Since its establishment in 1994, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) has promoted dialogue and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, including on issues in the South China Sea. ASEAN norms of consensus, inclusivity and non-interference are well reflected in the ARF’s operation through process of norm diffusion and engagement with major powers. Strengthening ASEAN leadership, maritime security focus, dialogue and interactivity within the ARF could enhance its effectiveness in regional security cooperation.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only), Political science (General)
Since Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assumed power with broad support in 2014, Indian politics has been undergoing a great transition, emphasizing the vision of “India for all” through inclusive growth. However, achieving and sustaining inclusive growth requires equal political participation, and yet there remains a substantial gap in citizens’ political engagement in India. Based on rational choice theory and political mobilization theory, I examined whether individuals’ health affects their political participation. Using ordinal logistic regression (OLR), I identified a significant effect of health on political participation in the Indian context. In light of the findings, I proposed several policy implications.
Political science (General), Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
This study aims to formulate and validate an alternative model of Civil Servant (ASN) competency development strategy in Indonesia. This is because competency development is an obligation for every ASN. However, there are still many agencies that have not facilitated it properly, because they have not conducted an analysis of competency development needs and there are no Job Competency Standards. As a result, competency development is partial and not in line with organizational needs. The research was conducted using a mixed method. It begins with a literature review to construct the model, followed by validation and reformulation through triangulation. Validation sites include Pusjar SK TASNAS-LAN, BPSDM of West Java Province, and BKD of Garut Regency, with data collected from Agency Leaders, Division Heads/Coordinators, and Employees. The findings confirm the COACHEE Model as a relevant alternative strategy for ASN competency development. This model emphasizes the importance of commitment; needs analysis based on Activity Competency Standards (SKA); selection of forms and pathways aligned with levels and gap components; implementation integrated with IKU; and an evaluation system tied to IKU and SKP. Recommendations include embedding competency development commitments in planning documents, adopting SKA as an alternative in AKPK, selecting forms and pathways based on levels and gaps, accelerating the Corporate University (Corpu) system for integration with IKU, and establishing an evaluation system that measures IKU and SKP achievement
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
Though a goal of HRI is the natural integration of social robots into everyday public spaces, real-world studies still occur mostly within controlled environments with predetermined participants. True public spaces present an environment which is largely unconstrained and unpredictable, frequented by a diverse range of people whose goals can often conflict with those of the robot. When combined with the general unfamiliarity most people have with social robots, this leads to unexpected human-robot interactions in these public spaces that are rarely discussed or detected in other contexts. In this paper, we describe atypical users we observed interacting with our robot, and those who did not, during a three-day pilot deployment within a large working church and visitor attraction. We then discuss theoretical future advances in the field that could address these challenges, as well as immediate practical mitigations and strategies to help improve public space human-robot interactions in the present. This work contributes empirical insights into the dynamics of human-robot interaction in public environments and offers actionable guidance for more effective future deployments for social robot designers.
The value of time management lies in the fact that people have too many tasks they need to do but not enough time for the things that they want to do. The study therefore, examined time management and employee productivity in government institutions in Delta State. The study adopted Time Management Quadrant theory. The study utilized secondary source of data. The study revealed that effective time management not only affects the productivity of employees, but also helps to cope with stress, conflicts and pressure more efficiently. It also helps them maintain a healthy work-life balance and keeps them motivated. The recommended that time should be set for the accomplishment of all activities by government at all levels including the core ministries. Adequate provisions should be made for the attainment of the goals set, among others.
The state of Penang, including city councils for island Pulau Pinang (with urban-core George Town) and mainland Seberang Perai, has negotiated at least a degree of political marginalisation since independence. Ruled previously by a secondary partner in the ruling Barisan Nasional (National Front), and since 2008, by the Democratic Action Party and its coalition partners, the economically powerful state has negotiated constrained autonomy and resources. While to some extent, these governing challenges are common to all states in Malaysia's highly centralised federation, in other ways, they reflect Penang's specific political position. Penang's leadership has sought in particular ways to circumvent inertia or divided loyalties among bureaucrats from the federal, rather than a state-level, civil service. Central to that solution has been reliance on an array of state government-linked corporations, facilitating administration, but at possible cost to clear accountability, transparency, and promised empowerment of civil society.
