Final Report Of Committee Research Articles

The Ecological Society of America at Mid‐Century: Finding Its Voice

The Ecological Society of America at Mid‐Century: Finding Its Voice

Assuring identity against the growing terrorist travel threat

“To terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons.” Thus reported the 9/11 Commission Final Report 1 . The United Nations World Tourism Organization states that nearly 1bn people annually are crossing international borders, or one in seven people 2 . The only truly distinguishing features for every single person? Physical identifiers, known as biometrics.

The Future for Health in Portugal—Everyone Has a Role to Play

—Portugal's Gulbenkian Foundation set up an independent commission to look forward 25 years to create a new vision for health and health care and make recommendations how that vision could be achieved and sustained.The Commission recognized the wide public support for the health system and the good clinical skills of its health professionals. It noted that Portugal had an aging population, high levels of chronic diseases (particularly diabetes, obesity, and mental health problems), low fertility rates, and high levels of migration. The Commission also noted that Portugal's health system had wide variability in performance and outcomes, did not use evidence systematically, and duplicated many specialist services.The Commission's final report proposed a two-part approach of tackling the social determinants of health and seeking to improve health care delivery. It did not treat finance as a separate strategy or variable but as an integral part of both of these approaches. Thus, for example, on sustainability the report concluded that whilst incentives and financial mechanisms could help, the sustainability of the system would be dependent on politicians being willing to introduce health into all policies and action by citizens, wider society and health professionals.This Commission's report is relevant to other countries that need to address both improving the health of their population and improving health care. In Portugal, a program of activities is underway after publication of the Commission's report. The Gulbenkian Foundation is promoting these activities by supporting three Gulbenkian Challenges: reducing hospital infections, preventing 50,000 people from getting diabetes in the next five years, and improving child health.

Application of the Recommendations of the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission to the Design, Construction, and Evaluation of Buildings and Seismic Risk Mitigation Policies in the United States

An unprecedented level of data concerning building performance in the Canterbury earthquake sequence of 2010–2011 has been collected by the Canterbury Earthquake Royal Commission of Inquiry. In addition to data from a technical investigation undertaken by the New Zealand Department of Building and Housing on four specific buildings, the Royal Commission has collected data from many other invited reports, international peer reviews of reports, submitted testimony, and oral testimony and examination at public hearings. Contained in the Commission's seven-volume final report are 189 specific recommendations for improvements in design codes and standards, hazard mitigation policy, post-earthquake building safety and occupancy tagging, and other topics. Some of these recommendations are unique to New Zealand's system of government, engineering practice, or codes and standards, but many are applicable in the United States.

Social ignorance and Indigenous exclusion: public voices in the province of Quebec, Canada

This article explores the mobilization of ignorance to uphold and perpetuate settler privilege and domination in the public voice record generated by the Bouchard–Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation, held in Quebec, Canada from February 2007 to May 2008. The Commission was a provincially funded inquiry into how the public felt about accommodating ethnocultural deviance from an assumed norm. Focused primarily on recent immigrant difference, Aboriginal accommodation, Aboriginality and Aboriginal rights were deliberately excluded from the Commission's purview, yet they are suggestively apparent in the public display and performance of ignorance in the briefs received by the Commission. The role of the intellectual elite in shaping and perpetuating ignorance is clear in the interplay between the Commission parameters established by Bouchard and Taylor and the public response to those parameters. In this article, we theorize ignorance and its role in reinforcing colonial logics; discuss the Commission's work; analyse the written briefs submitted to the Commission; discuss the Commission's final report; and reflect on the personal and collective dynamics of ignorance and its consequences for settler–Aboriginal relations. Ignorance is understood here not as an absence of knowledge but as an active, though not necessarily self-conscious, agreement to “know the world wrongly” in a way that supports settler interests and masks its own existence.

