让小人物进入董事会

为什么公司真正的主人--股东--不能有提名董事会成员的权力呢?当董事会的管理能力与公司业绩受到广泛的质疑时,投资人有权提名新的董事候选人。     

i-AGENTS: Modeling Organizational Problem Solving in Multi-Agent Teams

Organizations involving human and computer agents are constrained by a variety of factors including: task properties and arrangements; level of technology; knowledge held by, and distributed among, the agents; information and administrative structures; and organizational norms and policies. An important challenge to the scientific community is to develop, validate and apply theories and models to help managers re-engineer their organizations for higher levels of performance. Our research on organizational problem solving aims to develop a computational model of organizations to study interrelationships between agents' knowledge, task requirements, and organization structures and policies. This paper reports the first step of our research toward a computational organizational model—the i-AGENTS framework, a prototype computer system for modeling organizations of intelligent agents. i-AGENTS is composed of a number of high-level concepts: tasks, agents, organization and communication. A task is described in detail by task action, task object and task constraints; an agent is modeled to consist of cognitive attributes and expertise; role-based organizational structure is adopted for describing organizations. From an organization perspective, i-AGENTS extends traditional information processing models of organization (Galbraith 1977) by explicitly addressing the role of agents' knowledge of both the problem domain and the organization in problem solving. When viewed from an engineering perspective, our research is the first step toward an organizational problem-solving model that merges organization theory and distributed artificial intelligence and can be used to simulate and analyze organizational behavior of teams in engineering domains at a very specific level of detail.     

Towards communicating the value of volunteers: lessons from the field

As well as ministers, prominent people in particular fields have been employed as government ‘tsars’ or ‘champions’, to lead on or promote particular government policies. There needs to be greater transparency around these posts, so that their effectiveness can be effectively scrutinized.     

Cost of living, real wages and real incomes in thirteen Canadian cities, 1900–1950

Price indices for thirteen Canadian cities for 1900 to 1950 demonstrate large regional differences in cost of living until 1914. After 1914 regional price levels converged. Before the war, western Canadian cities had the highest cost of living. After 1920 cities in Ontario had the highest cost of living. Accounting for these trends in regional costs of living reveals that regional real wage and real income structures have been present and stable since at least 1901. Thus, regional wage and income disparities are long-standing and persistent features of the Canadian economy.
Coût de la vie, salaires réels et revenus réels dans treize villes canadiennes . Les indices de prix pour treize villes canadiennes entre 1900 et 1950 montrent qu'il y avait de fortes différences dans le coût de la vie jusqu'en 1914. Après 1914, il y a convergence des niveaux de prix régionaux. Avant la guerre, les villes de l'ouest canadien avaient le coût de la vie le plus élevé. Après 1920, des villes de l'Ontario vont avoir le plus haut coût de la vie. Si l'on tient compte de ces tendances régionales dans les niveaux du coût de la vie, il appert que des structures de salaires et de revenus réels ont été en place et stables depuis 1901. Donc, les disparités régionales de salaires et de revenus sont des caractéristiques déjà anciennes et persistantes de l'économie canadienne.     

Revisiting the UNICEF malnutrition framework to foster agriculture and health sector collaboration to reduce malnutrition: A comparison of stakeholder priorities for action in Afghanistan

High rates of undernutrition persist in Afghanistan, but community-level information is scarce on its underlying causes. Developing policy in such situations is affected by varying stakeholder perspectives on the issues. This study uses the UNICEF malnutrition framework and a rapid assessment methodology to compare how stakeholders at community, provincial and national levels describe the food and nutrition situation. Consistent differences in problem definition by administrative level and between agriculture and health sectors were apparent. Stakeholders at all administrative levels widely agreed on the need to improve incomes and employment to ensure food security because of the many constraints to agricultural production. Provincial and national level stakeholders further agreed on the need for nutrition education at all levels of society. The research illustrates how local adaptation and application of the UNICEF malnutrition framework can reveal divergent perspectives, as a first step toward finding common ground and an appropriate policy response.     

Australia's consumption‐based greenhouse gas emissions

We use data from the World Input‐Output Database in a multiregional input–output model to analyse Australian consumption‐based greenhouse gas emissions for the years 1995 to 2009. We find that the emission content of Australian macroeconomic activity has changed over the 15‐year period. Consumption‐based emissions have been growing faster than production‐based emissions since 2001. We show that emissions embodied in Australian imports are increasingly becoming a significant source of emissions. We investigate emissions in Australian imports and find that increased trade with China contributed substantially to the increase in Australia's consumption emissions. China was the largest exporter of emissions to Australia and accounted for almost half of emissions embodied in Australian imports since 2002. The growth of trade with China coincides with the increase in imported emissions as well as the increase in aggregate consumption emissions. Our results suggest that tracking consumption emissions together with production emissions provides a more complete picture of Australian emissions.     

Blockmodeling complex statutes: Mapping techniques based on combinatorial optimization for analyzing economic legislation and its stress point over time

Blockmodeling, a combinatorial technique for relational data analysis, is applied to studying texts of complex economic legislation. By making this area a subject for mathematical modeling, using methods related to combinatorics, logic, and discrete optimization, we describe a new type of frontier between law and economics.     

New development: Policy tsars—Whitehall's expert advisers revealed

The number of tsars in government acting as external experts has been steadily growing. Policy tsars are mostly businessmen and retired public servants. They are left free to work as they wish, so their practices vary greatly. In consequence, issues of propriety (since these are public appointments) and effectiveness (since they advise ministers very directly) arise.