Global ETD Search

1	"Susceptible of a very broad interpretation" : notions of accountability and free-flow-of-information in American views on the Freedom of Information Act, 1929-1989 McAndrew, Ian 05 1900 (has links) In 1989, the United States Supreme Court formulated the central purposes doctrine of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by ruling that the law was designed to grant citizens a right of access to records reflecting on the activities of government officials. This decision immediately generated controversy. The majority of parties interested in FOIA jurisprudence claimed that the judgement misconstrued the congressional intent by denying that legislators had hoped to create a right of access to all government-held information, regardless of its content. The contrast between the Court's doctrine and the majority interpretation, or the free-flow-of-information view, is the main topic of this thesis. In exploring this matter, it becomes evident that the intellectual history of access legislation in the United States is marked by considerable diversity: from the 1920s through to the present era, various FOIA constituencies have espoused distinctive views on how an access-torecords statute should be understood. Most of these interpretations have focussed on the need for access as a measure to help citizens oversee the conduct of government personnel, and only the free-flow supporters have broken from this pattern. The philosophy they offer in its place suggests that oversight interpretations, particularly the central purposes doctrine, are illegitimate. These orthodox commentators argue instead that because the FOIA was designed to serve the same goals as the First Amendment, it must be read as mandating disclosure as "an end for its own sake." The principal contention here is that free-flow supporters have dismissed the government-oversight views far too quickly. To illustrate this point, the thesis focuses on the central purposes doctrine, and articulates it in the form of an "accountability view" to establish that the Court's decision was not as arbitrary as is often claimed. Second, the argument inquires whether one of these two predominant views can be said to have a stronger rationale than the other. The ultimate conclusion of this line of inquiry is that, because of serious logical flaws in the first-amendment argument supporting the free-flow theory, the central purposes doctrine actually represents the more reasonable interpretation of the statutory purpose of the act.
2	"Susceptible of a very broad interpretation" : notions of accountability and free-flow-of-information in American views on the Freedom of Information Act, 1929-1989 McAndrew, Ian 05 1900 (has links) In 1989, the United States Supreme Court formulated the central purposes doctrine of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by ruling that the law was designed to grant citizens a right of access to records reflecting on the activities of government officials. This decision immediately generated controversy. The majority of parties interested in FOIA jurisprudence claimed that the judgement misconstrued the congressional intent by denying that legislators had hoped to create a right of access to all government-held information, regardless of its content. The contrast between the Court's doctrine and the majority interpretation, or the free-flow-of-information view, is the main topic of this thesis. In exploring this matter, it becomes evident that the intellectual history of access legislation in the United States is marked by considerable diversity: from the 1920s through to the present era, various FOIA constituencies have espoused distinctive views on how an access-torecords statute should be understood. Most of these interpretations have focussed on the need for access as a measure to help citizens oversee the conduct of government personnel, and only the free-flow supporters have broken from this pattern. The philosophy they offer in its place suggests that oversight interpretations, particularly the central purposes doctrine, are illegitimate. These orthodox commentators argue instead that because the FOIA was designed to serve the same goals as the First Amendment, it must be read as mandating disclosure as "an end for its own sake." The principal contention here is that free-flow supporters have dismissed the government-oversight views far too quickly. To illustrate this point, the thesis focuses on the central purposes doctrine, and articulates it in the form of an "accountability view" to establish that the Court's decision was not as arbitrary as is often claimed. Second, the argument inquires whether one of these two predominant views can be said to have a stronger rationale than the other. The ultimate conclusion of this line of inquiry is that, because of serious logical flaws in the first-amendment argument supporting the free-flow theory, the central purposes doctrine actually represents the more reasonable interpretation of the statutory purpose of the act. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate
3	Reining in the State: Civil Society, Congress, and the Movement to Democratize the National Security State, 1970-1978 Scott, Katherine Anne January 2009 (has links) This dissertation explores the battle to democratize the national security state, 1970-1978. It examines the neo-progressive movement to institutionalize a new domestic policy regime, in an attempt to force government transparency, protect individual privacy from state intrusion, and create new judicial and legislative checks on domestic security operations. It proceeds chronologically, first outlining the state's overwhelming response to the domestic unrest of the 1960s. During this period, the Department of Justice developed new capacities to better predict urban unrest, growing a computerized databank that contained millions of dossiers on dissenting Americans and the Department of Defense greatly expanded existing capacities, applying cold war counterinsurgency and counterintelligence techniques developed abroad to the problems of protests and riots at home. The remainder of the dissertation examines how the state's secret response to unrest and disorder became public in the early 1970s. It traces the development of a loose coalition of reformers who challenged domestic security policy and coordinated legislative and litigative strategies to check executive power. / History History, United States Political Science, General Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Freedom of Information Act National Security Privacy Act Right to Know Transparency
4	Otevřená data a jejich využití v tuzemské datové žurnalistice / Open Data and their use in Czech Data Journalism Krawiecová, Nela January 2022 (has links) The fundamental source of data journalism, which has established itself in the Czech media landscape in recent years, is the availability of usable data sets. However, academicians have so far neglected the topic of data openness and its importance in journalistic discourse. Simultaneously, data journalists are often the first to make data available to the public. An integral part of the thesis is mapping the historical development of data journalism, including the phenomenon of open government with a focus on Czech and European legislation and obtaining information with the help of the Freedom of Information Act. The aim of the thesis is, based on in-depth interviews with Czech data journalists, to identify the data sources which they frequently often use in their editorial routines, to evaluate the quality of these sources and to present the main limits that journalists encounter. In the conclusive part of the thesis the author transfers the focus to analysis of the availability of data sources provided by the Ministry of Health and the Institute of Health Information and Statistics during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 and outlines the process of acquisition, cleaning, analysis, and visualization of information by journalists.
