Top-down Way Research Articles

Suggestions for fixing top-down coastal fisheries management through participatory approaches

Abstract Marine protected areas created in a top-down way can be costly and ineffective due to low compliance of resource users. Conversely, employing users’ local knowledge and involving them in decision-making processes could decrease costs and conflicts, in addition to increasing the chances of management success. Here the potential to change conflicting MPAs into conservation areas that take into account fishers’ use and knowledge is assessed based on a case study on the Brazilian coast (Paraty town). Fishers ( n =206) from 11 villages were interviewed regarding their main fishing targets and gear, and then only the experienced ones ( n =41) were interviewed from three main fishing villages about the most important commercial species. Fish landings were sampled for one year in these three villages ( n =823), where participatory mapping and group interviews with fishers were also conducted to determine their opinions regarding management and how they thought it should be undertaken. Management measures should not be equivalent across the whole region, as there were clear differences in the target species and gear used. Fishers identified 55 important fishing spots, eight of which were important for more than five villages, while the experts identified 10 important fishing areas for the target species, which was supported by the sampling of fish landings. The fishers were not opposed to management and no-take reserves but would make some changes in the current design of these measures if it were up to them. Based on these data, a few changes were indicated in the design of these areas that would likely reduce the conflict between fishers and enforcement agencies. This kind of approach could be used as a framework for adapting conflictive MPAs or to support the establishment of new ones where fisheries are relevant.

Public service media and the partnership agenda. Matching public policy with PSB strategy

In recent years, in repositioning themselves as public service media, public broadcasters have increasingly built on cooperation and partnership activities in various domains (culture, education, innovation, etc.). While the focus on partnerships has been induced by policy-makers, public broadcasters have realized the legitimizing nature of their collaboration activities. This article seeks to analyse the partnership agenda from a regulatory and public broadcasting strategy angle. It questions whether the new practice to enforce partnerships between public broadcasters and other actors through management contracts is transposed into public broadcasters’ day-to-day reality and which problems might arise in that respect. Evidence derives from a comparative analysis of public broadcasting rhetoric, strategy and practice in Flanders (VRT), the Netherlands (NPO) and United Kingdom (BBC) and builds on a series of expert interviews with broadcasting representatives conducted between August 2010 and September 2011. Setting out from (among others) Graham Murdock’s Digital Commons model, this article aims to recommend improvements for the partnership agenda and nuances highly idealistic theoretical approaches. The main argument is that there is a misfit between theory, policy rhetoric and public broadcasters’ actual strategies. This does not mean that there is no legitimacy in the idea of a networked public broadcaster. In fact, the partnership agenda is crucial for the sustainability of public service media. However, it cannot and will not be successful if enforced in a top-down way exclusively.

Determining the capacity of time-based selection.

In visual search, a set of distractor items can be suppressed from future selection if they are presented (previewed) before a second set of search items arrive. This visual marking mechanism provides a top-down way of prioritizing the selection of new stimuli, at the expense of old stimuli already in the field (Watson & Humphreys, 1997). Typically, this preview benefit has been examined by measuring the efficiency of detecting a target item contained within a newly presented set. Such work has led to the suggestion that the capacity of the visual marking mechanism is extremely high. Here we present five experiments which measured performance for selecting and responding to all the new stimuli rather than a single target item within the new set. The findings illustrate that when selecting and responding to all new items intentionally trying to prioritize new stimuli has a capacity limit of approximately six to seven items and that this limit depends partly on properties of the stimuli. The findings are discussed in terms of mechanisms of time-based selection, attentional capacity limits, and the task demands of multiple item selection.

