventilation of the mounds of a few species of fungi-growing termites, which has generated considerable inter- est from human architecture. Otherwise, research on termite mounds has been scattered, with little work on their explicit properties. This review is focused on how termites design and build functional structures as nest, nursery and food storage; for thermoregulation and climatisation; as defence, shelter and refuge; as a foraging tool or building material; and for colony communication, either as in indirect communication (stigmergy) or as an information channel essential for direct communication through vibrations (biotremology). Our analysis shows that systematic research is required to study the prop- erties of these structures such as porosity and material composition. High res- olution computer tomography in combination with nonlinear dynamics and methods from computational intelligence may provide breakthroughs in un- veiling the secrets of termite behaviour and their mounds. In particular, the ex- amination of dynamic and wave propagation properties of termite-built struc- tures in combination with a detailed signal analysis of termite activities is re- quired to better understand the interplay between termites and their nest as superorganism. How termite structures serve as defence in the form of disguis- ing acoustic and vibration signals from detection by predators, and what role local and global vibration synchronisation plays for building are open ques- tions that need to be addressed to provide insights into how termites utilise materials to thrive in a world of predators and competitors