Advancing US public acceptance of spent fuel storage and transport: proposed outreach services for ionising radiation education support

Expansion of commercial nuclear energy could be one of the future US sources for clean, safe, reliable and economic electricity. However, no federal policy has effectively achieved wide acceptance of nuclear energy, with such policies having fallen victim to the politics of public radiation fears from nuclear energy usage and from spent fuel storage and transport. Many experts have described the foundation of public fear as not so much nuclear technology, but the ionising radiation to which people fear they might be exposed, and this issue has been talked and written about, yet gone substantially unaddressed with respect to public education for more than three decades. In the USA, the Blue Ribbon Commission Final Report is just the latest of clear statements where such an educational need is firmly asserted. The lamentable fact is that no one has made that substantive and concerted effort to do anything about it. Indeed, the only effort seems to have been talk about ‘better communication’, with a focus on...

Are we there yet? A journey of health reform in Australia

• Five years on from the establishment of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, it is timely to review the context for reform and some of the actions taken to date, and to highlight remaining areas of concern and priority. • The Commission's final report was released in July 2009 and presented 123 recommendations organised under four reform themes: Taking responsibility: individual and collective action to build good health and wellbeing - by people, families, communities, health professionals, employers, health funders and governments Connecting care: comprehensive care for people over their lifetime Facing inequities: recognise and tackle the causes and impacts of health inequities Driving quality performance: leadership and systems to achieve best use of people, resources and evolving knowledge. • Overall, the Australian Government's response to the Commission's report has been very positive, but challenges remain in some key areas: Financial sustainability and the vertical fiscal imbalance between the federal and state governments Getting the best value from the health dollar by reducing inefficiency and waste and using value-based purchasing across the public and private health sectors National leadership across the system as a whole Getting the right care in the right place at the right time Health is about more than health care - increasing focus on prevention and recognising and tackling the broader social determinants of health.

Analyzing after-action reports from Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina: Repeated, modified, and newly created recommendations

Thirteen years after Hurricane Andrew struck Homestead, FL, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Alabama, and southeastern Louisiana. Along with all its destruction, the term "catastrophic" was redefined. This article extends the literature on these hurricanes by providing a macrolevel analysis of The Governor's Disaster Planning and Response Review Committee Final Report from Hurricane Andrew and three federal after-action reports from Hurricane Katrina, as well as a cursory review of relevant literature. Results provide evidence that previous lessons have not been learned or institutionalized with many recommendations being repeated or modified. This article concludes with a discussion of these lessons, as well as new issues arising during Hurricane Katrina.

A Review of the Literature on Assessment in Academic and Research Libraries, 2005 to August 2011

A Review of the Literature on Assessment in Academic and Research Libraries, 2005 to August 2011 Jon R. Hufford (bio) Introduction Assessment in United States higher education has become very important in recent years. Virtually all colleges and universities are now striving to prove through empirical evidence that they are committed to improving student learning. Created in late 2005, the US Department of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education was charged with the task of "developing a strategy for higher education to meet the needs of America's population and address the economic and workforce needs of the future."1 The Commission's final report, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of United States Higher Education, makes several recommendations for reform and states in a summary that "improved accountability is vital to ensuring the success of all the other reforms we propose. Colleges and universities must become more transparent about cost, price, and student success outcomes, and must willingly share this information with students and families." Though the report was not an early wake-up call for assessment, since articles on the need and importance of assessment in higher education had been published in the literature before 2006,2 it was an important document on the topic from a political and administrative perspective and has had a significant impact on campuses across the nation. This is because, in response to the Commission's report, the regional accreditation organizations made changes in their standards, and these changes have been directly responsible for the trend toward assessment. As might be expected, some of the standards of several of these regional organizations relate to academic libraries and have changed the way they are assessed. This article reviews the literature on assessment in academic and research libraries that has been published since the Commission on the Future of Higher Education was created in 2005 and up until August 2011. Much has been written about assessment [End Page 5] over the years. The author felt that coverage of the literature of the most recent six years would include sources that would still be reasonably relevant for academic professionals in 2011. The author was also interested in providing an examination of the coverage since the Commission's report to disclose new developments, ideas, and directions in the assessment of academic and research libraries. Also, to offer a competent and manageable review of the literature, the article focuses on assessments concerned with the management or administration of libraries and their collections, public services, and issues or projects affecting more than one department within a library. Assessments in the acquisitions and technical services areas have been excluded. The author's goal was to treat the topic comprehensively. However, some sources were not considered significant enough to be included, and it is possible that other sources that perhaps should have been included were inadvertently left out. A representative selection of noteworthy older monographs and textbooks generally recognized for their contribution to academic and research library assessment has been included, along with a selection of publications on assessment in higher education that provides a more comprehensive perspective of the topic. Though the majority of the sources reviewed in this article were published in the United States and cover developments in the United States, some sources published in international or foreign publications that cover developments in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, or South Africa were included because they discuss developments similar to those taking place in American academic and research libraries and provide important insights into the topic. Assessment is often equated with evaluation. To education professionals, assessment occurs when a researcher wants to discover what a student knows or can do, while evaluation is used to determine the value of a course or program. Authors of books focused on academic and research libraries normally use evaluation when they discuss the measurement (or evaluation) of a library's operations and services. In The Measurement and Evaluation of Library Services, F.W. Lancaster explains in his definition of evaluation that it "consists of the comparison of performance with the objectives of the agency, in order to determine (a) whether there has been any change in performance for a...

