AIS President\u27s Report: 2000-2001

This report presents the work of AIS from January 1, 2000 to April 30, 2001. It summarizes the highlights during the author\u27s term as president

Government as a social machine - the implications of government as a social machine for making and implementing market-based policy

This is the second of two reports from the Government as a Social Machine project. The first report gave an overview of the evolution of electronic/digital government, and explored the concept of 21st century government as a \u27social machine\u27. This report identifies seven social machines developed by governments in Australia and New Zealand. These social machines harness digital technologies in order to deliver more effective and efficient services, develop better business practices, and enable better accountability and transparency. The report gives an overview of each social machine in context, describing the social need that is being met and the community that has developed it, and begins to unravel some of the socio-political consequences that might arise from the use of these social machines within the public policy context. These reports are not intended to be comprehensive (further educational materials are being developed as part of the ANZSOG Case Library), but they are intended to begin a conversation amongst those studying or practicing in public policy as to how governments can better understand, manage and employ these evolving social machines for better governance and social benefit

Promoting the Development of an Integrated Numerical Representation through the Coordination of Physical Materials

How do children use physical and virtual tools to develop new numerical knowledge? While concrete instructional materials may support the delivery of novel information to learners, they may also over-simplify the task, unintentionally reducing learners' performance in recall and transfer tasks. This reduction in testing performance may be mitigated by embedding physical incongruencies in the design of instructional materials. The effort of resolving this incongruency can foster a richer understanding of the underlying concept. In two experiments children were trained on a computerized number line estimation task, with a novel scale (0-180), and then asked to perform a series of posttest number line estimation tasks that varied spatial features of the training number line. In experiment 1, during training with feedback, children either received a ruler depicting endpoint and quartile magnitudes (i.e., 0, 45, 90, 135, 180) that physically matched the on-screen number line (congruent ruler), a proportionally-similar ruler scaled 33% larger than the on-screen number line (incongruent ruler), or no ruler. Children were trained to criterion before proceeding to posttest. Results indicated that while children who used the congruent ruler performed well during training, their performance at posttest was less accurate than the other two conditions. On the other hand, by increasing the difficulty of the learning task, while providing relevant landmark information, children in the incongruent ruler condition produced the highest accuracy at posttest. In experiment 2, controlling for learning task duration, the incongruent ruler and congruent ruler conditions were compared directly. Posttest results confirmed an advantage for children in the more complex, incongruent ruler condition. These results are interpreted to suggest that landmarks representations are an important and accessible means of developing a mature numerical representation of the number line. Furthermore, the results confirm that desirable difficulties are an essential component of the learning process. Potential implications for the design of learning activities that balance instructional support with conceptual challenge are discussed

Damaged Goods: Why, In Light of the Supreme Court\u27s Recent Punitive Damages Jurisprudence, Congress Must Amend the Federal Rules of Evidence

Since the 1980s, a wide range of courts and commentators have expressed concern over large punitive damages awards handed out by civil juries against a wide array of tortfeasors. A late 2001 study revealed that from 1985 to 2001, eight multi-billion dollar punitive damages awards were granted, with four of them being handed down in the years 1999 to 2001 alone.\u27 Not surprisingly, all but one of these verdicts were handed down against large corporations. Among the current members of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens in particular has regularly noted the especially dangerous tendency the current punitive damages regime poses: We have admonished that [p]unitive damages pose an acute danger of arbitrary deprivation of property. Jury instructions typically leave the jury with wide discretion in choosing amounts, and the presentation of evidence of a defendant\u27s net worth creates the potential that juries will use their verdicts to express biases against big businesses, particularly those without strong local presences. While many commentators note that punitive damages awards are still so rare that this should not pose a concern, others disagree, and still others posit that an even more pressing threat is the havoc that expectations of punitive damages awards can wreak on settlement negotiations. Within the past nine years, the United States Supreme Court has issued two landmark tort decisions, BMW of North America v. Gore, and State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell, holding in both instances that excessive punitive damages awards, which were upheld by their respective state supreme courts, violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. In light of the fact-specific nature of these cases, as well as the Court\u27s refusal to adopt a bright-line rule as to when punitive damages awards should be deemed excessive, questions remain regarding the precedential value of these cases and if the principles they espouse will be applied faithfully by the state courts that review punitive damages verdicts. In fact, it is unclear whether these two decisions will have any effect at all in causing lower courts to rein in punitive damages awards in post-verdict appellate review. The Supreme Court itself has acknowledged this worry, stating that [b]ecause no two cases are truly identical, meaningful comparisons of such awards are difficult to make. With these worries in mind, many commentators have suggested imposing additional constraints to reduce the risk of excessive punitive damages rendered by juries, or alternatively, to make such awards easier to strike down once they are rendered. Somewhat surprisingly, the Supreme Court entered the fray in Gore by identifying a limit on excessive punitive damages awards imposed by substantive due process. While Gore and its progeny ostensibly focus on after-the-fact checks on civil juries, this Note asserts that a more prudent and efficient means of ensuring reasonable and non- excessive punitive damages verdicts would be to prevent juries from even hearing the type of evidence that Gore and State Farm chastised trial courts for admitting in the first place. The most effective way to accomplish this constitutionally required goal would be to have Congress amend the Federal Rules of Evidence to take some discretion away from trial judges in situations analogous to Gore and State Farm. In particular, the Federal Rules should be amended to render inadmissible all types of evidence describing wrongful conduct by the defendant which: (1) bears minimal relation to the tort at issue; (2) occurred in another jurisdiction; (3) was legal when and where it occurred; or (4) for some other reason has no nexus to the specific harm suffered by the plaintiff

