Suchergebnisse

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is critical to global peace and security, yet more than 20 years of negotiations over its reform have proved fruitless. We use recent advances in the theory of a priori voting power to present a formal quantitative appraisal of the implications for democratic equity and efficiency of the "structural reforms" contained within 11 current reform proposals, as well as the separate effect of expansion of the UNSC membership. Only one reform proposal–a weakening of the veto power for Permanent Members by requiring two negative votes for a veto to be effective—robustly dominates the status quo against our measures of equity and efficiency. Several proposed structural reforms may actually worsen the issues they ostensibly claim to resolve.

We analyze democratic equity in council voting games (CVGs). In a CVG, a voting body containing all members delegates decision-making to a (time-varying) subset of its members, as describes, e.g., the relationship between the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). We develop a theoretical framework for analyzing democratic equitability in CVGs at both the country and region levels, and for different assumptions regarding preference correlation. We apply the framework to evaluate the equitability of the UNSC, and the claims of those who seek to reform it. We find that the individual permanent members are overrepresented by between 21.3 times (United Kingdom) and 3.8 times (China) from a country-level perspective, while from a region perspective Eastern Europe is the most heavily overrepresented region with more than twice its equitable representation, and Africa the most heavily underrepresented. Our equity measures do not preclude some UNSC members from exercising veto rights, however.

British ethnic minority unemployment rates are considerably higher than those of the white population. In 1991 the ethnic minority unemployment rate was more than double that of the white majority. One possible explanation is that Britain's ethnic minorities are concentrated in areas of economic disadvantage. The authors use the 2% Individual Sample of Anonymised Records (SAR) in conjunction with area-based census data for pseudo travel-to-work areas, to explore the relative importance of individual characteristics and area characteristics on ethnic minority unemployment rates. Multilevel modelling techniques are employed to estimate simultaneously variations between individuals and between areas after allowing for variables measured at both levels of analysis. The most important differences in the propensity to unemployment are shown to be between individuals, and, compared with whites, ethnic minority groups are shown to be disadvantaged wherever they live. In general, there is also evidence of greater variation in ethnic minority unemployment between areas than there is for whites. However, there is the same underlying geography of unemployment for the black and white populations, but a slightly different pattern for Asian ethnic groups. These differences can be explained only partially by area-level characteristics. In all, it is argued that at the spatial scale which is identifiable in the Individual SAR, ethnic minority unemployment cannot be attributed to geographical distribution, though data at a finer geographical scale are needed to test this hypothesis more fully.

The risk of unemployment varies between individuals, between occupations and industries, and between places. The Sample of Anonymised Records drawn from the 1991 Census is used to model geographical, demographic, and socioeconomic variations in male unemployment by means of multilevel logit models. The underlying structure of the problem is such that cells in a multiway cross-tabulation of individual characteristics (level 1) are nested within places (level 2). Geographical variations in male unemployment are found even after allowing for age, marital status, ethnicity, higher education qualifications, social class, and industry.

With . index by W.S. Barton. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Dated: February 9th, 1917. ; M.S. Gould, chairman. ; Mode of access: Internet.

The GEO-C doctoral programme, entitled "Geoinformatics: Enabling Open Cities", is funded by the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (International Training Networks (ITN), European Joint Doctorates) until December 2018, and is managed by three European universities in Germany, Portugal and Spain. 15 doctoral grantholders (Early Stage Researchers) were selected to work on specific three-year projects, all contributing to improving the notion of open cities, and specifically to an Open City Toolkit of methodologies, code, and best practice examples. Contributions include volunteered geographic information (VGI), public information displays, mobility apps to encourage green living, providing open data to immigrant populations, reducing the second-order digital divide, sensing of quality of life, proximity based privacy protection, and spatio-temporal online social media analysis. All doctoral students conducted long-term visits and were embedded in city governments and businesses, to gain experience from multiple perspectives in addition to the researcher and users' perspective. The projects are situated within three areas: transparency, participation, and collaboration. They took mostly a bottom-up (citizen-centric) approach to (smart) open cities, rather than relying on large IT companies to create smart open cities in a top-down manner. This paper discusses the various contributions to enabling open cities, explains in some detail the Open City Toolkit, and its possible uses and impact on stakeholders. A follow-up doctoral program has been solicited and, if successful, will continue this line of research and will strengthen aspects of privacy, data provenance, and trust, in an effort to improve relations between data (e.g. news) publishers and consumers.

The GEO-C doctoral programme, entitled "Geoinformatics: Enabling Open Cities", is funded by the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (International Training Networks (ITN), European Joint Doctorates) until December 2018, and is managed by three European universities in Germany, Portugal and Spain. 15 doctoral grantholders (Early Stage Researchers) were selected to work on specific three-year projects, all contributing to improving the notion of open cities, and specifically to an Open City Toolkit of methodologies, code, and best practice examples. Contributions include volunteered geographic information (VGI), public information displays, mobility apps to encourage green living, providing open data to immigrant populations, reducing the second-order digital divide, sensing of quality of life, proximity based privacy protection, and spatio-temporal online social media analysis. All doctoral students conducted long-term visits and were embedded in city governments and businesses, to gain experience from multiple perspectives in addition to the researcher and users' perspective. The projects are situated within three areas: transparency, participation, and collaboration. They took mostly a bottom-up (citizen-centric) approach to (smart) open cities, rather than relying on large IT companies to create smart open cities in a top-down manner. This paper discusses the various contributions to enabling open cities, explains in some detail the Open City Toolkit, and its possible uses and impact on stakeholders. A follow-up doctoral program has been solicited and, if successful, will continue this line of research and will strengthen aspects of privacy, data provenance, and trust, in an effort to improve relations between data (e.g. news) publishers and consumers.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is having profound mental health consequences for many people. Concerns have been expressed that, at their most extreme, these consequences could manifest as increased suicide rates. We aimed to assess the early effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on suicide rates around the world. Methods: We sourced real-time suicide data from countries or areas within countries through a systematic internet search and recourse to our networks and the published literature. Between Sept 1 and Nov 1, 2020, we searched the official websites of these countries' ministries of health, police agencies, and government-run statistics agencies or equivalents, using the translated search terms "suicide" and "cause of death", before broadening the search in an attempt to identify data through other public sources. Data were included from a given country or area if they came from an official government source and were available at a monthly level from at least Jan 1, 2019, to July 31, 2020. Our internet searches were restricted to countries with more than 3 million residents for pragmatic reasons, but we relaxed this rule for countries identified through the literature and our networks. Areas within countries could also be included with populations of less than 3 million. We used an interrupted time-series analysis to model the trend in monthly suicides before COVID-19 (from at least Jan 1, 2019, to March 31, 2020) in each country or area within a country, comparing the expected number of suicides derived from the model with the observed number of suicides in the early months of the pandemic (from April 1 to July 31, 2020, in the primary analysis). Findings: We sourced data from 21 countries (16 high-income and five upper-middle-income countries), including whole-country data in ten countries and data for various areas in 11 countries). Rate ratios (RRs) and 95% CIs based on the observed versus expected numbers of suicides showed no evidence of a significant increase in risk of suicide since the pandemic began ...