It has been a lot of talking about who’s president’s fault has been for the crisis that Started in the United States and how it spread around the world. Is it really a specific group of people’s fault? Our leaders’ responsibility to prevent all this? Or is it all of our fault for living in the illusions leaders created for us in order to keep being elected? I am not here to point fingers but, rather, analyzing what has happened by researching legislations that passed and did not pass, and who lobbied and why they lobbied on specific legislations that could have made a difference in the economic situation but were never given the chance. The research are mainly on the years right before the 2007- 2008 recession and specifically from 2004 to 2006. I conclude with analyzing the types of leadership styles that I feel have influenced the current situation and what is the follower’s responsibility in letting it happen, why, and how they could change the situation.

<p>Municipal councils are vested with the legal authority to promote financial accountability in their respective municipalities. To accomplish this responsibility, municipal council establishes committees to enable a structured and coordinated mechanism through which it can promote financial accountability effectively. However and despite the available legal and institutional mechanisms established to enable council committees to promote financial accountability, the lack of effective financial accountability in municipalities has persisted. This study focused on the role of council committees in ensuring financial accountability. It was guided by the following research questions: What are the major factors that contribute to financial accountability at local level, what is the role of council committees in promoting financial accountability and how can council committees be strengthened to play an effective role in Stellenbosch municipality&rsquo / s municipal financial accountability. Stellenbosch Local Municipality was used as a case study for this research. The data was collected from primary and secondary sources. Primary data was sourced from members of relevant council committees through structured and unstructured interviews. Secondary data was obtained from relevant municipal reports, internet sources, government department publications, journals and Auditor - General&rsquo / s reports which contributed to the reliability, validity and objectivity of the findings. The findings showed that political instability, a lack of a culture of accountability, lack of clearly defined authority for accountability, lack of relevant capacity and willingness are some of the major factors that have impacted negatively on council committees from promoting effective financial accountability. The study opens up the possibility of future research to include a wider number of municipalities.</p>

El presente trabajo constituye una investigación sobre las razones de la tendencia, existente en la actualidad, a una creciente regulación de carácter ético y deontológico en el campo particular de la medicina (a través de la proliferación de códigos éticos y deontológicos, creación de instituciones de control (bio)ético, procedimientos protocolizados de decisión en ética clínica, etc.), paralelamente a una creciente externalización por parte del Estado de las funciones normativas y potestades decisorias a sujetos, organismos y corporaciones privadas. Este análisis del auge de la bionomía ética, y de diferentes formas de codificación ética, centra su atención, por un lado, en la llamada «sociología del riesgo» -que estudia el fenómeno de los riesgos tecnológicos y, entre otros aspectos, las respuestas jurídico-políticas que se dan a ellos-, particularmente sobre los avances en medicina, biotecnología e investigación clínica y farmacéutica. Por otro lado, dicho análisis se centra en el fenómeno de la penetración, en el campo de autonomía de poder médico y tecno-científico, de la lógica del mercado y su sistema de poder decisorio. El presente trabajo concluye que ese fenómeno autorregulatorio ético de las profesiones y corporaciones médicas y tecno-científicas crece a costa de una creciente evasión de una regulación jurídico-pública de las actividades tecno-científicas en el campo de la medicina: un mínimo jurídico-público frente una máxima autorregulación ética con implicaciones en las garantías jurídico-públicas y en el proceso de democratización de los Estados. / ETHICS WITH CODES: A PHILOSOPHIC AND JURIDICAL ANALYSIS OF DEONTOLOGICAL RULES IN MEDICINE AND HIS RELATIONS WITH THE LEGAL SYSTEM AND THE STATE This work constitutes an investigation about the reasons of the current tendency to an increasing ethic and deontological regulation in the specific field of medicine (through the proliferation of ethical -deontological- codes, the creation of (bio)ethics institutions of control in medicine issues, protocolized proceedings of taking decisions in clinical ethics, etcetera), in the line with a growing externalization by the State of the regulation function and authority decisions to private subjects, organizations and corporations. This analysis about the growth of bioethic rules and different shapes of ethic codification, focuses, on one side, on the called «risk sociology» -that studies the technological risks phenomenon and, among other things, the legal and political answers to it-, especially about the medical and biotechnological advances and clinical and pharmacological investigations. On the other side, this analysis is centered on the phenomenon of the penetration of the market logic and its decision power system on the medical and on the scientific and technical autonomous field. This work concludes that this phenomenon of ethic self-regulation of the medical profession and medical, technical and scientific corporations, growths at expense of an increasing evasion of a legal and public regulation of the technical and scientific activities in the sphere of medicine: it produces a minimum of public law in front of a maximum of ethic self-regulation with implications in the legal and public guaranties and in the democratization process of the states.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1986. / Also availalbe in microfilm.

