Hard Issues Research Articles

Property on bodily parts, dignity and sovereignty: Some comparative reflections on the English and Italian law of organ transplantations

This paper aims at giving an account of the status quo of English and Italian law on the complex issue of the legal status of human biological materials, with particular reference to the regulation of organ transplantations. It will begin by arguing that a proprietary framework for bodily parts is not, as some maintain, necessarily incompatible with the respect of human dignity; it will then describe how the law “escapes” this hard issue by separately addressing specific questions rather than using a comprehensive approach; it will conclude by describing how comparative law can be useful to deconstruct existing legal categories and forge new ones.

The Changing Landscape of Higher Education: An Analysis of Bologna Policy and Ireland's Engagement with the Process

In 1999 the Irish state agreed to participate voluntarily in an international policy process, more commonly known as Bologna. The process aimed to reform higher education in a ten-year period, and to establish the European Higher Education Area. Policy implementation in Bologna was facilitated through the open method of co-ordination. This mode of governance sidestepped many of the cumbersome hard law and treaty-based issues normally associated with the European Union. This article considers how Bologna utilised the open method of co-ordination, by examining the policy instruments used to facilitate lesson drawing and the sharing of best practice. The paper categorises Bologna instruments as mainly suasive, and examines policy convergence with respect to one policy instrument and one element of policy content. Ireland is identified internationally as having played a pivotal role in the development of qualification frameworks within Bologna. Qualification frameworks based on learning outcomes provided a means to progress quality and recognition action lines with Bologna. The paper moves from the supra-national policy environment to consider the national implementation of the Irish National Framework for Qualifications. This analysis reveals institutional and sectoral level issues concerning Irish universities, which are associated with policy implementation and the adoption of the learning outcomes paradigm. The paper concludes by considering challenges for the co-ordination and implementation of this policy instrument at the supra-national level and ultimately the establishment of the European Higher Education Area based on the Irish universities' experience. Author's e-mail: mairead.nicgiollamhichil@dcu.ie Irish Studies in International Affairs , Vol. 24 (2013), 331-345. doi: 10.33 18/ISIA.201 3.24. 18 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.124 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 05:13:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 332 Irish Studies in International Affairs INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND TO BOLOGNA The Bologna process has been described as a mechanism that enabled policy convergence through transnational problem solving.1 This paper supports this contention and considers that the problem to be solved can be described as the reform of higher education to realise and facilitate the so-called knowledge society. Mary Henkel argues that the 'changing conceptions of knowledge' have led governments and their publics to expand and to adapt their higher-education systems.2 Theoretical knowledge is seen by Daniel Bell as a fundamental characteristic of innovation a cornerstone of the knowledge society: And the university, research organizations and intellectual institutions, where theoretical knowledge is codified and enriched, become the axial structures of the emergent society.3 Scientific knowledge has become an increasingly productive force in society in the twentieth century allowing for the continued development, manipulation and control of social constructs.4 Globalisation is a key factor driving the knowledge society and economy.5 Berit Askling, Mary Henkel and Barbara Kehm assert that the implicit knowledge and skills previously 'inseparable from the human actor' have become progressively explicit, codified and available to all through education.6 Ivar Bleiklie describes this interpretation of knowledge as an outcome as opposed to a procedure.7 Education is seen as a tool to develop human resources first, for the ultimate benefit of society and second, to meet the demands of the marketplace.8 Thomas Davenport and Lawrence Prusak outline succinctly the prevailing paradigm: People search for knowledge because they expect it to help them succeed... Knowledge is the most sought-after remedy to uncertainty. . .When we supply knowledge we expect to benefit too.9 Higher education had been tasked to play a central role to realise the benefits of

An Ontology-Based Collaborative Filtering Personalized Recommendation

Recommender systems have been successfully used to tackle the problem of information overload, where users of products have too many choices and overwhelming amount of information about each choice. Personalization is widely used in various fields to provide users with more suitable and personalized service. Many e-commerce web sites such as online shop retailers make use of recommendation systems. In order to make recommendations to a user, collaborative filtering is an important personalized recommendation technique applied widely in E-commerce. The collaborative approach faces the hard issue of cold start problem and the matrix sparsity problem. The paper presents a collaborative filtering personalized recommendation approach based on ontology in the special domain. The method combines ontology technology and item-based collaborative filtering. The given recommendation approach can tackle the traditional recommenders problems, such as matrix sparsity and cold start problems.

