Public administration and science and technology

Budgetary trends in Federal support of basic scientific research and proposals for national science policy organizatio

Opposition politics and urban service delivery in Kampala, Uganda

Uganda, like other African countries, has implemented reforms to decentralize political authority to local governments and reintroduce multiparty elections. This combination creates opportunities for national partisan struggles to emerge in local arenas and influence local service delivery. This study explores how partisan politics affects urban service delivery in Uganda through an examination of service provision by Kampala City Council and recent reforms to recentralize control over Kampala. I find that partisan politics undermines service delivery Kampala in several ways, including through financing, tax policy, and even direct interference in the policies and decisions made by the city council

Objective Chances in a Deterministic World

Determinism is the thesis that the state of the world at any time uniquely determines the state of the world at all future times. Our best scientific theories seem inconclusive as to whether our world is deterministic. Our world could very well be either partially or completely deterministic. But determinism is not as innocuous as it seems; the truth of determinism seems to come into conflict with many intuitive concepts. One such concept is objective chance. Our intuitive notions of objective chances are tied to the belief that events could have turned out differently than the way they actually occurred. Though many philosophers have declared that this conception of objective chance is incompatible with deterministic worlds, some have tried to provide accounts that render the two compatible. In this thesis I investigate what a theory of deterministic chance could be. Working within certain metaphysical constraints on chance, I craft out a new dispositional account of chance grounded in properties that objects have

ESMD Space Grant Faculty Report

The strength of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate ESMD Faculty Project lies in its ability to meet National Aeronautics Space Administration NASA's Strategic Educational Outcome 1 by developing a sustainable and long-term integration of student involvement at academic institutions with all NASA Centers. This outcome is achieved by a three-fold approach: 1) by collecting Senior Design projects pertaining to Constellation work performed at each of the ten NASA Centers, 2) by engaging students at Minority Serving Institutions in the art of systems engineering and systems design of technologies required for space exploration, and 3) by identifying potential internships at each Center relative to exploration that provide students who are supported by their institutional Space Grant to engage in on-going mission-level and explorative systems designs. The objectives of the ESMD Faculty Project are to: 1. Aid the Centers (both Education Offices and associated technical organizations) in providing relevant opportunities for the ESMD Space Grant Program to support student and faculty in Senior Design projects 2. Enable better matches between the ESMD work required and what the Space Grant Consortia can do to effectively contribute to NASA programs 3. Provide the Space Grant Consortia an opportunity to strengthen relations with the NASA Centers 4. Develop better collective understanding of the U.S. Space Exploration Policy by the Center, Space Grant, faculty, Education Office, and students 5. Enable Space Grant institution faculty to better prepare their students to meet current and future NASA needs 6. Enable the Center Education Offices to strengthen their ties to their technical organizations and Space Grant Consortia 7. Aid KSC in gaining a greater and more detailed understanding of each of the Center activities Senior Design projects are intended to stimulate undergraduate students on current NASA activities related to lunar, Mars, and other planetary missions and to bring out innovative and novel ideas that can be used to complement those currently under development at respective NASA Centers. Additionally, such academic involvement would better the prospects for graduating seniors to pursue graduate studies and to seek careers in the space industry with a strong sense for systems engineering and understanding of design concepts. Internships, on the other hand, are intended to provide hands-on experience to students by engaging them in diverse state-of-the-art technology development, prototype bread-boarding, computer modeling and simulations, hardware and software testing, and other activities that provide students a strong perspective of NASA's vision and mission in enhancing the knowledge of Earth and space planetary sciences. Ten faculty members, each from a Space Grant Consortium-affiliated university, worked at ten NASA Centers for five weeks between June 2 and July 3, 2008. The project objectives listed above were achieved. In addition to collecting data on Senior Design ideas and identifying possible internships that would benefit NASA/ESMD, the faculty fellows promoted and collected data when required for other ESMD-funded programs and helped the Center's Education Office, as,needed.