Pensacola, Florida Mayor Ashton Hayward's Urban Redevelopment Advisory Committee Final Report

The Urban Redevelopment Advisory Committee presents this Report to Mayor Ashton Hayward and the citizens of Pensacola. Earlier this year, Mayor Hayward — Pensacola’s first strong mayor after the City adopted a new Charter in 2009 — established the Committee with the hope that it would serve as a catalyst for creating improvements in downtown Pensacola. The Mayor assembled seven Pensacola residents of diverse experience, each of whom share a genuine commitment to the community. The Mayor charged us with a sweeping mandate to create a realistic vision for the continued redevelopment of Pensacola’s Community Redevelopment Agency District, including downtown, the waterfront, and the surrounding neighborhoods.The Mayor tasked us with crafting a plan of action to: Build a competitive community; Replenish the Community Redevelopment Agency’s income through new capital investment; Productively use the large inventory of public land; Create jobs and a sustainable future for the community; Create a walkable community by increasing mixed-use density; Ensure that opportunities created and resources expended benefit all; Create a waterfront that is a thriving public space; Create housing with a wide spectrum of affordability; Restore the authentic, historic character of downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods.The Committee first convened in February 2012 and met publicly 15 times over the next eight months. In pursuing our mandate, we sought to be independent, impartial, objective, and thorough. To that end, over 40 presenters — and dozens of citizens — addressed the Committee as a whole. We reviewed thousands of pages of documents and consulted with hundreds of individuals. This Report summarizes the Committee’s conclusions.The Committee’s principal findings consist of over 75 specific policy recommendations, and over 50 action items. While these recommendations cover a variety of topics, our recommended strategies may be summarized in three broad categories: Progress is vital. First and foremost, this Report recognizes that the proper development of downtown Pensacola is vital to the economic, social, commercial, and cultural progress of the Florida Panhandle; Progress will be entrepreneurial. Private investment will drive progress downtown. Plans for improvement should properly consider the risk and market factors that drive private investment; Progress will be incremental. The findings in this Report are intended to support an incremental approach to progress. Sustainable, long-term solutions must be highly adaptable to changing commercial and social conditions over time. These recommendations are aspirational. We fully expect that the Mayor will — as he should — focus on recommendations he believes to be the most important and which can make the greatest difference. We have provided a wide assortment of recommendations so that our leaders may pick and choose as if ordering from a menu. This approach will allow our community to select the vital few rather than focus on the trivial many. The Report presents not only a vision of what we believe downtown Pensacola can realistically become in three to five years, but also specific policy recommendations to implement that vision. We sincerely hope that this Report will assist the Mayor with his efforts to move forward with the ongoing redevelopment of downtown Pensacola.In making these recommendations, we are mindful that our Report is not the first attempt to articulate and implement such a vision. Others — such as the Community Redevelopment Agency — have provided intelligent and insightful plans to improve our community, and we acknowledge a debt to them. We believe our findings are consistent with, and indeed provide a comprehensive framework for implementing, those plans. We do not presume to have exhausted every resource or possibility. The questions are complex, and invite many potential solutions. New ideas and circumstances constantly arise. But we believe this Report presents a compelling path forward for the future of downtown Pensacola.