The evolution of HIV policy in Vietnam: from punitive control measures to a more rights-based approach

Aim: Policymaking in Vietnam has traditionally been the preserve of the political elite, not open to the scrutiny of those outside the Communist Party. This paper aims to analyse Vietnam's HIV policy development in order to describe and understand the policy content, policy-making processes, actors and obstacles to policy implementation.Methods: Nine policy documents on HIV were analysed and 17 key informant interviews were conducted in Hanoi and Quang Ninh Province, based on a predesigned interview guide. Framework analysis, a type of qualitative content analysis, was applied for data analysis.Results: Our main finding was that during the last two decades, developments in HIV policy in Vietnam were driven in a top-down way by the state organs, with support and resources coming from international agencies. Four major themes were identified: HIV policy content, the policy-making processes, the actors involved and human resources for policy implementation. Vietnam's HIV policy has evolved from one focused on punitive control measures to a more rights-based approach, encompassing harm reduction and payment of health insurance for medical costs of patients with HIV-related illness. Low salaries and staff reluctance to work with patients, many of whom are drug users and female sex workers, were described as the main barriers to low health staff motivation.Conclusion: Health policy analysis approaches can be applied in a traditional one party state and can demonstrate how similar policy changes take place, as those found in pluralistic societies, but through more top-down and somewhat hidden processes. Enhanced participation of other actors, like civil society in the policy process, is likely to contribute to policy formulation and implementation that meets the diverse needs and concerns of its population.

Designing and modeling cyberworlds using the incrementally modular abstraction hierarchy based on homotopy theory

For designing and modeling complicated and sophisticated systems such as cyberworlds, their mathematical foundation is critical. To realize it, two important properties called the homotopy lifting property (HLP) and homotopy extension property (HEP) are applied for designing and modeling a system in a bottom-up way and a top-down way, respectively. In this paper, an enterprise system and a real-time embedded system are considered as important socially emerging cases of cyberworlds, where the π-calculus processes for describing these behaviors formally, a Petri net for explaining process interactions, and XMOS XC programs are modeled and designed by our approach. The spaces in both properties are specified by the incrementally modular abstraction hierarchy by climbing down the abstraction hierarchy from the most abstract homotopy level to the most specific view level, while keeping invariants such as homotopy equivalence and topological equivalence.

The Relationship between Response Time and the Strength of Top-Down Attentional Control: An ERP Study

A recent ERP study using a spatial cueing paradigm found that the physiological indices accompanying the orienting, shifting and allocation processes of attention, and the performance on the task in terms of speed and accuracy of responding on the other hand covaried (Talsma, Mulckhuyse, Slagter, & Theeuwes, 2007). However, the stimuli used in the former study possibly allowed for bottom-up capture of attention. Therefore the results could not unequivocally be attributed to a top-down attentional process. The present study is a follow-up of the Talsma et al. (2007) study and the stimuli design used in this study controlled for possible bottom-up effects. As a result, participants needed to spatially allocate attention in a top-down way. Indeed, in this study an Event-related Potential (ERP) component associated with the top-down allocation of attention was found; the N2-posterior-contralateral (N2pc). N2pc amplitudes were bigger in the fastest versus the slowest trials for the validly and non-informatively cued targets at posterior scalp sites. The present study replicated the Talsma et al. (2007) findings that the target-evoked N1 components were larger for the faster trials in the validly and non-informatively cued trials.

Analysis of biological networks

Analysis of biological networks

From numerical concepts to concepts of number

Many experiments with infants suggest that they possess quantitative abilities, and many experimentalists believe that these abilities set the stage for later mathematics: natural numbers and arithmetic. However, the connection between these early and later skills is far from obvious. We evaluate two possible routes to mathematics and argue that neither is sufficient: (1) We first sketch what we think is the most likely model for infant abilities in this domain, and we examine proposals for extrapolating the natural number concept from these beginnings. Proposals for arriving at natural number by (empirical) induction presuppose the mathematical concepts they seek to explain. Moreover, standard experimental tests for children's understanding of number terms do not necessarily tap these concepts. (2) True concepts of number do appear, however, when children are able to understand generalizations over all numbers; for example, the principle of additive commutativity (a+b=b+a). Theories of how children learn such principles usually rely on a process of mapping from physical object groupings. But both experimental results and theoretical considerations imply that direct mapping is insufficient for acquiring these principles. We suggest instead that children may arrive at natural numbers and arithmetic in a more top-down way, by constructing mathematical schemas.

