Download or read book Africa s Infrastructure written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sustainable infrastructure development is vital for Africa s prosperity. And now is the time to begin the transformation. This volume is the culmination of an unprecedented effort to document, analyze, and interpret the full extent of the challenge in developing Sub-Saharan Africa s infrastructure sectors. As a result, it represents the most comprehensive reference currently available on infrastructure in the region. The book covers the five main economic infrastructure sectors information and communication technology, irrigation, power, transport, and water and sanitation. 'Africa s Infrastructure: A Time for Transformation' reflects the collaboration of a wide array of African regional institutions and development partners under the auspices of the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa. It presents the findings of the Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD), a project launched following a commitment in 2005 by the international community (after the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland) to scale up financial support for infrastructure development in Africa. The lack of reliable information in this area made it difficult to evaluate the success of past interventions, prioritize current allocations, and provide benchmarks for measuring future progress, hence the need for the AICD. Africa s infrastructure sectors lag well behind those of the rest of the world, and the gap is widening. Some of the main policy-relevant findings highlighted in the book include the following: infrastructure in the region is exceptionally expensive, with tariffs being many times higher than those found elsewhere. Inadequate and expensive infrastructure is retarding growth by 2 percentage points each year. Solving the problem will cost over US$90 billion per year, which is more than twice what is being spent in Africa today. However, money alone is not the answer. Prudent policies, wise management, and sound maintenance can improve efficiency, thereby stretching the infrastructure dollar. There is the potential to recover an additional US$17 billion a year from within the existing infrastructure resource envelope simply by improving efficiency. For example, improved revenue collection and utility management could generate US$3.3 billion per year. Regional power trade could reduce annual costs by US$2 billion. And deregulating the trucking industry could reduce freight costs by one-half. So, raising more funds without also tackling inefficiencies would be like pouring water into a leaking bucket. Finally, the power sector and fragile states represent particular challenges. Even if every efficiency in every infrastructure sector could be captured, a substantial funding gap of $31 billion a year would remain. Nevertheless, the African people and economies cannot wait any longer. Now is the time to begin the transformation to sustainable development.

Download or read book The Keillor Reader written by Garrison Keillor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories, essays, poems, and personal reminiscences from the sage of Lake Wobegon When, at thirteen, he caught on as a sportswriter for the Anoka Herald, Garrison Keillor set out to become a professional writer, and so he has done—a storyteller, sometime comedian, essayist, newspaper columnist, screenwriter, poet. Now a single volume brings together the full range of his work: monologues from A Prairie Home Companion, stories from The New Yorker and The Atlantic, excerpts from novels, newspaper columns. With an extensive introduction and headnotes, photographs, and memorabilia, The Keillor Reader also presents pieces never before published, including the essays “Cheerfulness” and “What We Have Learned So Far.” Keillor is the founder and host of A Prairie Home Companion, celebrating its fortieth anniversary in 2014. He is the author of nineteen books of fiction and humor, the editor of the Good Poems collections, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Download or read book Beyond Role and Play written by Markus Montola and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sleep in the Military written by Wendy M. Troxel and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sleep problems can have long-term consequences for servicemembers' health and for force readiness and resiliency. This first-ever comprehensive review of sleep-related policies and programs led to recommendations for improving sleep across the force.

Download or read book Interconnecting Smart Objects with IP written by Jean-Philippe Vasseur and published by Morgan Kaufmann. This book was released on 2010-07-06 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interconnecting Smart Objects with IP: The Next Internet explains why the Internet Protocol (IP) has become the protocol of choice for smart object networks. IP has successfully demonstrated the ability to interconnect billions of digital systems on the global Internet and in private IP networks. Once smart objects can be easily interconnected, a whole new class of smart object systems can begin to evolve. The book discusses how IP-based smart object networks are being designed and deployed. The book is organized into three parts. Part 1 demonstrates why the IP architecture is well suited to smart object networks, in contrast to non-IP based sensor network or other proprietary systems that interconnect to IP networks (e.g. the public Internet of private IP networks) via hard-to-manage and expensive multi-protocol translation gateways that scale poorly. Part 2 examines protocols and algorithms, including smart objects and the low power link layers technologies used in these networks. Part 3 describes the following smart object network applications: smart grid, industrial automation, smart cities and urban networks, home automation, building automation, structural health monitoring, and container tracking. Shows in detail how connecting smart objects impacts our lives with practical implementation examples and case studies Provides an in depth understanding of the technological and architectural aspects underlying smart objects technology Offers an in-depth examination of relevant IP protocols to build large scale smart object networks in support of a myriad of new services

Download or read book Copyright s Excess written by Glynn Lunney and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tests copyright's fundamental premise that more money will increase creative output using the US recording industry from 1962-2015.