Towards Information Security Metrics Framework for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has recently emerged as new computing paradigm which basically aims to provide customized, reliable, dynamic services over the internet. Cost and security are influential issues to deploy cloud computing in large enterprise. Privacy and security are very important issues in terms of user trust and legal compliance. Information Security (IS) metrics are best tool used to measure the efficiency, performance, effectiveness and impact of the security constraints. It is very hard issue to get maximum benefits from Information security metrics in cloud computing. The aim of this paper is to discuss security issues of cloud computing, and propose basic building blocks of information security metrics framework for cloud computing. This framework helps cloud users to create information security metrics, analyze cloud threats, processing on cloud threats to mitigate them and threat assessment

Malaria elimination strategy and challenges in People’s Republic of China

Background Malaria remains an infectious disease of foremost public health importance in the People’s Republic of China. Historically, high malaria incidence rates have been reported from 24 provinces of P.R. China with more than 30 million cases annually reported. With the significant reduction of malaria incidence, the national malaria elimination was launched in 2010. Methods The risk factors related to malaria transmission in China was reviewed based on the previous literature reviewing, and the capacity of malaria elimination was analysed based on the readiness in surveillance and response system. The challenges and future research priorities related to the elimination strategy were put forward. Results Owing to large-scale control activities facilitated through primary healthcare networks and community participation, the infection rate of Plasmodium vivax has been reduced to under 0.01% in most areas of China, and P. falciparum malaria has been eliminated in most provinces, except Yunnan and Hainan. The elimination strategy formulation and its readiness analysis were performed with discussion on the challenges for the national malaria elimination programme in China, while the sourthern border areas in Yunnan will be the one of most hard issue to elimination the disease. Finally the recommendation on surveillance and response approaches based on currently satus leading to malaria elimination in China were put forward. Conclusion The national malaria elimination programme launched in 2010 is able to achieve its optimal goal to eliminate malaria in whole country by 2020, if facilitated by surveillance and response system.

Interest Groups and Presidential Approval

This article investigates the impact of interest group membership on presidential approval. Data come from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which asked respondents about membership in 11 interest groups. Distinguishing between easy and hard issues, I argue that interest groups will tighten the relationship between issue position and approval for hard issues because of the information that groups provide it members. Analysis looks at interest group effects on five issues: abortion and the Iraq War, both deemed easy; the environment and Social Security Reform, which are harder issues; and stem cell research, which is harder for some. As hypothesized, membership in abortion or veterans groups has no impact on members' approval either directly or through the relevant issues. But for members of environmental and senior groups, the relevant issues are found to have statistically significant impact on approval. And membership in abortion rights groups affects stem cell research. The conclusions put the findings into perspective and discuss directions for future research.

Supreme Court of Canada to decide upon sufficiency of Viagra's disclosure

The Supreme Court of Canada must decide whether the disclosure provided for in Pfizer’s Canadian patent no. 2,163,446 (better known as the Viagra patent) was sufficient. Teva v. Pfizer, [2010] SCCA No 443 is one of the few patent cases on the Supreme Court’s docket, and the decision will be highly anticipated. Canada’s top Court will have to address the impo(r)tence of Pfizer’s specification and certainly cannot shy away from the hard issues.

Campaign Contribution Limits and Strategic Political Parties: Empirical Analysis of Gubernatorial Elections in the American States

Political parties have used hard money, soft money, and/or issue advocacy to strengthen party building. But, as soft money and issue advocacy expenditures began to explode, concerns over both the source of these monies and their continued growth helped lead to the passage of Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Contribution limits on party contributions, however, remained relatively unchanged under the new law. In this paper we examine what might be gained or lost if contribution limits on party contributions are changed. We examine 88 gubernatorial elections from 1995 to 2002 in 50 American states. Analyses of the total dollar amount of party contributions suggest that less restrictive party contribution limits result in political parties being more likely to contribute higher dollar amounts to candidates. This pattern is enhanced when political parties perceive that their contributions are likely to have a greater impact, i.e., in a competitive election. In addition, analyses of the candidates’ reliance on party contributions are supportive of a similar pattern; less restrictive party contribution limits result in candidates being more likely to rely on party contributions, especially when the election becomes competitive. Findings presented in this paper clearly suggest that the financial role of political parties in an election can be enhanced or diminished by making adjustments in the level of political party campaign contribution limits.