International relations, Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
In authoritarian systems, ethnic power-sharing arrangements include important ethnic groups in government and decision-making while putting restraints on political competition. However, under conditions of democratization, we might expect power-sharing arrangements to fragment as political parties seize opportunities to expand their base and appeal across ethnic lines. This article draws from the case of Malaysia, where multiethnic coalitions built around ethnic parties ruled for 61 years but where increasing electoral competitiveness has destabilized coalition politics. I focus on the Democratic Action Party (DAP), one of the country's most successful parties, which has sought to build a more multiethnic support base. I show that its attempts have been stymied by enduring norms of ethnically informed coalition building and efforts to protect existing ethnic bases by both rivals and allies. The findings shed light on the barriers to ethnic party adaptation and on why power-sharing practices remain so enduring, even in more fluid and democratic political environments.
International relations, Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
Southeast Asia is a geopolitically and socio-economically significant region with unique challenges and opportunities. Intensifying progress in generative AI against a backdrop of existing health security threats makes applications of AI to mitigate such threats attractive but also risky if done without due caution. This paper provides a brief sketch of some of the applications of AI for health security and the regional policy and governance landscape. I focus on policy and governance activities of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), an international body whose member states represent 691 million people. I conclude by identifying sustainability as an area of opportunity for policymakers and recommend priority areas for generative AI researchers to make the most impact with their work.
We present closed analytical approximations for the pricing of basket options, also applicable to Asian options with discrete averaging under the Black-Scholes model with time-dependent parameters. The formulae are obtained by using a stochastic Taylor expansion around a log-normal proxy model and are found to be highly accurate for Asian options in practice as well as for vanilla options with discrete dividends.
Goals. The article aims to explore some unpublished documents relating to the interaction between Rev. Hieromonk Gury, Associate Professor of the Kazan Theological Academy, and Astrakhan Diocesan Committee of the Orthodox Missionary Society, the former contained in Collection 597 ‘Astrakhan Diocesan Committee of the Missionary Orthodox Society’ (State Archive of Astrakhan Oblast). Materials and methods. The study analyzes a set of archival documents of 1907 narrating about the cooperation between Astrakhan Diocesan Committee and Kazan Theological Academy, including ones describing scientific and teaching endeavors of Rev. Hieromonk Gury. The article employs comparative and historical-descriptive methods of historical research. Results. The paper examines and introduces into scientific circulation a number of documents dated 1907 — a petition by Associate Professor of Kazan Theological Academy hieromonk Gury to Bishop Georgy of Astrakhan, resolution of the Bishop, decision of Astrakhan Diocesan Committee, letter of Hieromonk Gury to Bishop Georgy of Astrakhan, the latter’s appeal to the Committee, and Rev. Gury’s notification confirming the delivery of publications — from Collection 597 of the State Archive of Astrakhan Oblast. The documents are an important historical source on missionary activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kalmyk Steppe, interaction between Astrakhan Diocesan Committee and Kazan Theological Academy, and are most instrumental in discovering additional data pertaining to the biography of the prominent Mongolist Rev. Hieromonk Gury.