Download or read book A Practical Introduction to Regression Discontinuity Designs written by Matias D. Cattaneo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-11 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this Element, which continues our discussion in Foundations, the authors provide an accessible and practical guide for the analysis and interpretation of Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs that encourages the use of a common set of practices and facilitates the accumulation of RD-based empirical evidence. The focus is on extensions to the canonical sharp RD setup that we discussed in Foundations. The discussion covers (i) the local randomization framework for RD analysis, (ii) the fuzzy RD design where compliance with treatment is imperfect, (iii) RD designs with discrete scores, and (iv) and multi-dimensional RD designs.

Download or read book Playful Trajectories and Experimentations written by Judit Vari and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-16 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The principal aim of this book is to discuss the role of video games in socialization of children and young people. The development of video games is a sign of and a factor in the democratization of modern societies.

Download or read book The Gameful World written by Steffen P. Walz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-01-16 with total page 687 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if every part of our everyday life was turned into a game? The implications of “gamification.” What if our whole life were turned into a game? What sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel is today becoming reality as “gamification.” As more and more organizations, practices, products, and services are infused with elements from games and play to make them more engaging, we are witnessing a veritable ludification of culture. Yet while some celebrate gamification as a possible answer to mankind's toughest challenges and others condemn it as a marketing ruse, the question remains: what are the ramifications of this “gameful world”? Can game design energize society and individuals, or will algorithmic incentive systems become our new robot overlords? In this book, more than fifty luminaries from academia and industry examine the key challenges of gamification and the ludification of culture—including Ian Bogost, John M. Carroll, Bernie DeKoven, Bill Gaver, Jane McGonigal, Frank Lantz, Jesse Schell, Kevin Slavin, McKenzie Wark, and Eric Zimmerman. They outline major disciplinary approaches, including rhetorics, economics, psychology, and aesthetics; tackle issues like exploitation or privacy; and survey main application domains such as health, education, design, sustainability, or social media.

Download or read book Assessment Sensitivity written by John Gordon MacFarlane and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John MacFarlane debates how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative, and how we might use this idea to give satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis. Although there is a substantial philosophical literature on relativism about truth, going back to Plato's Theaetetus, this literature (both pro and con) has tended to focus on refutations of the doctrine, or refutations of these refutations, at the expense of saying clearly what the doctrine is. In contrast, Assessment Sensitivity begins with a clear account of what it is to be a relativist about truth, and uses this view to give satisfying accounts of what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do. The book seeks to provide a richer framework for the description of linguistic practices than standard truth-conditional semantics affords: one that allows not just standard contextual sensitivity (sensitivity to features of the context in which an expression is used), but assessment sensitivity (sensitivity to features of the context from which a use of an expression is assessed). The Context and Content series is a forum for outstanding original research at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. The general editor is Francois Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris).

Download or read book The Politics of Evidence written by Justin Parkhurst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political areas. This book provides new insights into the nature of political bias with regards to evidence and critically considers what an ‘improved’ use of evidence would look like from a policymaking perspective. Part I describes the great potential for evidence to help achieve social goals, as well as the challenges raised by the political nature of policymaking. It explores the concern of evidence advocates that political interests drive the misuse or manipulation of evidence, as well as counter-concerns of critical policy scholars about how appeals to ‘evidence-based policy’ can depoliticise political debates. Both concerns reflect forms of bias – the first representing technical bias, whereby evidence use violates principles of scientific best practice, and the second representing issue bias in how appeals to evidence can shift political debates to particular questions or marginalise policy-relevant social concerns. Part II then draws on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology to understand the origins and mechanisms of both forms of bias in relation to political interests and values. It illustrates how such biases are not only common, but can be much more predictable once we recognise their origins and manifestations in policy arenas. Finally, Part III discusses ways to move forward for those seeking to improve the use of evidence in public policymaking. It explores what constitutes ‘good evidence for policy’, as well as the ‘good use of evidence’ within policy processes, and considers how to build evidence-advisory institutions that embed key principles of both scientific good practice and democratic representation. Taken as a whole, the approach promoted is termed the ‘good governance of evidence’ – a concept that represents the use of rigorous, systematic and technically valid pieces of evidence within decision-making processes that are representative of, and accountable to, populations served.