AFTER THE SALE: LEVERAGING MAINTENANCE WITH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGYl

Post-sale maintenance is already an important part of the competitive strategy of some firms, and will become increasingly important to many others in the future. The maintenance problem can be converted into an opportunity for additional revenue, for the sale of add-on products and services and for improved customer relationships. Information technology (IT) can play a significant role in leveraging a firm\u27s investments in maintenance, and indeed in directing its overall approach to the maintenance issue. This paper first presents a conceptual framework for understanding the maintenance process. There are three generic approaches: design, risk reduction, and service support. Examples from a variety of industries are used to illustrate each approach and to indicate the role that IT can play in its successful implementation. Next the paper turns to the question of searching for potential applications. The traditional inputprocess- output analysis framework, enhanced through the addition of the trigger\u27 concept, is suggested as a method of finding competitively important applications of IT to the maintenance process. Here the inputs include a broken product, spare parts, and tools, while the outputs include the repaired product, removed parts, used/returned tools, and such by products as sales leads, product history, and learning for the maintenance staff. Among the triggers are a broken product, inspections, indicators, and simply elapsed time. Numerous examples suggest ways in which IT can be used to augment the triggers, inputs, and outputs of the maintenance process. Finally, the paper notes that the search method used is a specific case of the application of the triggerinput- process-output framework to a single stage of Ives and Learmonth \u27customer resource life cycle.- This model suggests looking at a product from the customer\u27s perspective, focusing on ways that IT might be used to assist the customer in specifying, acquiring, owning, or disposing of the product or of other resources used in conjunction with the product. This search process will be most fruitful in an information- intensive environment and requires for its success the active involvement of functional and general managers. We believe that a thoughtful selection of examples, combined with consideration of the firm\u27s competitive strategy and distinctive competencies. will produce both potential applications of IT and the starting point for discussions concerning the overall role of IT in a firm

Using Video Segments to Enhance Early Clinical Experiences of Prospective Teachers

This poster outlines a perspective for framing an early clinical experience course by using a model in which video segments of typical K-5 classrooms are used in conjunction with a structured classroom observation instrument as a focus for subsequent classroom observations. By introducing a conceptual framework for student observations using video segments, students are provided with an efficient and conceptually coherent means for guiding their classroom observation experiences in school settings in the remainder of the course

Urgency, utility, and time horizon of transplant benefit

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110847/1/lt24082.pd

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You: Use and Abuse of Astrophysical Models in Gravitational-wave Population Analyses

One of the goals of gravitational-wave astrophysics is to infer the number and properties of the formation channels of binary black holes (BBHs); to do so, one must be able to connect various models with the data. We explore benefits and potential issues with analyses using models informed by population synthesis. We consider 5 possible formation channels of BBHs, as in Zevin et al. (2021b). First, we confirm with the GWTC-3 catalog what Zevin et al. (2021b) found in the GWTC-2 catalog, i.e. that the data are not consistent with the totality of observed BBHs forming in any single channel. Next, using simulated detections, we show that the uncertainties in the estimation of the branching ratios can shrink by up to a factor of $\sim 1.7$ as the catalog size increases from $50$ to $250$, within the expected number of BBH detections in LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA's fourth observing run. Finally, we show that this type of analysis is prone to significant biases. By simulating universes where all sources originate from a single channel, we show that the influence of the Bayesian prior can make it challenging to conclude that one channel produces all signals. Furthermore, by simulating universes where all 5 channels contribute but only a subset of channels are used in the analysis, we show that biases in the branching ratios can be as large as $\sim 50\%$ with $250$ detections. This suggests that caution should be used when interpreting the results of analyses based on strongly modeled astrophysical sub-populations.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures, comments are welcom