Constraints and obstacles to social health protection in the Maghreb: the cases of Algeria and Morocco

Introduction Economic variables must be taken into account in any attempt to develop social health protection systems. However, such variables should not blind us to the importance of social protection as a civic right and as an effective way to improve the well-being of the population, with a resulting positive effect on the economy. Building or reforming social health protection systems involves a complex combination of political, social and technical factors and strategies. Reforms often call for major changes in resource allocation and in the distribution of power and thus evoke fear and resistance among small but powerful segments of society. This paper briefly describes attempts made by Morocco and Algeria to reform their social health protection systems. Evolution of social health protection systems The measures taken in Morocco to reform social health protection spanned the period from 2002 to 2006. Before 2002, several coexisting optional health insurance schemes covered only 17% of the population. A system of certificates of indigence was operating in parallel and still exists today. Individuals who consider themselves indigent may submit a request to local authorities to receive a certificate granting them access to subsidized hospital care in public facilities. Such a system is universally criticized for being plagued by serious malfunction. (1) In 2002, after several abortive attempts at reform, the Youssoufi government (1997-2002) pushed through a framework law (No. 65-00) on basic medical aimed at phasing in universal coverage for the Moroccan population. This law has two components: compulsory health insurance (Assurance maladie obligatoire, AMO) and medical care (Regime d'assistance medicale, RAMED) for persons in need. While the initial decrees on AMO, which were passed in 2005, only concerned the formal sector, in 2007 the Jettou government (2002-2007) extended coverage to self-employed professionals outside the AMO, through a plan known as Inaya. The RAMED, under pilot-testing in one province, had not yet come into being. With independence in 1962, Algeria inherited a fragmented social protection system with disparities in the population and services covered. Beginning in 1970, the government implemented a series of measures to harmonize and unify social protection schemes. Major health programmes were launched, and the decision to provide public sector health care for free was made in 1974. By 1983 this trend had been consolidated through the unification of social security plans. The nationalization of natural resources, the growth of oil revenues and the launch of a vast movement to industrialize the economy and pay fair salaries to the economically active population provided the foundations for the extension of social protection. This top-down way of building a broadened social protection system and health insurance plan was relatively successful for as long as the central government had substantial financial resources and continued to rapidly develop salaried employment in the public sector. The system covered almost all risks (disease, maternity, disability, death, retirement, work injuries, unemployment, etc.) for more than 85% of the population. In 1988, however, oil revenues slumped, marking the end of the social consensus based on the redistribution of income. This ushered in a protracted and exceptionally violent political, economic and social crisis. Economic constraints for Morocco Despite an annual increase of more than 4% in its per capita gross domestic product over the last decade, Morocco's economic status remains modest, with an annual per capita income still less than 2000 US dollars. Moreover, this economic growth has not significantly reduced the unemployment rate, which is 16% in urban areas, or the poverty level, with 15% of the population being poor and 23% economically vulnerable. …

Fibre materials for advanced technical textiles

In this article, most kinds of fibre materials used for advanced technical textiles are systematically introduced. The definition of advanced technical textiles and the scope of fibre materials used for advanced technical textiles are given in the introductory chapter, PET, nylon and PP fibres are explained as three major conventional fibres for advanced technical textiles. High mechanical performance fibres such as carbon fibre and aramid fibre, and high heat resistance fibres such as SiC fibre are introduced in chapters 3 and 4, respectively. Several kinds of function fibres such as separation function, optical, electric conductive, adhesive are introduced in chapters 5 to 10. Specialty material fibres such as PVA and PLA, modified fibres for specific function and modified fibres for specific end-use are also introduced in chapters 11 to 13. The final chapter is assigned to introduce nano-fibres which include three kinds of organic nano-fibres manufactured by bottom-up way, by electro-spinning and by top-down way, and also carbon nano-tube and nano-fibre.