The strange deaths of section 47

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to evaluate the Law Commission's recommendations concerning the power of removal contained in section 47 of the National Assistance Act 1948. That provision applies to certain people who are seriously ill, living in squalor, or not receiving proper care and it enables them to be taken to hospital or a care home and detained there.Design/methodology/approachThe Law Commission's final report on adult social care law was considered and compared with earlier Commission publications that addressed this issue, and also with other sources (such as a paper published by the Department of Health in 2000).FindingsThe Law Commission calls for the repeal of section 47, because it is hard to interpret, difficult to implement and seems to breach the European Convention on Human Rights. The Commission says other provisions, such as those in environmental health legislation, the Mental Health Act 1983, and the Mental Capacity Act 2005, provide a more appropriate means of caring for people in distress and that more information is needed before a decision can be taken as to what, if anything, should replace section 47. Some of these criticisms, and also the call for more information, were made by the Department of Health.Originality/valueThe Law Commission's findings and recommendations concerning section 47 have not otherwise been widely reported, nor has much been done to analyse their development or antecedence. The paper also offers a modest critique of this aspect of the Commission's report.

Regarding ‘National Health and Hospital Reform Commission final report and patient-centred suggestions for reform’ by T. Jowsey, L. Yen, R. Wells and S. Leeder

The recently published article by Jowsey et al. (2011, Australian Journal of Primary Health 17, 162-168) highlighted key inclusions and omissions from the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission final report with respect to patient-centred care for people with chronic illness. However, the author proposes that this study could have further addressed dimensions of equity and patient-centred practice by including participants with chronic mental illness. The author suggests that interventions to improve chronic illness care typically remain disease specific, which fails to address the realities that face consumers or service providers. References to the literature and professional experience are provided to support the inclusion of mental illness within discussion, services and policy concerning chronic illness.

The Law Commission's final recommendations for a new adult social care statute

PurposeThis paper seeks to set out the Law Commission's final recommendations for the reform of adult social care, including the community care assessment process, service provision, and the recommendations for a new legal framework for adult safeguarding in England and Wales.Design/methodology/approachThe paper discusses each of the Law Commission's recommendations for adult social care and contrasts them with the proposals put forward at the consultation phase of the review.FindingsThe paper argues that a single legal framework for adult social care, including adult safeguarding, will have substantial benefits in terms of legal clarity, consistency, and efficiency. A clear and single legal framework is important for older and disabled people, and their carers, in order to understand fully their entitlements, and for local authorities and partnership agencies (such as the NHS and the police) in order to fully understand their responsibilities.Originality/valueThe paper provides a clear summary of the Law Commission's final report – in particular the recommendations for community care assessments and service provision and adult safeguarding.

Drug Law Reform: Lessons from the New Zealand Experience

New Zealand’s existing drug laws are out of date, overly complex and poorly aligned with official drug policy. In 2007, the Government decided to entrust an independent agency, the New Zealand Law Commission, to comprehensively review the country’s drug law.The Commission will present a final report which is likely to feature a new approach to personal pos­session and use of drugs placing less emphasis on conviction and punish­ment and more on the delivery of effective treatment. This is an important departure as, in many countries, and previously in New Zealand, drug laws have been developed and implemented with little consideration of their wider impact on social policy.The Commission's final report is likely to serve as a blueprint for drug law reform. Many of the recommendations will be applicable to other countries attempting to steer a balance between enacting progressive drug law reform while complying with their international treaty obligations.

Why Help a Growing Scientific Giant?

The pace of progress in Chinese science and technology, from high-speed rail to supercomputers, has been breathtaking. The Web of Science s Essential Science Indicators show China to be ranked at fourth place internationally, behind the United States, Japan, and Germany, in terms of the number of published papers in the peer-reviewed literature. The country comes in at eighth place in number of citations. Almost all of this has been fueled by central government funding which, in the basic sciences, has increased at an annual rate of over 20 percent per year for the last few years. It is a staggering rate of investment compared to other countries. Certainly, China is emerging as a scientific giant, and the rate of growth is the envy of many.

