"Show me your impact": evaluating transitional justice in contested spaces

This paper discusses some of the most significant challenges and opportunities for evaluating the effects of programs in support of transitional justice - the field that addresses how post-conflict or post authoritarian societies deal with legacies of wide spread human rights violations. The discussion is empirically grounded in a case study that assesses the efforts of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and one of its Guatemalan partners to evaluate the effects of a museum exposition that is attempting to recast historic memory and challenge racist attitudes in post-conflict Guatemala. The paper argues that despite the increasing trend to fund transitional justice programs, many international aid donors are stuck in traditional and arguably orthodox paradigms of program evaluation. This is having a negative effect not only upon the administration of aid but also upon how transitional justice research is perceived and valued by local populations. The case study experience indicates that there is no perfect evaluation model or approach for evaluating transitional justice programming - only choices to be made by commissioners of evaluation, evaluators, and those being evaluated. These are profoundly influenced by the extreme politics and moral values that define transitional justice settings as contested spaces in which calls to remember the tragic past must be balanced with aspirations to re-build a hopeful future.     

Invisible computer for collaborative design: evaluation of a multimodal sketch-based environment

In the areas of design, especially in architectural design, collaboration has become an important challenge. The specialization of skills increase, work teams are more and more extensive and the geographic distance between them increases too. The economic and ecological stakes related to remote collaboration are an evidence. This context involves the need to support most efficiently possible remote working meetings. We present the Distributed Collaborative Digital Studio (DSDC), a tool designed to recreate, in distant situations, the context of copresence meetings. This shared environment is created in the "invisible computer" approach [11]. The idea is that the tool should disappear from user's consciousness. Indeed, creative design activities require some fluidity in their process. Therefore, any involuntary interruption created by the system can potentially brake creativity. In this perspective, we investigate specifically the "invisibility" of our environment. To do this, we propose a framework for the operationalization of the concept and a methodology to test the system invisibility. This methodology was applied through a case study consisting of a corpus of 12 hours of remote collaborative design sessions with the DSDC. We highlight the learning effects while using our system, conclude on its effectiveness and discuss our methodology.     

Violence,murder, and fallen women: prostitution in the works of Vsevolod Garshin

This article investigates the theme of prostitution in two stories by the Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin (1855–88). Like many authors of the nineteenth century, Garshin utilizes the symbolic figure of the prostitute to question social and medical beliefs about commercial sex. Focusing on Garshin’s “Proisshestvie” (“An Occurrence”, 1878) and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” (1885), the article traces the use of melodrama and violence in the depiction of prostitution. Particular attention is paid to Garshin’s use of St. Petersburg to add heightened meaning to the fallen woman’s plight. Connected through the Petersburg myth and the character of Nadezhda Nikolaevna, the stories complicate the traditional redemption plot associated with prostitutes by focusing on the inner life of the fallen woman and her impact on the male characters that she encounters.     

Beyond tail median and conditional tail expectation: Extreme risk estimation using tail Lp-optimization

The conditional tail expectation (CTE) is an indicator of tail behavior that takes into account both the frequency and magnitude of a tail event. However, the asymptotic normality of its empirical estimator requires that the underlying distribution possess a finite variance; this can be a strong restriction in actuarial and financial applications. A valuable alternative is the median shortfall (MS), although it only gives information about the frequency of a tail event. We construct a class of tail L^p-medians encompassing the MS and CTE. For p in (1,2), a tail L^p-median depends on both the frequency and magnitude of tail events, and its empirical estimator is, within the range of the data, asymptotically normal under a condition weaker than a finite variance. We extrapolate this estimator and another technique to extreme levels using the heavy-tailed framework. The estimators are showcased on a simulation study and on real fire insurance data.     

The Prevalence of Destructive Leadership Behaviour

This study investigates the prevalence of the four types of destructive leadership behaviour in the destructive and constructive leadership behaviour model, in a representative sample of the Norwegian workforce. The study employs two estimation methods: the operational classification method (OCM) and latent class cluster (LCC) analysis. The total prevalence of destructive leadership behaviour varied from 33.5% (OCM) to 61% (LCC), indicating that destructive leadership is not an anomaly. Destructive leadership comes in many shapes and forms, with passive forms prevailing over more active ones. The results showed that laissez‐faire leadership behaviour was the most prevalent destructive leadership behaviour, followed by supportive–disloyal leadership and derailed leadership, while tyrannical leadership behaviour was the least prevalent destructive leadership behaviour. Furthermore, many leaders display constructive as well as destructive behaviours, indicating that leadership is not either constructive or destructive. The study contributes to a broader theoretical perspective on what must be seen as typical behaviour among leaders.     

Die Bedeutung der Zinsschranke

The German Corporate Tax Reform Act of 2008 requires an adjustment of classic valuation concepts because it limits interest deduction from taxable income depending on the operating performance of the company. By using time- and state-contingent discount rates in a risk-neutral valuation with predetermined debt levels, a theoretically sound valuation result is obtained. However, a modified APV-concept which assumes deterministic debt over the planning horizon and constant leverage in the terminal value phase also yields consistent valuation results when two types of tax shields with different levels of risk are distinguished.     

A Characterization of a Matric-Variate Exponential Distribution

Suppose S is a positive definite m x m random matrix and S> Ω denotes the event that S—Ω is positive definite, Ω being a constant positive definite matrix. Under very mild regularity conditions, we show that the constraint Pr(S>Ω₁+Ω₂ | S>Ω₂) = Pr(S>Ω₁) implies that S has a Wishart distribution on m+ 1 degrees of freedom.