DISCOVERING PATTERNS FOR INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESS COLLABORATION

In the area of business-to-business (B2B) collaboration for manufacturing, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are confronted with the problem of spending considerable time and effort on coordinating suppliers across multiple tiers of their supply chain. In tightly integrated supply chains, the failure of providing services and goods on time leads to interruptions of the overall production and subsequently results in customer dissatisfaction. This paper proposes the concept of electronic Sourcing eSourcing as a consolidating approach for improving the coordination of service provision across several tiers of a supply chain. eSourcing allows for the harmonization of heterogenous system environments of collaborating parties without requiring a total disclosure of internal business details to the counterpart. Furthermore, with tool support in eSourcing, it is possible to verify the correct termination of processes and the contractual adherence of service provision without imposing fixed standardized routing. In this paper features of the eSourcing concept are analyzed in a pattern-based way. This paper pursues an analysis of eSourcing patterns in a top-down way for constructing collaboration configurations. The discovered and specified eSourcing construction patterns of this paper are instrumental in the EU-FP6 project CrossWork for conducting case studies with industry partners from the automobile industry.

Hierarchical learning strategy in semantic relation extraction

This paper proposes a novel hierarchical learning strategy to deal with the data sparseness problem in semantic relation extraction by modeling the commonality among related classes. For each class in the hierarchy either manually predefined or automatically clustered, a discriminative function is determined in a top-down way. As the upper-level class normally has much more positive training examples than the lower-level class, the corresponding discriminative function can be determined more reliably and guide the discriminative function learning in the lower-level one more effectively, which otherwise might suffer from limited training data. In this paper, two classifier learning approaches, i.e. the simple perceptron algorithm and the state-of-the-art Support Vector Machines, are applied using the hierarchical learning strategy. Moreover, several kinds of class hierarchies either manually predefined or automatically clustered are explored and compared. Evaluation on the ACE RDC 2003 and 2004 corpora shows that the hierarchical learning strategy much improves the performance on least- and medium-frequent relations.

A new graph cut-based multiple active contour algorithm without initial contours and seed points

This paper presents a new graph cut-based multiple active contour algorithm to detect optimal boundaries and regions in images without initial contours and seed points. The task of multiple active contours is framed as a partitioning problem by assuming that image data are generated from a finite mixture model with unknown number of components. Then, the partitioning problem is solved within a divisive graph cut framework where multi-way minimum cuts for multiple contours are efficiently computed in a top-down way through a swap move of binary labels. A split move is integrated into the swap move within that framework to estimate the model parameters associated with regions without the use of initial contours and seed points. The number of regions is also estimated as a part of the algorithm. Experimental results of boundary and region detection of natural images are presented and analyzed with precision and recall measures to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Memorial Projects as Sites of Social Integration in Post-1989 Berlin?

How do groups of people produce particular markers of the past in the urban landscape? The terrain of markers in a given neighborhood, city, or country can result from the top-down vision of a centralized elite-or the relatively diverse, even contradictory, layers of multiple eras and multiple interest groups and actors. In post 1989 Berlin, the memorial landscape is a heterogeneous collection of statues, plaques, and conceptual memorial projects relating to various eras in the city?s nearly eight centuries of existence. More widely known sites may be created in somewhat top-down ways, and be the responsibility of federal and state officials. But, much memorial work happens at the district level, and in the hands of an array of local activists. This local responsibility clearly indicates the active involvement of both easterners and westerners in local democratic and civic processes in general, and in activities that shape the memorial terrain in particular. Despite the inequality of unification and the extensive institutional transfer that happened in many sectors of the political and economic arenas, many eastern Berliners play active roles in the civic life in general and memorial culture in particular of their neighborhoods and districts. These local practices result from the civic participation (and arguably social integration) of a range of Berlin?s residents, in both the eastern and western halves of the city.