Supply chain performance issues in an automobile company: a SAP‐LAP analysis

PurposeSupply chain performance is concerned with managing dependencies between various supply chain members and the joint efforts of all supply chain members to achieve mutually defined goals. There are various performance initiatives reported in the literature but these are often discussed in isolation. Information sharing, information technology, collaborative partnerships, and vendor management that help in improving the supply chain performance are some of the noteworthy initiatives. But there is a need to consider the supply chain in a holistic sense. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a case study of A1, a leading original equipment manufacturer in India, to throw light on the status of supply chain performance initiatives taken in its supply chain.Design/methodology/approachA situation‐actor‐process (SAP)‐learning‐action‐performance (LAP) model has been applied for the case study of A1. The situation represents the present scenario of the organization. Actors are the participants, influencing the situation to evolve different business processes. Based on SAP, various learning issues have been analyzed which lead to suitable action followed by impact on the performance of the supply chain of the organization. Resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm has been suggested to understand the tangible and intangibles associated with the implementation of a supply chain performance measurement system.FindingsThe case study organization has taken various initiatives for improving supply chain performance, such as vendor managed inventory and dealer management system. However, the issues that need attention include measurement of the vendor's performance on criteria which have supply chain orientation, as well as connecting dealers' point of sale information to vendors; This way connects the supply chain as a whole. Emphasis should be placed on second and third tier suppliers, as most of the quality‐related problem is due to them. In the twenty‐first century only those organizations which pay attention to agility, alignment and adaptability for responding to the challenges can gain competitive advantage. SCPMS as a resource can provide a sustained competitive advantage for a firm.Research limitations/implicationsThe SAP‐LAP analysis is used to explain soft and hard issues of supply chain performance in a managerial context as applied to the case of A1. The value of SCPMS can be augmented only when it is embedded in an organization through resource complementarity and co‐specialization.Practical implicationsThe SAP‐LAP model presents the situation of supply chain performance to participants who may initiate the processes needed to make the supply chain effective and efficient. The synthesis of SAP leads to LAP, which bridges the gap by suggesting improvement actions based on the learning from the present situation, actors and processes.Originality/valueThis is a novel approach to analyze quantitative and qualitative issues of supply chain performance initiatives in a single model and its impact on performance of the supply chain.

Local Angle Domain Target Oriented Illumination Analysis and Imaging Using Beamlets

AbstractPrestack depth migration has been widely used for seismic imaging recently. However, the imaging of sub‐salt structure is still a hard issue even in true velocity model. Here, we use local angle domain target oriented illumination analysis to study how the acquisition geometry affects the image quality, especially for some reflectors with certain dip angle in the sub‐salt area. Numerical tests based on 2D SEG/EAGE salt model help us to better understand the capability of prestack migration under the given acquisition system. This analysis can also provide us an easy and efficient way to do target‐oriented migration for the given reflector.

Political theorists as dangerous social actors

What is the appropriate degree of abstraction from existing social facts when engaging in normative political theory? Through a focus on American Indian and other indigenous claims over historically expropriated lands, this essay argues that highly abstracted forms of normative analysis can often misunderstand the core moral problems at stake in real cases, and that they can pose moral dangers when they do so. As argued, the hard moral issues involved in indigenous land claims within countries such as Canada and the United States often have far more to do with questions about competing uses for public lands than with abstract property theory as such. The essay argues that normative theorists will often do more social good, and pose fewer dangers, when they pay close attention to the real moral challenges that social actors face on the ground than when they become captured by abstract questions with ambiguous practical importance.

Magnetic Resonance

This paper presents a novel methodology for the non-rigid registration of cardiac perfusion MRI exams. The target medical application is the automated quantitative assessment of myocardial perfusion for clinical diagnosis and longitudinal study of ischemic pathologies. Specifically, an original variational method for the groupwise registration of p-MRI exams based on high-dimensional feature distribution matching using (normalized) mutual information, is developed. The hard issue of estimating information in high-dimensional spaces is solved using state-of-the-art kth-nearest neighbor (kNN) entropy estimators. Combined with mean-shift approximation, the latter allow to efficiently optimize (normalized) mutual information over finite- and infinite-dimensional motion spaces. This framework is applied to the groupwise alignment of cardiac p-MRI exams using local contrast enhancement curves as a feature set, and a B-spline model for cardio-thoracic motions. Preliminary experimental assessment suggests that the technique allows for accurately aligning up to 34 p-MRI images simultaneously, and for further reliably computing perfusion parameters whose joint analysis strongly correlates with expert-based visual diagnosis.

Responsibility Rewarded: Ethics, Engagement, and Scientific Autonomy in the Labyrinth of the Minotaur

Dramatic changes in the stem cell ethical and research ecosystem in the last 10 years depended on active engagement among scientists, ethicists, government, and public. Tracing that story demonstrates the value of such engagement, and forecasts a successful method for meeting future challenges.

The OSCE's uncertain future

The credibility of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) as a regional security provider is increasingly in doubt. With a mandate covering hard security issues and conflict, as well as economic and human security, it is the only organisation in Europe to embody the concept of comprehensive security. Its 56 members include the United States, all west European countries, Russia and all states of the former Soviet Union, including five central Asian nations, but its very inclusiveness means that it is hampered by disagreements among its members. And it cannot be a normative body on human rights and democratic freedoms as long as its membership includes undemocratic regimes in post-Soviet Eurasia.

