The end of an era? The resignation of Iain Duncan Smith,Conservatism and social security benefits for disabled people

Iain Duncan Smith resigned as the UK’s Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in March 2016. While not invisible from the debate following his resignation, the fact that changes to social security policy for disabled people were central to Duncan Smith’s time as Secretary of State and central to his (at least public) reasons for resignation was lost in a focus on the internal machinations of the UK’s Conservative Party. In this short article, Duncan Smith’s resignation is used to examine the location of additional cost social security benefits for disabled people in Conservative thinking in contemporary Britain.     

Deras as sites of electoral mobilisation in Indian Punjab: examining the reasons that political parties flock to the deras

Mushrooming of the deras in Indian Punjab, and the role of some of these deras in influencing the political choices of their followers, most of whom belong to the socially and economically marginal groups, is being recognised and apparently encouraged by the political parties. This is evident in the fact that political leaders/candidates cutting across party divides flocked to various deras in the run-up to the recent elections. This phenomenon can be attributed primarily to the fact that the social basis of political power of state has remained unaltered in favour of the upper castes/communities. Unwilling to share power, yet compelled to seek the crucial support of numerically strong and economically mobile dalit and other backward castes voters in a closely contested bi-polar polity, the upper-caste political leadership takes recourse to the ‘softer’ option of cultivating the deras to ‘deliver’ en bloc the marginal-castes votes. With one form of the identity politics based on ethno-regional communal divide having receded to background, it is the turn of the caste-based identity politics through the ‘dera route’ that is prevailing in post-militancy Punjab.     

What Characterises Women Vulnerable to Chronic Energy Deficiency?

Weight-for-squared height or body mass index (BMI) is often considered as an effective predictor of morbidity and mortality rates. This study uses BMI data from a sample of ever-married women in the age group of 15–49 years in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh for the year 1998–1999, to analyse the determinants of chronic energy deficiency (CED) and estimate the population vulnerable to CED. The results highlight that CED rates and vulnerability rates can be very different, emphasizing need for policy intervention to focus on ‘potential’ CED persons. The characteristics of vulnerable population identified would be appropriate channels for policy intervention.

Globalization and migration in the contemporary world order: an insight into the postnational condition and the diasporas

In the new millennium, nations and nationalism persevere despite scholarship that has both anticipated and declared their demise. Globalization, which brings flow of capital, goods, ideas, people and technology, has a tremendous undeniable impact on every sphere of the contemporary world. The growing connectivity amongst the nation-states at physical, imaginative and virtual levels facilitates transnational networks that produce new types of migrants who do not respect national borders. The diaspora communities today are no longer confined in the homeland/hostland binary. The globalized economy, technology and the world society provide enough space for those with hyphenated identities to survive as a connecting link not only with the homeland but also with other diasporic nodes with common origin and cultural/ethnic background. Thus, a new diaspora is taking shape which is highly mobile and interconnected. Viewed in this perspective, this paper aims to explore the changing configurations of diasporic identities in the context of a much eulogized postnational condition engendered by increasing transnational activities that defy the stringent idea of nation and its state’s territorial boundaries questioning the very viability of nation-states in the present era of globalization.     

Forest structure and anthropogenic disturbances regulate plant invasion in urban forests

Urban forest ecosystems, the structure, and functions therein are subjected to anthropogenic disturbances. Native and sensitive species from those forests might be lost due to such disturbances. At the same time, supplemented anthropogenic resources might create opportunities for exotic and invasive species. Although invasive species are considered one of the major threats to the urban biodiversity and ecosystems, the research on invasion dynamics in the Himalayas has primarily focused on the impacts of invasion on forest structure and productivity. This study aims to understand the influence of forest structure and anthropogenic factors in invasion success that are poorly covered in the existing literature. We selected 11 urban forest patches for the study considering the presence-absence of selected invasive species and structural attributes. We used Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce co-linearity in the covariates and generalized linear mixed effects model (GLMM) to identify the factors affecting invasion success. We found that forest structural attributes, namely, tree diameter, height and canopy cover, and anthropogenic disturbances regulate invasion success in urban forests. This implies that maintaining urban forest structural attributes, especially the stands with large-sized trees, is essential to control invasion in the context of urbanization.

     

Optimal Enhancement and Lifetime of Software Systems: A Control Theoretic Analysis

We develop an optimal control model to maximize the net value provided by a software system over its useful life. The model determines the initial number of features in the system, the level of dynamic enhancement effort, and the lifetime of the system. The various factors affecting these optimal choices are systems characteristics (e.g., complexity, age, quality), user learning, and process maturity. We also consider that there is a time lag between the addition of a feature and the realization of its benefit to users. The basic model is extended to consider the decision of replacing the existing system by a new one.     

Effect of urbanization on the dynamics of ecosystem services: An analysis for decision making in Kolkata urban agglomeration

Urban Ecosystems - Urbanization has profound influence on the changes of land use and land cover, which on the other hand exert significant impact on ecosystem services and their values, especially...     

A Resource‐Based View of Strategic IT Alignment: How Knowledge Sharing Creates Competitive Advantage

A critical decision problem for top management, and the focus of this study, is whether the CEO (chief executive officer) and CIO (chief information officer) should commit their time to formal planning with the expectation of producing an information technology (IT)‐based competitive advantage. Using the perspective of the resource‐based view, a model is presented that examines how strategic IT alignment can produce enhanced organizational strategies that yield competitive advantage. One hundred sixty‐one CIOs provided data using a postal survey. Results supported seven of the eight hypotheses. They showed that information intensity is an important antecedent to strategic IT alignment, that strategic IT alignment is best explained by multiple constructs which operationalize both process and content measures, and that alignment between the IT plan and the business plan is significantly related to the use of IT for competitive advantage. Study results raise questions about the effect of CEO participation, which appears to be the weak link in the process, and also about the perception of the CIO on the importance of CEO involvement. The paper contributes to our understanding of how knowledge sharing in the alignment process contributes to the creation of superior organizational strategies, provides a framework of the alignment‐performance relationship, and furnishes several new constructs.     

Projecting populations for major Pacific Island countries with and without COVID-19: pro-active insights for population policy

Journal of Population Research - The paper projects aggregate populations of six Pacific Island countries in both pre- and post-COVID19 scenarios using a Cohort Component Method for the period...     

Bayesian neural tree models for nonparametric regression

Frequentist and Bayesian methods differ in many aspects but share some basic optimal properties. In real-life prediction problems, situations exist in which a model based on one of the above paradigms is preferable depending on some subjective criteria. Nonparametric classification and regression techniques, such as decision trees and neural networks, have both frequentist (classification and regression trees (CARTs) and artificial neural networks) as well as Bayesian counterparts (Bayesian CART and Bayesian neural networks) to learning from data. In this paper, we present two hybrid models combining the Bayesian and frequentist versions of CART and neural networks, which we call the Bayesian neural tree (BNT) models. BNT models can simultaneously perform feature selection and prediction, are highly flexible, and generalise well in settings with limited training observations. We study the statistical consistency of the proposed approaches and derive the optimal value of a vital model parameter. The excellent performance of the newly proposed BNT models is shown using simulation studies. We also provide some illustrative examples using a wide variety of standard regression datasets from a public available machine learning repository to show the superiority of the proposed models in comparison to popularly used Bayesian CART and Bayesian neural network models.