COMBATING TERRORIST FINANCING: IS CANADA'S LEGAL REGIME EFFECTIVE?

When Air India Flight 182 was bombed in 1985, anti-terrorist financing (ATF) law did not exist. In Canada, over the past decade, a broad-based legal regime, consisting of the Criminal Code and the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act, has developed. This regime covers significant regulatory ground and, generally speaking, accords with private and public international law, including the 1267 regime and the 1999 International Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism Financing. But has this regime been effective in fulfilling its stated objective of preventing the funding of terrorist activity? Unless we know the answer – and we do not – we should not be keen to impose additional legal requirements on private or public actors. Regulation is costly, and ineffective regulation imposes unnecessary costs on the private and public sectors. This issue of effectiveness is increasingly important, given the emphasis on terrorist financing in the international community as exemplified in the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force and the United Nations Security Council. This article recommends a full-fledged assessment of the efficacy of the current ATF regime. Although the argument for undertaking an evaluation of ATF law was presented to the Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182 by the author, the recommendations in the commission's final report did not address terrorist financing or the need to assess the efficacy of the current legal regime, except for general recommendations about the role of the National Security Advisor. This is a conspicuous omission, given that ATF law has never been assessed or analysed in terms of its efficacy. The underlying assumption appears to be that the regime works well, but this assumption has not been subject to governmental scrutiny let alone empirical assessment.

National Health and Hospital Reform Commission final report and patient-centred suggestions for reform

The final report of the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission (NHHRC) called for a strengthened consumer voice and empowerment. This has salience for the development of health policy concerning chronic illnesses. This paper compares the recommendations for chronic illness care made in the NHHRC final report with suggestions made by people with chronic illness and family carers of people with chronic illness in a recent Australian study. Sixty-six participants were interviewed in a qualitative research project of the Serious and Continuing Illness Policy and Practice Study (SCIPPS). Participants were people with type II diabetes mellitus, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or chronic heart failure. Family carers were also interviewed. Content analysis was undertaken and participants' recommendations for improving care were compared with those proposed in the NHHRC final report. Many suggestions from the participants of the SCIPPS qualitative research project appeared in the NHHRC final report, including the need to improve care coordination, health literacy and the experience of Indigenous Australians. The research project also identified important issues of family carers, immigrants and people with multiple illnesses, which were not addressed in the NHHRC final report. More specific attention is needed in health reform to improve the experience of family carers, Indigenous peoples, immigrants to Australia and people with multiple illnesses. To align more closely with their needs, health reform must be explicitly informed by the voices of people with chronic illness and their family carers. The NHHRC recommendations must be supplemented with proposals that address the needs of these people for support and the problems associated with poor care coordination.

An Analysis of the Deficit Reduction Commission's Final Report

This paper analyzes the Final Report of the President's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and compares the recommendations to those of The Debt Reduction Task Force of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Digging in the Archives: The Promise and Perils of Primary Documents

This article explores the methodological obstacles to research on wartime sexual violence and the extent to which they can be overcome with archival research. It discusses issues of concept formation, counting victims of human rights abuse, and coding violations. It compares figures from the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report, an analysis of the Commission's published materials, and an analysis of the primary documents and finds that (1) the number of reported cases of sexual violence is significantly higher than the 538 cited by the Commission, (2) men were more often the targets of sexual violence than previously thought, and (3) sexual humiliation and sexual torture were common practices during the war.

Democracy and Memory: Romania Confronts Its Communist Past

All postcommunist societies face major dilemmas in confronting their traumatic past. A functional democracy cannot be based on lies, denial, and amnesia. Romania's exit from communism has resulted in a hybrid quasi-democratic regime, with former communists like Ion Iliescu maintaining influential positions and opposing a genuine break with the past. In 2006, President Traian Basescu established a Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania; the author of this article was selected as its chair. The commission's Final Report was the basis for President Basescu's condemnation of the communist dictatorship as illegitimate and criminal. Offering a comparative perspective, the author focuses on the debates that led to the creation of the commission, the commission's activity and the fierce attacks on it by nostalgic communists and xenophobic nationalists, and the impact of moral justice on Romania's democratic political culture.