Book Review - Introducing Romans, Richard Longenecker

Review of Richard Longenecker\u27s Introducing Romans

The Simple Analytics of Accountability

In this paper, the author offers a schematic that distinguishes the actors, interactions, and dynamics of various accountability relationships. A number of distinctions including those between responsibility and accountability, moral and legal accountability claims, and socially or governmentally generated demand for accountability are offered to assist those working on accountability policies or strategies and who may be struggling with generic conceptions of accountability that conflate all of these elements. This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 33.9. Hauser Working Paper Series Nos. 33.1-33.9 were prepared as background papers for the Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Symposium October 3-4, 2006

The Public Value Scorecard: A Rejoinder and an Alternative to "Strategic Performance Measurement and Management in Non-Profit Organizations"

Robert Kaplan's Balanced Scorecard has played an important and welcome role in the nonprofit world as nonprofit organizations have struggled to measure their performance. Many nonprofit organizations have taken both general inspiration and specific operational guidance from the ideas advanced in this important work. Their pioneering efforts to apply these concepts to their own particular settings have added a layer of richness to the important concepts. Given the great contribution of this work to helping nonprofits meet the challenge of measuring their performance, it seems both ungracious and unhelpful to criticize it. Yet, as I review the concepts of the Balanced Scorecard, and look closely at the cases of organizations that have tried to use these concepts to measure their performance, I believe that some systematic confusions arise. Further, I think the source of these confusions lies in the fact the basic concepts of the Balanced Scorecard have not been sufficiently adapted from the private, for-profit world where they were born to the world of the nonprofit manager where they are now being applied. Finally, I think a different way of thinking about nonprofit strategy and linking that to performance measurement exists that is simpler that and more reliable for nonprofit organizations to rely upon. The purpose of this paper is to set out these contrarian ideas. This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 18. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Supporting Constructive Learning with a Feedback Planner

A promising approach to constructing more effective computer tutors is implementing tutorial strategies that extend over multiple turns. This means that computer tutors must deal with (1) failure, (2) interruptions, (3) the need to revise their tactics, and (4) basic dialogue phenomena such as acknowledgment. To deal with these issues, we need to combine ITS technology with advances from robotics and computational linguistics. We can use reactive planning techniques from robotics to allow us to modify tutorial plans, adapting them to student input. Computational linguistics will give us guidance in handling communication management as well as building a reusable architecture for tutorial dialogue systems. A modular and reusable architecture is critical given the difficulty in constructing tutorial dialogue systems and the many domains to which we would like to apply them. In this paper, we propose such an architecture and discuss how a reactive planner in the context of this architecture can implement multi-turn tutorial strategies

The Phillips Curve is Back? Using Panel Data to Analyze the Relationship Between Unemployment and Inflation in an Open Economy

Expanding on an approach suggested by Ashenfelter (1984), we extend the Phillips curve to an open economy and exploit panel data to estimate the textbook 'expectations augmented' Phillips curve with a market-based and observable measure of inflation expectations. We develop this measure using assumptions common in economic analysis of open economies. Using quarterly data from 9 OECD countries and the simplest econometric specification, we estimate the Phillips curve with the same functional form for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Our analysis suggests that although changing expectations played a role in creating the empirical failure of the Phillips Curve in the 1970s, supply shocks were at least as important.

NASA Puffin Electric Tailsitter VTOL Concept

Electric propulsion offers dramatic new vehicle mission capabilities, not possible with turbine or reciprocating engines; including high reliability and efficiency, low engine weight and maintenance, low cooling drag and volume required, very low noise and vibration, and zero emissions. The only penalizing characteristic of electric propulsion is the current energy storage technology level, which is set to triple over the next 5-10 years through huge new investments in this field. Most importantly, electric propulsion offers incredible new degrees of freedom in aircraft system integration to achieve unprecedented levels of aerodynamic, propulsive, control, and structural synergistic coupling. A unique characteristic of electric propulsion is that the technology is nearly scale-free, permitting small motors to be parallelized for fail-safe redundancy, or distributed across the airframe for tightly coupled interdisciplinary functionality without significant impacts in motor-controller efficiency or specific weight. Maximizing the potential benefit of electric propulsion is dependent on applying this technology to synergistic mission concepts. The vehicle missions with the most benefit include those which constrain environmental impact (or limit noise, exhaust, or emission signatures) are short range, or where large differences exist in the propulsion system sizing between takeoff and cruise conditions. Electric propulsion offers the following unique capabilities that other propulsion systems can t provide for short range Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft; elimination of engine noise and emissions, drastic reduction in engine cooling and radiated heat, drastic reduction in vehicle vibration levels, drastic improvement in reliability and operating costs, variable speed output at full power, for improved cruise efficiency at low tip-speed, elimination of high/hot sizing penalty, and reduction of engine-out penalties

A Framework for Analyzing Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Policies and Strategies

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the sprawling topic of nonprofit governance and accountability. It distinguishes various accountability-generating mechanisms and actors, including the unit-level governing board; government policies aimed at shaping the behavior of governing boards; and a broader, natural demand for accountability, generated by an organizations many stakeholders. The aims of these accountability mechanisms and actors also vary, and include the prevention of theft and fraud; the efficient use of resources; the choice of socially valuable goals; and the effective performance of an organization in service of those goals.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 33.3. Hauser Working Paper Series Nos. 33.1-33.9 were prepared as background papers for the Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Symposium October 3-4, 2006