Using accurate AIC-based performance models to improve the scheduling of parallel applications

Predictions based on analytical performance models can be used on efficient scheduling policies in order to select adequate resources for an optimal execution in terms of throughput and response time. However, developing accurate analytical models of parallel applications is a hard issue. The TIA (Tools for Instrumenting and Analysis) modeling framework provides an easy to use modeling method for obtaining analytical models of MPI applications. This method is based on modeling selection techniques and, in particular, on Akaike’s information criterion (AIC). In this paper, first the AIC-based performance model of the HPL benchmark is obtained using the TIA modeling framework. Then the use of this model for assessing the runtime estimation on different backfilling policies is analyzed in the GridSim simulator. The behavior of these simulations is compared with the equivalent simulations based on the theoretical model of the HPL provided by its developers.

PARETO HONOURING POVERTY REDUCTION

ABSTRACTPolicy reforms often pit the poor against the poor by triggering a fall in poverty for some but an increase in poverty for others. Aggregated national measures gloss over these fine patterns and pronounce ‘a reduction in poverty’– is such aggregation across poor individuals ethically permissible? Addressing this type of aggregation is a hard issue. This paper has made an attempt in that direction by outlining an axiomatically grounded aggregate measure of such gains or losses, duly giving more importance to the losses to a poor compared to the gains of another poor.

Measuring service quality and a comparative analysis in the passenger carriage of airline industry

Acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers have long been two important subjects for service organizations. Creating difference in every section of the service is a key factor to success on realization of these purposes. When service quality is thought as an important factor for creating difference in service industry, the importance of estimating service quality provided to customers comes out. Estimating service quality is a hard issue for service firms because services are intangible, heterogeneous, perishable, and inseparable. Estimating service quality provides service firms how to manage their marketing operations appropriately. Therefore, this estimation should be performed with right measurement scales. In this study, first, service marketing literature was reviewed and then data were gathered via questionnaire forms. Lastly exploratory factor analysis was conducted and two scales which estimate service quality were compared in the research. The findings reveal that the weighted Servperf scale has explained perceived service quality more much than the weighted Servqual scale did in the research.

Developing Q-methodology to explore staff views toward the use of technology in nurse education

Technology in education is moving quickly in terms of the hardware and software applications available, but also due to the expectations of an increasingly digitally competent student population. Academics have to rethink their pedagogy in relation to these changes. Nurse educators, in particular, must face the challenge of effectively integrating technology into what is essentially a hands-on, people-centred profession. To date, the factors most commonly cited as barriers to the adoption of e-learning by academics have focused on explicit and tangible ('hard') issues. Less frequently mentioned are the implicit and tacit ('soft') factors which are harder to identify. This article describes a pilot study using Q-methodology to explore the limitations of commonly used research methods in identifying how these hard and soft issues are prioritised by individuals, through the voices of nurse educators.

How the New Government Utilizes Emerging Internet Media in Japan

The newly elected Hatoyama administration has launched several projects on the Internet to facilitate interactions with the public. Politicians use Twitter to tweet their political activities and interact with other users. Government agencies have launched several new Web sites, such as hatomimi and jukugi kake-ai, and integrated video-steaming sites, such as ustream.com. Notwithstanding these efforts, however, the new administration has not yet been able to apply these forums to resolving hard political issues.

Agora: International Commercial Arbitration by Gary Born

This book is superb. It is truly comprehensive and beautifully written. It fears not to wade into the hardest issues in arbitration. It addresses them with undeniable clarity and makes bold judgements, even while acknowledging the strength of the opposing positions. In the end, anyone approaching any serious issue in international commercial arbitration will want to see what Born has to say and the authorities he has collected on the topic. As I am reviewing in particular the last 1,000 pages or so, I will start where most readers will: at the back, more specifically, the index. An index in a book like this is, of course, essential. An otherwise unknown nineteenth century London antiquary named Francis Douce has gone down in history for (aside from a museum bequest) observing that ‘the man who published a book without an index ought to be damned ten miles beyond Hell, where the Devil could not get for stinging nettles’.30 I agree. But there are indices, and there are indices. A well-done index is a marvellous thing. This one is very well done. It is aimed at the practitioner with a passing familiarity with the field. Thus, its entries correspond to the way a practitioner would put the question. You want to know about ‘conflicts of interest’? No problem. Would that be ‘arbitrators’ (see ‘impartiality and independence’) or ‘counsel’ (go straight to p. 2,313)? ‘Competence-Competence’? You'll find it under that term, and also under ‘jurisdiction, of arbitrators’ and cross-referenced as ‘Kompetenz-Kompetenz’. But you do need to have a passing familiarity with the field. You won't find an entry for ‘arbitration clauses’, the term my contract-writing partners will usually use. You need to remember that in the field they are more often called ‘arbitration agreements’. If there is any quibble here it is …