<p>Municipal councils are vested with the legal authority to promote financial accountability in their respective municipalities. To accomplish this responsibility, municipal council establishes committees to enable a structured and coordinated mechanism through which it can promote financial accountability effectively. However and despite the available legal and institutional mechanisms established to enable council committees to promote financial accountability, the lack of effective financial accountability in municipalities has persisted. This study focused on the role of council committees in ensuring financial accountability. It was guided by the following research questions: What are the major factors that contribute to financial accountability at local level, what is the role of council committees in promoting financial accountability and how can council committees be strengthened to play an effective role in Stellenbosch municipality&rsquo / s municipal financial accountability. Stellenbosch Local Municipality was used as a case study for this research. The data was collected from primary and secondary sources. Primary data was sourced from members of relevant council committees through structured and unstructured interviews. Secondary data was obtained from relevant municipal reports, internet sources, government department publications, journals and Auditor - General&rsquo / s reports which contributed to the reliability, validity and objectivity of the findings. The findings showed that political instability, a lack of a culture of accountability, lack of clearly defined authority for accountability, lack of relevant capacity and willingness are some of the major factors that have impacted negatively on council committees from promoting effective financial accountability. The study opens up the possibility of future research to include a wider number of municipalities.</p>

No description available.

Previous works on classification committees have shown that an efficient committee should consist of networks that are not only very accurate, but also diverse. In this work, aiming to explore trade-off between the diversity and accuracy of committee networks, the steps of neural network training, aggregation of the networks into a committee, and elimination of irrelevant input variables are integrated. To accomplish the elimination, an additional term to the Negative correlation learning error function, which forces input weights connected to the irrelevant input variables to decay, is added.

Magister Legum - LLM

No description available.

This thesis consists of four independent essays, which consider different topics in information economics and political economy. The first two papers are variants of the same idea. An uninformed principal, e.g., a government, will make a decision. In order to gain more information it may consult two experts; however, these experts have a private interest in certain policies being implemented. The question is, to gain as much information as possible, should the principal consult experts who are biased in the same direction, or experts who prefer different decisions? The main result is that, as long as collusion between experts can be prevented, homogeneous panels are superior to heterogeneous ones, and this advantage increases with the experts’ informational precision. In the third paper, two firms consider entry in a new product market and must decide when to enter the market and how to design their product. Firms do not know for certain what the best design is, so both firms want to outwait the other’s decision in order to gain more information. The focus of the paper is on which firm will make the first decision. The main result is that if products are strong (strategic) substitutes, the worst informed firm makes the first decision in equilibrium. The analysis should apply to a range of other contexts, such as investors’ trading decisions or the policy choices of political candidates. The final paper asks the following question: Could it be that parties in a two-party system may benefit from using several candidates in the same election? To promote the use of multiple candidates, I assume that a party never runs the risk of having its votes split up among its candidates. Despite this, it turns out that parties have a strong incentive to restrict their number of nominees. Paradoxically, it seems that the more uncertain parties are about voter opinion, the fewer candidates they want to use. In particular, with a uniform voter distribution the optimal number of candidates is one. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2001 S. v-vii: sammanfattning, s. 1-72: 4 uppsatser