EXCHANGE COUPLING AND DECOUPLING IN A NANOCOMPOSITE SPIN SYSTEM

We studied the exchange coupling and decoupling process in a nanocomposite spin system based on a 3D Heisenberg model by means of Monte Carlo numerical computation simulation. Different from the conventional micromagnetism approach in which finite elements method (FEM) is usually adopted to compute, in a top-down way, the magnetic property of micromagnetic ensemble in micron even nanometer scale our current paper presents a new approach in computing the magnetic property of above nanomagnetic ensemble. Our approach addressed a composite spin lattice structure consisting of both single spin and cluster spin built up from single spin in a bottom-up way. Two species of distinctive spins were taken into account further in order to imitate the magnetic behavior of heterogeneous ensemble. The simulation revealed the influence of exchange coupling constant Jab, the size of cluster spins d and system reduced temperature t upon the exchange coupling and decoupling between component spin phases, respectively. Smaller value of Jab, larger d and lower temperature t usually lead to the decoupling of originally exchange-coupled component phases and the occurrence of a characteristic two-stage shoulder with an inflexion on the demagnetization curve. The results reported here are, to some extent, of universality and applicable to other dual-phase magnetic systems since our simulation simply focus on a pure duplex spin system rather than a specific material, and all physical variables were treated in a reduced form.

Motor primitive and sequence self-organization in a hierarchical recurrent neural network

This study describes how complex goal-directed behavior can be obtained through adaptation processes in a hierarchically organized recurrent neural network using a genetic algorithm (GA). Our experiments, using a simulated Khepera robot, showed that different types of dynamic structures self-organize in the lower and higher levels of the network for the purpose of achieving complex navigation tasks. The parametric bifurcation structures that appear in the lower level explain the mechanism of how behavior primitives are switched in a top-down way. In the higher level, a topologically ordered mapping of initial cell activation states to motor primitive sequences self-organizes by utilizing the initial sensitivity characteristics of non-linear dynamical systems. The biological plausibility of the model's essential principles is discussed.

European public opinion and aid to Africa: is there a link?

The current international debate on aid to Africa seems to assume that public opinion matters, i.e. it presupposes the existence of a ‘bottom-up’ relationship between public opinion and aid policy. This paper shows that it is rather the other way round. It is only possible to understand the relationship between decision-making on aid and public opinion as a ‘top-down’ relationship. The conclusion is supported by case studies of five European aid donors: France, the UK, Germany, Denmark and the European Union. The ‘missing link’ between opinion and policy-making is mainly to be explained by the high degree of centralisation of decision-making and the weak link between government and society in this particular policy field. On the other hand, opinion surveys show that there are strong popular sentiments in Europe in favour of ‘helping the poor’. Also, surveys indicate that European public opinion believes that emergency assistance basically is the rationale for development aid. The humanitarian attitudes in favour of ‘helping the poor’ find an outlet in the growing amount of emergency assistance going to Africa, thus leaving decision-making on development aid to the elite in a typical top-down way.

A new approach to outdoor scene description based on learning and top-down segmentation

Abstract This paper presents a new approach to outdoor scene description, by providing a methodology for labelling image objects in a top-down way. The system's strategy is based on a cooperative set of distributed tasks, composed of several segmentation processes devoted to the recognition of the objects of interest, and a coordinator process, used to control the segmentation tasks. The approach includes a learning process to generate flexible models that can fit with the relevant objects of outdoor scenes, which can vary significantly under different environment conditions. The results of a series of tests carried out under different weather and seasonal conditions demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

The world-wide telescope.

The world-wide telescope.

Neural aspects of anticipatory behavior

Anticipatory behavior reveals itself in the perceptual domain and in the motor domain. Expectant attention and motor preparation are characterized by selection, aimed at an amelioration of the signal-to-noise ratio in the information to be processed. The functional similarity of anticipatory attention and motor preparation is reflected in the underlying anatomical substrate. The prefrontal cortex, involved in a number of different networks, organizes anticipatory behavior in a top-down way by activating cortico-cortical loops and thalamo-cortical loops to sensory and motor areas. The sensory areas are set to receive the impinging stimulus presentation, the motor areas are set to implement and execute the different motor programs. Thalamic nuclei are also activated from the prefrontal cortex, especially the large association nuclei, the dorsomedial nucleus and the pulvinar. In different models of selective attention the reticular nucleus of the thalamus has a special role in the distribution of the inhibitory control upon the information processing in the “relay” nuclei. It is hypothesized that it has the same pivotal position in motor preparation. Although the anatomical relations do not allow a direct test of the proposed hypothesis, the available psychophysiological evidence does not contradict it.