Technologies of Knowledge and Governance on the Front Lines of Emergency Services.

Using institutional ethnography, a sociology and critical method of inquiry used primarily in North America, this presentation discusses new forms and technologies of knowledge and governance – “forms of language, technologies of representation and communication, and text-based, objectified modes of knowledge through which local particularities are interpreted or rendered actionable in abstract, translocal terms” (McCoy, 2008: 701) on the front line of emergency medical services. I focus specifically on technologies central to health reforms that attempt to reshape how health care is delivered, experienced, and made accountable (Anantharaman, 2004; Ball, 2005; Alberta Health Services, 2008). In additional to exemplifying how institutional ethnography can be used to answer Rankin and Campbell’s (2006) call for additional research into “the social organization of information in health care and attention to the (often unintended) ways ‘such textual products may accomplish…ruling purposes but otherwise fail people and, moreover, obscure that failure’ (p. 182)” (cited in McCoy, 2008: 709), this presentation will introduce the audience to a critical approach to social inquiry that explores how knowledge is socially organized.

Music for Mercer's: The Mercer's Hospital Music Collection and Charity Music in Eighteenth-Century Dublin

Account of benefit concerts in support of Mercer's Hospital, Dublin 1736-80 and an analysis of extant manuscript and printed music sources dating from c.1736-c.1771

Examining Participatory Governance in a Devolving UK: insights from national parks policy development in Northern Ireland

This paper provides a contemporary examination of policy making and participatory practice in the context of devolving governance in the UK. The paper takes Northern Ireland as its focus and is particularly timely considering the context of devolved governance, the ongoing transition from conflict to relative peace and the potential for rejuvenating democracy through participatory
governance. The paper concentrates on one particular policy process, namely the attempted designation of a national park in the Mournes Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. A thematic analysis of qualitative data is drawn upon to analyse the structural factors that framed the policymaking process, in particular the role of power in determining how consultation processes were 2 initiated, designed and undertaken. Using Lukes’ model) as an analytical framework, power is shown to manifest at multiple levels within the policy-making process to influence policy outcomes. The paper reveals how the persistence of a top-down approach to policy development combined with a highly parochial political outlook undermined attempts to designate a Mourne National Park. The paper concludes that, given the immaturity of recently devolved government in
Northern Ireland, in this instance, the democratising intentions of devolved governance have not been met. This has implications for Northern Ireland’s recent reform of public administration which devolves certain planning powers to local authority level and the management of the internationally significant Mournes landscape.

Semantics for possibilistic answer set programs: uncertain rules versus rules with uncertain conclusions

Although Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a powerful framework for declarative problem solving, it cannot in an intuitive way handle situations in which some rules are uncertain, or in which it is more important to satisfy some constraints than others. Possibilistic ASP (PASP) is a natural extension of ASP in which certainty weights are associated with each rule. In this paper we contrast two different views on interpreting the weights attached to rules. Under the first view, weights reflect the certainty with which we can conclude the head of a rule when its body is satisfied. Under the second view, weights reflect the certainty that a given rule restricts the considered epistemic states of an agent in a valid way, i.e. it is the certainty that the rule itself is correct. The first view gives rise to a set of weighted answer sets, whereas the second view gives rise to a weighted set of classical answer sets.

Interpretable and Reconfigurable Clustering of Document Datasets by Deriving Word-based Rules

Clusters of text documents output by clustering algorithms are often hard to interpret. We describe motivating real-world scenarios that necessitate reconfigurability and high interpretability of clusters and outline the problem of generating clusterings with interpretable and reconfigurable cluster models. We develop two clustering algorithms toward the outlined goal of building interpretable and reconfigurable cluster models. They generate clusters with associated rules that are composed of conditions on word occurrences or nonoccurrences. The proposed approaches vary in the complexity of the format of the rules; RGC employs disjunctions and conjunctions in rule generation whereas RGC-D rules are simple disjunctions of conditions signifying presence of various words. In both the cases, each cluster is comprised of precisely the set of documents that satisfy the corresponding rule. Rules of the latter kind are easy to interpret, whereas the former leads to more accurate clustering. We show that our approaches outperform the unsupervised decision tree approach for rule-generating clustering and also an approach we provide for generating interpretable models for general clusterings, both by significant margins. We empirically show that the purity and f-measure losses to achieve interpretability can be as little as 3 and 5%, respectively using the algorithms presented herein.

Reforming the Westminster Model of Agency Governance: Britain and Ireland after the Crisis

Conventional understandings of what the Westminster model implies anticipate reliance on a top-down, hierarchical approach to budgetary accountability, reinforced by a post–New Public Management emphasis on recentralizing administrative capacity. This article, based on a comparative analysis of the experiences of Britain and Ireland, argues that the Westminster model of bureaucratic control and oversight itself has been evolving, hastened in large part due to the global financial crisis. Governments have gained stronger controls over the structures and practices of agencies, but agencies are also key players in securing better governance outcomes. The implication is that the crisis has not seen a return to the archetypal command-and-control model, nor a wholly new implementation of negotiated European-type practices, but rather a new accountability balance between elements of the Westminster system itself that have not previously been well understood.

Answer set programs with optional rules: a possibilistic approach

Many problems in artificial intelligence can be encoded as answer set programs (ASP) in which some rules are uncertain. ASP programs with incorrect rules may have erroneous conclusions, but due to the non-monotonic nature of ASP, omitting a correct rule may also lead to errors. To derive the most certain conclusions from an uncertain ASP program, we thus need to consider all situations in which some, none, or all of the least certain rules are omitted. This corresponds to treating some rules as optional and reasoning about which conclusions remain valid regardless of the inclusion of these optional rules. While a version of possibilistic ASP (PASP) based on this view has recently been introduced, no implementation is currently available. In this paper we propose a simulation of the main reasoning tasks in PASP using (disjunctive) ASP programs, allowing us to take advantage of state-of-the-art ASP solvers. Furthermore, we identify how several interesting AI problems can be naturally seen as special cases of the considered reasoning tasks, including cautious abductive reasoning and conformant planning. As such, the proposed simulation enables us to solve instances of the latter problem types that are more general than what current solvers can handle.

Economic Stability and Economic Governance in the Euro Area:What the European Crisis Can Teach on the Limits of Economic Integration

The recent European economic crisis has dramatically exposed the failures of
the various institutional mechanisms in place to maintain economic stability
in Europe, and has unveiled the difficulty in achieving international coordination
on fiscal and financial stability policies. Drawing on the European
experience, this article analyzes the concept of economic stability in international
law and highlights the peculiar problems connected to its maintenance
or promotion. First, we demonstrate that policies that safeguard and
protect economic stability are largely regulated and managed at the national
level, due to their inextricable relationship with the exercise of national political
power. Until recently, more limited levels of pan-European integration
did not make the coordination of economic stability policies seem necessary.
However, a much deeper level of economic integration makes it very difficult
to tackle an international economic crisis through national responses. If EU
Member states wish to maintain and deepen economic integration, they
must accept an erosion of sovereignty over their economic stability policies.
This will not only deprive states of a fundamental anchor of political power,
but also create a challenge for the maintenance of democratic control over
economic policies. Second, this article argues that soft law approaches are
likely ineffective in enforcing the regulatory disciplines required to ensure
economic stability.

Reframing EU Public Health Governance:From Risk to Citizenship and Participation

Risk is the dominant frame for the European Union’s growing albeit often overlooked public health governance. The starting point for this chapter is the distortion of public health priorities by and within this frame. I argue that existing efforts to identify, underline and tackle the distortions can be strengthened by reframing governance as a matter of citizenship so as to develop citizen participation in decision making.