Download or read book Software Studies written by Matthew Fuller and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of short expository, critical and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social and aesthetic impact of software. Experts from a range of disciplines each take a key topic in software and the understanding of software, such as algorithms and logical structures.

Download or read book Financing Pulp Mills An Appraisal of Risk Assessment and Safeguard Procedures written by Machteld Spek and published by CIFOR. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study analyses the risk assessment and socio-environmental safeguard procedures associated with the financing of pulp mill projects. The type and cost of the fibre source is clearly key to the economic competitiveness of any pulp mill. Nevertheless, investment institutions often carry out only limited assessment of the fibre source of the proposed mill. Although a growing number of financial institutions have adopted policies to employ social and environmental safeguard screening for investments in developing countries and transitioning economies, the scope of such screenings is in fact quite limited and they are often implemented ineffectively. [Provided by publisher]

Download or read book The C Programming Language written by Bjarne Stroustrup and published by Addison-Wesley. This book was released on 2013-07-10 with total page 1366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new C++11 standard allows programmers to express ideas more clearly, simply, and directly, and to write faster, more efficient code. Bjarne Stroustrup, the designer and original implementer of C++, has reorganized, extended, and completely rewritten his definitive reference and tutorial for programmers who want to use C++ most effectively. The C++ Programming Language, Fourth Edition, delivers meticulous, richly explained, and integrated coverage of the entire language—its facilities, abstraction mechanisms, standard libraries, and key design techniques. Throughout, Stroustrup presents concise, “pure C++11” examples, which have been carefully crafted to clarify both usage and program design. To promote deeper understanding, the author provides extensive cross-references, both within the book and to the ISO standard. New C++11 coverage includes Support for concurrency Regular expressions, resource management pointers, random numbers, and improved containers General and uniform initialization, simplified for-statements, move semantics, and Unicode support Lambdas, general constant expressions, control over class defaults, variadic templates, template aliases, and user-defined literals Compatibility issues Topics addressed in this comprehensive book include Basic facilities: type, object, scope, storage, computation fundamentals, and more Modularity, as supported by namespaces, source files, and exception handling C++ abstraction, including classes, class hierarchies, and templates in support of a synthesis of traditional programming, object-oriented programming, and generic programming Standard Library: containers, algorithms, iterators, utilities, strings, stream I/O, locales, numerics, and more The C++ basic memory model, in depth This fourth edition makes C++11 thoroughly accessible to programmers moving from C++98 or other languages, while introducing insights and techniques that even cutting-edge C++11 programmers will find indispensable. This book features an enhanced, layflat binding, which allows the book to stay open more easily when placed on a flat surface. This special binding method—noticeable by a small space inside the spine—also increases durability.

Download or read book Combinatory Linguistics written by Cem Bozsahin and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines to what extent the mediating relation between constituents and their semantics can arise from combinatory knowledge of words. It traces the roots of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and uses the theory to promote a Humean question in linguistics and cognitive science: Why do we see limited constituency and dependency in natural languages, despite their diversity and potential infinity? A potential answer is that constituents and dependencies might have arisen from a single resource: adjacency. The combinatory formulation of adjacency constrains possible grammars.

Download or read book Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law Second Edition written by J. M. Smits and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 1025 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaim for the first edition: ïThis is a very important and immense book. . . The Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law is a treasure-trove of honed knowledge of the laws of many countries. It is a reference book for dipping into, time and time again. It is worth every penny and there is not another as comprehensive in its coverage as ElgarÍs. I highly recommend the Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law to all English chambers. This is a very important book that should be sitting in every university law school library.Í _ Sally Ramage, The Criminal Lawyer Containing newly updated versions of existing entries and adding several important new entries, this second edition of the Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law takes stock of present-day comparative law scholarship. Written by leading authorities in their respective fields, the contributions in this accessible book cover and combine not only questions regarding the methodology of comparative law, but also specific areas of law (such as administrative law and criminal law) and specific topics (such as accident compensation and consideration). In addition, the Encyclopedia contains reports on a selected set of countriesÍ legal systems and, as a whole, presents an overview of the current state of affairs. Providing its readers with a unique point of reference, as well as stimulus for further research, this volume is an indispensable tool for anyone interested in comparative law, especially academics, students and practitioners.

Download or read book Now for the Long Term written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: