Assessing Consistency and Fairness in Sentencing: A Comparative Study in Three States

Summarizes a study of sentencing guidelines in Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia comparing levels of predictability and judicial discretion under different guideline systems, effectiveness in limiting discriminatory disparities, and lessons learned

Unlocking Public Entrepreneurship and Public Economies

entrepreneurship, urban public services, polycentricity

Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource

The goal of this paper is to summarize the lessons learned from a large body of international, interdisciplinary research on common-pool resources (CPRs) in the past 25 years and consider its usefulness in the analysis of scholarly information as a resource. We will suggest ways in which the study of the governance and management of common-pool resources can be applied to the analysis of information and \u27the intellectual public domain.\u27 The complexity of the issues is enormous for many reasons: the vast number of players, multiple conflicting interests, rapid changes of technology, the general lack of understanding of digital technologies, local versus global arenas, and a chronic lack of precision about the information resource at hand. We suggest, in the tradition of Hayek, that the combination of time and place analysis with general scientific knowledge is necessary for sufficient understanding of policy and action. In addition, the careful development of an unambiguous language and agreed-upon definitions is imperative. As one of the framing papers for the Conference on the Public Domain, we focus on the language, the methodology, and outcomes of research on common-pool resources in order to better understand how various types of property regimes affect the provision, production, distribution, appropriation, and consumption of scholarly information. Our analysis will suggest that collective action and new institutional design play as large a part in the shaping of scholarly information as do legal restrictions and market forces

In pursuit of comparable concepts and data about collective action:

Research on collective action confronts two major obstacles. First, inconsistency in the conceptualization and operationalization of collective action, the key factors expected to affect collective action, and the outcomes of collective action hampers the accumulation of knowledge. Inconsistent terminology obscures consistent patterns. Second, the scarcity of comparable data thwarts evaluation of the relative importance of the many variables identified in the literature as likely to influence collective action. The International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research program addresses both of these problems. Since its founding in 1993, the IFRI network of collaborating research centers has used a common set of methods and concepts to study forests, the people who use forest resources, and their institutions for resource management. The basic social unit of analysis in IFRI is the user group, defined as a set of individuals with the same rights and responsibilities to forest resources. This definition does not require formal organization or collective action, since these features are potential dependent variables. This strategy for data collection allows analysis of relationships between diverse forms of social heterogeneity and collective action within groups with comparable rights to resources. IFRI's relational database also captures the connections among forest systems, sets of resource users, particular forest products, formal and informal rules for resource use, and formal local and supra-local organizations. By the middle of 2001, the IFRI database included data on 141 sites with 231 forests, 233 user groups, 94 forest organizations, and 486 products in 12 countries. Drawing upon these data, IFRI researchers are contributing substantially to our understanding of collective action for institutional development, the mediating role institutions play relative to demographic and market pressures in patterns of resource use, and relationships between particular institutions and forest conditions. The paper describes IFRI's strategy for collecting comparable data based on consistent conceptualization and operationalization, summarizes the contributions of IFRI research to the study of collective action for natural resource management, and identifies continuing challenges.resource management, Forests and forestry Social aspects., Collective action, Forest products., Capacity,

State Sentencing Guidelines: Profiles and Continuum

Describes twenty-one state sentencing commissions; highlights key attributes of each state's sentencing guidelines and the composition of each commission; and compares guideline systems along a continuum from "more voluntary" to "more mandatory.

Developing capacity for agricultural water management: Current practice and future directions

YesThis paper defines concepts of capacity and capacity development for agricultural water management, and particularly the contributions made by ICID in this area in the recent past. Working from a theoretical framework of overlapping domains of capacity development ¿ the enabling environment, the organisational and the individual domains, with knowledge management as a cross-cutting theme ¿ the paper reviews previous work in the field and then summarises a range of case studies from the sector which illuminate key aspects of these different domains. The paper notes the need to accommodate a rapidly-changing context for agricultural water management to take account of the increasing demand for water resources in all sectors, and the consequent requirement for support of new approaches to capacity development. These new approaches emphasise the growing importance of authentic knowledge, internally-generated learning and self-development, whether at the level of the organisation or the individual. The paper also recognises the need for continuing and long-term support of capacity development, particularly in processes of organisational and institutional change, where there is no single set of guidelines or practices which will fit every situation. Specific directions for future work are suggested, including increased attention to monitoring and evaluation of capacity development, and closer links to emerging work on water governance.Non

What do people bring into the game? experiments in the field about cooperation in the commons

The study of collective action requires an understanding of the individual incentives and of the institutional constraints that guide people in making choices about cooperating or defecting on the group facing the dilemma. The use of local ecosystems by groups of individuals is just one example where individual extraction increases well-being, but aggregate extraction decreases it. The use of economic experiments has enhanced the already diverse knowledge from theoretical and field sources of when and how groups can solve the problem through selfgoverning mechanisms. These studies have identified several factors that promote and limit collective action, associated with the nature of the production system that allows groups to benefit from a joint-access local ecosystem, and associated with the institutional incentives and constraints from both self-governed and externally imposed rules. In general, there is widespread agreement that cooperation can happen and be chosen by individuals as a rational strategy, beyond the ?tragedy of the commons? prediction. A first step in this paper is to propose a set of layers of information that the individuals might be using to decide over their level of cooperation. The layers range from the material incentives that the specific production function imposes, to the dynamics of the game, to the composition of the group and the individual characteristics of the player. We next expand the experimental literature by analyzing data from a set of experiments conducted in the field with actual ecosystem users in three rural villages of Colombia using this framework. We find that repetition brings reciprocity motives into the decision making. Further, prior experience of the participants, their perception of external regulation, or the composition of the group in terms of their wealth and social position in the village, influence decisions to cooperate or defect in the experiment. The results suggest that understanding the multiple levels of the game, in terms of the incentives, the group and individual characteristics or the context, can help understand and therefore explore the potentials for solving the collective-action dilemma.collective action, cooperation, experimental economics, field experiments, local ecosystems

Estimating Drag and Heating Coefficients for Hollow Reentry Objects in Transitional Flow Using DSMC

In NASAs Object Reentry Survival Analysis Tool (ORSAT), aerodynamic drag and aerothermal heating coefficients are computed for each of the free-molecular, continuum, and transitional flow regimes using analytical and semi-analytical methods. These methods are typically limited to convex, blunt objects (such as spheres) and are applied to other objects such as boxes and cylinders using multiplicative shape factors to account for the different behavior. Previous literature has analyzed the aerodynamic and aerothermodynamic properties of flow around sharp-edged objects like boxes and cylinders in transitional flow, though only those objects with solid external boundaries. However, many reentry objects we have encountered in real spacecraft have been hollow (i.e., with the potential to allow flow through them). We present here preliminary results from analyses performed using the NASA Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) Analysis Code (DAC) on hollow cylinders and boxes (with varying wall thickness-diameter ratio)

Wicked but worth it: student perspectives on socio-hydrology

harvestPolicy AnalysisMulti Actor System