5	Highway Development Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Analysis, Critique and Advancement El-Khatib, Mayar January 2010 (has links) While decision-making under uncertainty is a major universal problem, its implications in the field of transportation systems are especially enormous; where the benefits of right decisions are tremendous, the consequences of wrong ones are potentially disastrous. In the realm of highway systems, decisions related to the highway configuration (number of lanes, right of way, etc.) need to incorporate both the traffic demand and land price uncertainties. In the literature, these uncertainties have generally been modeled using the Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) process, which has been used extensively in modeling many other real life phenomena. But few scholars, including those who used the GBM in highway configuration decisions, have offered any rigorous justification for the use of this model. This thesis attempts to offer a detailed analysis of various aspects of transportation systems in relation to decision-making. It reveals some general insights as well as a new concept that extends the notion of opportunity cost to situations where wrong decisions could be made. Claiming deficiency of the GBM model, it also introduces a new formulation that utilizes a large and flexible parametric family of jump models (i.e., Lévy processes). To validate this claim, data related to traffic demand and land prices were collected and analyzed to reveal that their distributions, heavy-tailed and asymmetric, do not match well with the GBM model. As a remedy, this research used the Merton, Kou, and negative inverse Gaussian Lévy processes as possible alternatives. Though the results show indifference in relation to final decisions among the models, mathematically, they improve the precision of uncertainty models and the decision-making process. This furthers the quest for optimality in highway projects and beyond. highway development decision making under uncertainty real options jump processes infinitely divisible distributions Lévy processes measure theory characteristic function characteristic exponent Lévy jump measure probability measure cádlág stochastic process Wiener process Poisson process compound Poisson process finite activity models jump diffusion models Merton model Gaussian jump process Kou model double exponential jump process leptokurtic volatility smile infinite activity models pure jumps process generalized hyperbolic model modified Bessel function negative inverse Gaussian model geometric Brownian motion model log-normal distribution model normality assumption heavy-tailed distribution asymmetric distribution quantile-quantile plot Rydberg algorithm parameter calibration moments cummulants sum of squares Monte Carlo simulation least-squares regression backward dynamic programming discrete-time Markov chain land price traffic demand highway service quality index data collection traffic volume Annual Average Daily Traffic Ontario Ministry of Transportation Land Registry Office Freedom of Information Act seasonality value of transportation types of transportation systems importance of highway systems cost of wrong decisions monetary cost private sector cost human cost land expropriation environmental cost irreversibility cost factor time cost factor political cost factor opportunity cost opportunity cost of wrong decisions economic cost of wrong decisions economic cost of mis-estimation economic profit of wrong decisions cost of inaction price of making right decisions scope of decisions rehabilitation decision land acquisition decision expansion decision uncertainty modeling land acquisition cost expropriation cost construction cost material cost Montréal-Mirabel International Airport Pickering Airport 407 Express Toll Route Highway 407 Statistics
6	Highway Development Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Analysis, Critique and Advancement El-Khatib, Mayar January 2010 (has links) While decision-making under uncertainty is a major universal problem, its implications in the field of transportation systems are especially enormous; where the benefits of right decisions are tremendous, the consequences of wrong ones are potentially disastrous. In the realm of highway systems, decisions related to the highway configuration (number of lanes, right of way, etc.) need to incorporate both the traffic demand and land price uncertainties. In the literature, these uncertainties have generally been modeled using the Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) process, which has been used extensively in modeling many other real life phenomena. But few scholars, including those who used the GBM in highway configuration decisions, have offered any rigorous justification for the use of this model. This thesis attempts to offer a detailed analysis of various aspects of transportation systems in relation to decision-making. It reveals some general insights as well as a new concept that extends the notion of opportunity cost to situations where wrong decisions could be made. Claiming deficiency of the GBM model, it also introduces a new formulation that utilizes a large and flexible parametric family of jump models (i.e., Lévy processes). To validate this claim, data related to traffic demand and land prices were collected and analyzed to reveal that their distributions, heavy-tailed and asymmetric, do not match well with the GBM model. As a remedy, this research used the Merton, Kou, and negative inverse Gaussian Lévy processes as possible alternatives. Though the results show indifference in relation to final decisions among the models, mathematically, they improve the precision of uncertainty models and the decision-making process. This furthers the quest for optimality in highway projects and beyond. highway development decision making under uncertainty real options jump processes infinitely divisible distributions Lévy processes measure theory characteristic function characteristic exponent Lévy jump measure probability measure cádlág stochastic process Wiener process Poisson process compound Poisson process finite activity models jump diffusion models Merton model Gaussian jump process Kou model double exponential jump process leptokurtic volatility smile infinite activity models pure jumps process generalized hyperbolic model modified Bessel function negative inverse Gaussian model geometric Brownian motion model log-normal distribution model normality assumption heavy-tailed distribution asymmetric distribution quantile-quantile plot Rydberg algorithm parameter calibration moments cummulants sum of squares Monte Carlo simulation least-squares regression backward dynamic programming discrete-time Markov chain land price traffic demand highway service quality index data collection traffic volume Annual Average Daily Traffic Ontario Ministry of Transportation Land Registry Office Freedom of Information Act seasonality value of transportation types of transportation systems importance of highway systems cost of wrong decisions monetary cost private sector cost human cost land expropriation environmental cost irreversibility cost factor time cost factor political cost factor opportunity cost opportunity cost of wrong decisions economic cost of wrong decisions economic cost of mis-estimation economic profit of wrong decisions cost of inaction price of making right decisions scope of decisions rehabilitation decision land acquisition decision expansion decision uncertainty modeling land acquisition cost expropriation cost construction cost material cost Montréal-Mirabel International Airport Pickering Airport 407 Express Toll Route Highway 407 Statistics

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