The European peripherality index

Article 2 of the Maastricht Treaty states as the goals of the European Union the promotion of harmonious and balanced economic development, convergence of economic performance, improvement of the quality of life and economic and social coherence between the member states. A prominent role for the achievement of these goals play the envisaged Trans-European Transport Networks (TETN). They are to link landlocked and peripheral areas with the central areas of the Community. The identification of those peripheral regions, whose accessibility and transport infrastructure systems are to be improved, is becoming of great political importance. This is underlined by the European Commission's first Cohesion Report (1997) which emphasises that "regions should ensure that policy success is measurable, that results are regularly monitored, and that the public and political authorities are regularly informed of progress." This paper presents the results of a study on peripherality undertaken for the European Commission. The purpose was to undertake, for the fifteen EU states and twelve candidate countries, the calculation of an index of peripherality of the 'potential' type. The economic potential of a region is the total of destinations in all regions weighted by a function of distance from the origin region. It is assumed that the potential for economic activity at any location is a function both of its proximity or 'travel tim' to other economic centres and of its economic size or 'mass'. The influence of each economic centre on any other centre is assumed to be proportional to its volume of economic activity and inversely proportional to a function of the distance between them. The economic potential of a given location is found by summing the influence on it of all other centres. Based on theoretical considerations, an integrated European Peripherality Index software system was developed to facilitate peripherality indices calculatio scenarios comparison, data updating and results demonstration. It is designed in a way to evaluate the impacts of transport infrastructure projects as well as impacts of general transport policies with respect to peripherality and could be seen as a first attempt for a wider regional monitoring system. In this, it should contribute to answer the debated question whether infrastructure improvements rather lead to cohesion effects or whether they increase disparities between the regions. The paper starts with theoretical considerations on cohesion effects of transport infrastructure improvements and concepts of accessibility and peripherality. Then the methodology used and the software system developed will be addressed briefly. Eventually the results of the indicator calculations will be presented, before the paper concludes with political implications and findings.

Post-Election Audits in the Philippines

How do you observe the unobservable? The election technology in use in the Philippines are optical ballot scanners called Vote Counting Machines (VCMs) that scan, count, and transmit election results at the close of polls back to the national tallying center. Postelection audits called Random Manual Audits (RMAs) are required by law to take place prior to the result becoming final. In this paper, we explore the idea of replacing RMAs by Risk-Limiting Audits (RLAs) that are effcient, have a high chance of correcting an incorrect election outcome by the means of a recount, and can therefore strengthen public confidence in the election

Microsimulation of urban land use

The project ILUMASS (Integrated Land-Use Modelling and Transportation System Simulation) aims at embedding a microscopic dynamic simulation model of urban traffic flows into a comprehensive model system incorporating both changes of land use and the resulting changes in transport demand. The land-use component of ILUMASS will be based on the land-use parts of an existing urban simulation model, but is to be microscopic like the transport parts of ILUMASS. Microsimulation modules will include models of demographic development, household formation, firm lifecycles, residential and non-residential construction, labour mobility on the regional labour market and household mobility on the regional housing market. These modules will be closely linked with the models of daily activity patterns and travel and goods movements modelled in the transport parts of ILUMASS developed by other partners of the project team. The design of the land use model takes into account that the collection of individual micro data (i.e. data which because of their micro location can be associated with individual buildings or small groups of buildings) or the retrieval of individual micro data from administrative registers for planning purposes is neither possible nor, for privacy reasons, desirable. The land use model therefore works with synthetic micro data which can be retrieved from generally accessible public data. ILUMASS is a group project of institutes of the universities of Aachen, Bamberg, Dortmund, Cologne and Wuppertal under the co-ordination of the Transport Research Institute of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). Study region for tests and first applications of the model is the urban region of Dortmund. The common database will be compiled in co-operation with the City of Dortmund. After its completion the integrated model is to be used for assessing the impacts of potential transport and land use policies for the new land use plan of the city. The paper will focus on the land-use parts of the ILUMASS model. It will present the underlying behavioural theories and how they are made operational in the model design, explain how the synthetic population is generated, show first model results and demonstrate the potential usefulness of the model for the planning process.

A practical module system for LF

Module systems for proof assistants provide administrative support for large developments when mechanizing the meta-theory of programming languages and logics. In this paper we describe a module system for the logical framework LF. It is based on two main primitives: signatures and signature morphisms, which provide a semantically transparent module level and permit to represent logic translations as homomorphisms. Modular LF is a conservative extension over LF, and defines an elaboration of modular into core LF signatures. We have implemented our design in the Twelf system and used it to modularize large parts of the Twelf example library