LINKING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND CORPORATE STRATEGY: AN ORGANIZATIONAL VIEW

Considerable attention is currently focused on using information technology to obtain and maintain competitive advantage. Numerous mini-cases have been used to illustrate the use of information systems for competitive advantage, and various conceptual frameworks have been proposed to aid in the identification of such applications. Much of this work is grounded in a single concept of strategy formulation, an approach that we refer to as top-down. A survey of senior information system executives demonstrates the potential problems of relying on a top-down approach. A second, adaptive approach, appears to offer potential value for the identification of competitive applications in organizations facing considerable environmental turbulence or in which senior strategists are relatively uninformed about information system resources. Five organizational roles are defined that can help support this adaptive approach

Multi-scale analysis on soil improved by alkali activated fly ashes

The development of soil treatment techniques using alkali-activated binders is a relevant issue since the increasing interest into the use of new binders as an alternative solution for geotechnical engineering applications, such as soil improvement. Alkali activated binders are formed by alkaline activation of an aluminosilicate source, containing precursor materials like fly ash, silica fume, steel sludge, which chemically react with an alkaline solution (i.e. sodium hydroxide, sodium silicate) forming a three-dimensional aluminosilicate gel with cementitious properties (Duxon et al. 2007, Provis and van Deventer 2014, Davidovits 1991, Xu and van Deventer 2000, Shi et al. 2006). Recycling of waste materials such as by-product from industrial process to synthesize a new binder favors a closed loop of material use, which minimizes the generation of waste and reduces the costs of production. Alkali activated binders represent a viable sustainable alternative to the use of ordinary binders for soil improvement (Vitale et al. 2017a; Vitale et al. 2017b). In the present study, an insight into the mechanical improvement induced by alkali-activated binders based on the activation of two different type of fly ashes on a clayey soil has been presented. An experimental multiscale analysis on chemo-physical evolution of the systems and its influence on microstructural features of treated soil has been developed highlighting the link between alkaline activation processes and macroscopic evolution of soil properties. Mechanical tests have been performed and interpreted taking into account the chemo-physical evolution of alkali activated fly ashes. Effects of binder content and curing time have been also considered. Addition of alkali-activated binders increases shear strength of the treated samples since the very short term. A reduction of compressibility and an increase of yield stress of treated samples have been also detected, whose extent depends on the curing time and on the binder content. Macroscopic behaviour of treated soil has been linked to the experimental evidences at microscale. Mineralogical and fabric changes induced by alkali-activated binders have been monitored over time by means of X ray diffraction (XRD), thermogravimetric analysis, 29Si NMR spectroscopy and Mercury Intrusion Porosimetry (MIP). Test results showed a high reactivity of alkali activated fly ashes as alumino-silicate source promoting precipitation of new mineralogical phase forming chains and networks with cementitious properties, responsible of the mechanical improvement of the treated soil. The efficiency of treatment has been also highlighted by comparing the mechanical performance induced by alkali-activated binder with the one promoted by ordinary Portland cement. Duxon P., Fernàndez-Jiménez A., Provis J.L., Lukey G.C., Palomo A., van Deventer J.S.J (2007). Geopolymer Technology: The Current State of the Art. Journal of Materials Science 42, 9, 2917-2933. Provis J.L., van Deventer J.S.J (2014). eds. Alkali Activated Materials. Vol.13. RILEM State of the Art Reports. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Davidovits J. (1991). Geopolymers: inorganic polymeric new materials. J Therm Anal, 37,1633-1656. Xu H., van Deventer J.S.J. (2000). The geopolymerisation of alumina-silicate minerals. Int J Miner Process, 59, 247-266. Shi C., Krivenko P.V., Roy D.M. (2006). Alkali-activated Cements and Concretes. Abington, UK, Taylor and Francis. Vitale E., Coudert E., Deneele D., Paris M., Russo G. (2017a). Multiscale analysis on a kaolin improved by an alkali-activated binder. Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Coupled Phenomena in Environmental Geotechnics (CPEG2), Leeds, UK. Vitale E., Russo G., Dell’Agli G., Ferone C., Bartolomeo C. (2017b). Mechanical behaviour of soil improved by alkali activated binders. Environments, 4, 80, doi:10.3390/environments4040080