Purpose – This article aims to treat contemporary economic development from a regional and European perspective. Design/methodology/approach – The article applies a French prospective (foresight) approach to the issues of employment, decentralization, and privatization as an antidote to the usual discussions of governance and globalization. Findings – The article stresses the need for simple, a...

Many philosophers endorse deterrence justifications of legal punishment. According to these justifications, punishment is justified at least in part because it deters offenses. These justifications rely on empirical assumptions, e.g., that non-punitive enforcement can’t deter or that it can’t deter enough. I’ll challenge these assumptions and argue that extant deterrence justifications of legal...

It was a difficult year for Latin America and the Caribbean. The East Asian economic crisis and the financial rumblings in Russia generated unsettling aftershocks in emerging financial markets. The bottom fell out of prices for key commodities such as oil and metals, and even nature dealt its blow in the form of El Niño. Volatility has hit again. But thanks to a decade of structural reforms, th...

Aspen FACE Harvest Complete The Aspen FACE harvest has been completed! On June 8, 2009, harvest of the experiment began. Crews from the Forest Service, Michigan Technological University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Nevada teamed together to harvest the aboveand below-ground portions of the experiment. All together, well over 25 students and staff from these institutions wo...

The process of robot design is a complex task and the majority decisions are still based on human intuition or tedious manual tuning. A more informed way facing this computational methods where parameters concurrently optimized with corresponding controllers. Existing approaches, however, strongly influenced by predefined control rules motion templates cannot provide end-to-end solutions. In pa...