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General Lessons (general + lesson)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	40%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	20%

Selected Abstracts

The molecular genetics of holoprosencephaly,,

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF MEDICAL GENETICS, Issue 1 2010
Erich Roessler§
Abstract Holoprosencephaly (HPE) has captivated the imagination of Man for millennia because its most extreme manifestation, the single-eyed cyclopic newborn infant, brings to mind the fantastical creature Cyclops from Greek mythology. Attempting to understand this common malformation of the forebrain in modern medical terms requires a systematic synthesis of genetic, cytogenetic, and environmental information typical for studies of a complex disorder. However, even with the advances in our understanding of HPE in recent years, there are significant obstacles remaining to fully understand its heterogeneity and extensive variability in phenotype. General lessons learned from HPE will likely be applicable to other malformation syndromes. Here we outline the common, and rare, genetic and environmental influences on this conserved developmental program of forebrain development and illustrate the similarities and differences between these malformations in humans and those of animal models. Published 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Institutions, distributional concerns, and public sector reform

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 2 2001
JØRGEN GRØNNEGÅRD CHRISTENSEN
As in otherWestern countries, a wave of reform has swept the Danish public sector. The record of these reforms is mixed and paradoxical; an ambiguous delegation of executive authority and radical privatization have been successfully implemented, while other measures, especially contracting out and user democracy or the introduction of greater choice, turn out to have failed. The paper argues that this experience offers two general lessons. First, shortterm costs and benefits are decisive to those who enact and implement public sector reform. Second, institutional factors specific to each type of reorganization have a major impact on the political distribution of costs and benefits. [source]

Civil Servants, Economic Ideas, and Economic Policies: Lessons from Italy

GOVERNANCE, Issue 4 2005
LUCIA QUAGLIA
Building on theoretically oriented and empirically grounded research on two key macroeconomic institutions in Italy, this article explains how and why civil servants can engineer major policy changes, making a difference in a country's trajectory. Italy provides a challenging testing ground for this kind of analysis, as it is generally portrayed as a highly politicized system in which political parties and politicians fully control public policies. Three general lessons can be learned, the first being that the role of civil servants in changing modes of economic governance depends on the resources that they master in the system in which they operate. "Intangible assets" are of primary importance in complex and perceived technical policies, such as monetary and exchange rate policy, which have high potential for "technocratic capture." Second, in these policies, certain intangible assets, such as specific bodies of economic knowledge or policy paradigms, have a considerable impact on policy making. Third, besides interactions in international fora, the professional training of civil servants is a mainstream way through which economic policy beliefs circulate and gain currency, laying the foundations for policy shifts. By highlighting the importance of the intangible assets of macroeconomic institutions, this research makes an unorthodox contribution to the primarily economic literature on central bank independence. [source]

Game Theory: Pitfalls and Opportunities in Applying It to International Relations

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 3 2000
Steven J. Brams
Four problems plague game-theoretic models in international relations (IR): (1) misspecifying the rules, (2) confusing goals and rational choice, (3) arbitrarily reducing the multiplicity of equilibria, and (4) forsaking backward induction. An alternative approach, theory of moves (TOM), is discussed and applied to Prisoners' Dilemma and then, more prescriptively, to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979,80. TOM incorporates into the framework of game theory an initial state in a payoff matrix, the moves and countermoves required to reach a "nonmyopic equilibrium," and threat, moving, and order power that reflect asymmetries in the capabilities of the players. It also allows for incomplete information, which in the Iran hostage crisis led to misperceptions and flawed play. Two general lessons come out of the U.S. foreign-policy failure in the Iran hostage crisis: (1) know the game you are playing, and (2) make threats only if they are likely to be credible. In specific games, TOM provides detailed prescriptions for optimal play, depending on where play starts and the powers of the players, that could aid foreign-policy makers, especially in crises. [source]

RETURNS TO SCALE AND REGIONAL GROWTH: THE STATIC-DYNAMIC VERDOORN LAW PARADOX REVISITED,

JOURNAL OF REGIONAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2007
John S. L. McCombie
ABSTRACT It has long been an article of faith amongst regional economists that increasing returns to scale are necessary to explain the punctiform location of economic activity and population. However, there is no consensus in the empirical literature over whether returns to scale are constant or increasing. A notable example of this lack of agreement is provided by the static-dynamic Verdoorn law paradox. While the dynamic Verdoorn law (specified using growth rates) yields estimates of substantial increasing returns to scale, the static Verdoorn law (specified using log-levels) indicates only the presence of constant returns to scale. In this paper, we explain the static-dynamic Verdoorn law paradox by showing that estimates of returns to scale obtained using the static law are subject to a spatial aggregation bias, which biases the estimates towards constant returns to scale. We illustrate our arguments by means of simulation exercises. The results obtained hold general lessons for applied economic analysis using spatial data. [source]

Exit polling in a cold climate: the BBC,ITV experience in Britain in 2005

JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL STATISTICAL SOCIETY: SERIES A (STATISTICS IN SOCIETY), Issue 3 2008
John Curtice
Summary., Conducting an exit poll to forecast the outcome of a national election in terms of both votes and seats is particularly difficult in Britain. No official information is available on how individual polling stations voted in the past, use of single-member plurality means that there is no consistent relationship between votes and seats, electors can choose to vote by post and most of those who vote in person do so late in the day. In addition, around one in every six intended exit poll respondents refuses to participate. Methods that were developed to overcome these problems, and their use in the successful 2005 British Broadcasting Corporation,Independent Television exit poll, are described and evaluated. The methodology included a panel design to allow the estimation of electoral change at local level, coherent multiple-regression modelling of multiparty electoral change to capture systematic patterns of variation, probabilistic prediction of constituency winners to account for uncertainty in projected constituency level shares, collection of information about the voting intentions of postal voters before polling day and access to interviewer guesses on the voting behaviour of refusals. The coverage and accuracy of the exit poll data are critically examined, the effect of key aspects of the statistical modelling of the data is assessed and some general lessons are drawn for the design and analysis of electoral exit polls. [source]

Unplanned shutdowns plus lack of knowledge equals incidents

PROCESS SAFETY PROGRESS, Issue 4 2004
Albert Ness
Two incidents and a near miss, each precipitated by an unplanned shutdown, are reviewed. In every case, a lack of understanding of the process control and/or chemistry led to an uncontrolled reaction that resulted in process equipment damage and, in one case, injured several people. The incidents are described in detail, and some general lessons and recommendations are drawn from them. © 2004 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog, 2004 [source]

THERAPY AS MEMORY-WORK: DILEMMAS OF DISCOVERY, RECOVERY AND CONSTRUCTION

BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY, Issue 4 2002
Erica Burman
ABSTRACT In this paper I have sought to shift the focus on the construction of memory within psychotherapeutic practice in a number of different directions to draw some more general lessons for the process and status of therapeutic accounts. The precipitating context for the current scrutiny of memory-making within therapy may have limited its scope and fruitfulness. The fact that this issue was largely prompted by debates about the status of (usually) adult women's recovery of memories of early abuse within therapy is a relevant factor that has been compounded by issues of professional credibility and hierarchy. Clearly, at a cultural level, women's memories of childhood abuse function politically as well as personally, as reflected by the social and legal responses to this challenge. However, guidelines for professional practice cannot legislate for the indeterminacies surrounding the subjectivity of memory, while assumptions underlying the empirical psychological resources drawn upon to inform debates in psychotherapy require critical scrutiny. Clinical and interpretive dilemmas extend beyond the status accorded client memorial reports to therapists' memory-making practices as textualized via both supervision and clinical notetaking. Drawing on more recent (including feminist) discussions of memory that identify different political possibilities within third and first person accounts it was suggested that, rather than eschewing the subjectivity of memory, therapists can instead analyse this as a key interpretive and reflexive resource to inform their own practice. [source]

Innis Lecture: Explorations in medium-run macroeconomics

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS, Issue 4 2005
Paul Beaudry
This area of research has emerged over the last decade as a new and distinct field of enquiry. In this paper, I overview a set of personal attempts aimed at understanding certain medium-run phenomena such as: changes in the wage structure, changes in the world distribution of income-per-capita, and changes in growth patterns across OECD countries. The goal of the paper is to extract general lessons from these experiences. In particular, I will discuss why models of endogenous technological choice may be a good starting point for studying medium-run phenomena. JEL classification: E00, O00 Explorations du monde macroéconomique à moyen terme., La macroéconomie à moyen terme s'attache aux phénomènes économiques agrégés qui se manifestent sur des périodes de 10 à 25 ans. Ce champ de recherche a émergé au cours de la dernière décennie en tant que chantier nouveau et distinct. Dans ce texte, je fais le tour d'un ensemble de tentatives personnelles pour comprendre certains phénomènes de moyen terme comme les changements dans les structures de salaires, les changements dans la distribution des revenus per capita dans le monde, et les changements dans les patterns de croissance à travers les pays de l'OCDE. L'objectif de ce mémoire est d'extraire certaines leçons générales de ces expériences. En particulier, on discute des raisons pour lesquelles les modèles de choix technologiques endogènes constituent un bon point de départ pour l'étude des phénomènes de moyen terme. [source]

One task, a few approaches, many impacts: Private-sector involvement in Canadian building code enforcement

CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION/ADMINISTRATION PUBLIQUE DU CANADA, Issue 3 2010
Jeroen Van Der Heijden
As a result, private-sector inspectors were introduced as an alternative to local government control on the adherence to building regulations. However, this privatization has resulted in variations among jurisdictions. The main difference is the degree of private-sector involvement. Based on a series of interviews with forty-seven insiders, this article addresses the implications of such differences in privatization on the practice and process of building code enforcement. It draws some general lessons for the redesign of control over building regulations but at the same time warns against copy-pasting best practices. Sommaire : Pour répondre aux questions touchant à l'exécution de la réglementation par les municipalités, les gouvernements au Canada ont entrepris la réforme de leurs régimes de règlement et de contrôle de la construction depuis les années 1980. C'est ainsi que des inspecteurs du secteur privé ont été engagés au lieu de laisser les administrations locales veiller au respect des règlements de la construction. Cependant, cette privatisation a abouti à des modifications au sein des juridictions. La principale différence réside dans le degré de participation du secteur privé. En se fondant sur une série de quarante-sept entrevues avec des professionnels du secteur, le présent article porte sur les incidences que les différences dues à la privatisation ont sur la pratique et le processus d'application du code de construction. Il tire certaines leçons générales de la nouvelle conception du contrôle des règlements de la construction, tout en faisant des mises en garde contre les meilleures pratiques consistant à faire du copier-coller. [source]