History of Asia, Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
allowing different players, reflecting a selective but relatively broad section of the civil population, in both the colonies and the Republic. Neither was Dutch Brazil a performanceand growth-oriented society of self-exploitation, like philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes contemporary neoliberalism. According to Han, this self-exploitation is the result of ubiquitous surveillance and the quest for personal gratification, both of which reduce humans to self-imposed slavery in the service of both Big Capital and Big Government, which act as one and the same technocracy. Using Kollman’s theory of lobbying, Van den Tol describes how interest groups could use direct as well as outside lobbying strategies. Ordinary people used petitions to reach political mandates, and personal relations and societal capital were vital tools to influence decision-making. Lobbying was a relatively cooperative form of interaction between people and decision-makers, and was chosen over the more confrontational option of going to court. Van den Tol concludes that, as a result, institutions were largely the product of lobbying by knowledgeable individuals, either on an individual level or forming a lobbying alliance. Comparisons can also be geographic. It would be interesting to compare Dutch Brazil with lobbying in an Asian context. The Dutch East India Company had to deal with highly developed societies in India and East Asia. As a result, lobbying had to include local Indigenous administrations or the Mughal Empire. Trading along the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts took place in an arguably Asia-centric world where Asian producers still had a considerable advantage compared to their European counterparts. To what extent was Dutch Brazil part of this Asia-centric world, and how did this affect lobbying efforts? Today, again, we are moving toward a more Asia-centric world where lobbying, especially in so-called neo-Confucian systems which confuse Confucianism with capitalism, is only between Big Government and Big Capital. Van den Tol provides us with an interesting case study with many implications for today’s lobbying or the lack of it. It allows us to conclude that lobbying in the seventeenth century, at least in some cases, was more polycentric than lobbying in today’s neoliberal technocracy.
One of the major themes in contemporary public policy studies is to making public policy based on or based on science by relying on various research results. Knowledgee is continually being discourses through a set of studies until finally it can be used as a basis for making good public policy. This paper aims to analyze the land tenure struggle within the public policy in the context of developing knowledge for policy after New Order Era. Conceptually the tenure discourse is understood as a recognition by the state over the rights of indigenous people land that essentially becomes a reflection of the willingness the state power bearers to recognize the existence of autonomous indigenous peoples. The method used in this paper is qualitative method, with research technique of literature study and document analysis, and also participatory observation. In conclusion, the agenda to recognize community rights over land and other natural resources should be formulated with new provisions and / or use of the old provisions, which maintain harmony between people who are de facto entitled to land and natural resources, with government authorities on the basis of the political conception of the state property rights, contained in the law on land and natural resources.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
Although many methods for computing the Greeks of discrete-time Asian options are proposed, few methods to calculate the Greeks of continuous-time Asian options are known. In this paper, we develop an integration by parts formula in the multi-dimensional Malliavin calculus, and apply it to obtain the Greeks formulae for continuous-time Asian options in the multi-asset situation. We combine the Malliavin method with the quasi-Monte Carlo method to calculate the Greeks in simulation. We discuss the asymptotic convergence of simulation estimates for the continuous-time Asian option Greeks obtained by Malliavin derivatives. We propose to use the conditional quasi-Monte Carlo method to smooth Malliavin Greeks, and show that the calculation of conditional expectations analytically is viable for many types of Asian options. We prove that the new estimates for Greeks have good smoothness. For binary Asian options, Asian call options and up-and-out Asian call options, for instance, our estimates are infinitely times differentiable. We take the gradient principal component analysis method as a dimension reduction technique in simulation. Numerical experiments demonstrate the large efficiency improvement of the proposed method, especially for Asian options with discontinuous payoff functions.
Ferenc Huszár, Sofia Ira Ktena, Conor O'Brien
et al.
Content on Twitter's home timeline is selected and ordered by personalization algorithms. By consistently ranking certain content higher, these algorithms may amplify some messages while reducing the visibility of others. There's been intense public and scholarly debate about the possibility that some political groups benefit more from algorithmic amplification than others. We provide quantitative evidence from a long-running, massive-scale randomized experiment on the Twitter platform that committed a randomized control group including nearly 2M daily active accounts to a reverse-chronological content feed free of algorithmic personalization. We present two sets of findings. First, we studied Tweets by elected legislators from major political parties in 7 countries. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In 6 out of 7 countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left. Consistent with this overall trend, our second set of findings studying the U.S. media landscape revealed that algorithmic amplification favours right-leaning news sources. We further looked at whether algorithms amplify far-left and far-right political groups more than moderate ones: contrary to prevailing public belief, we did not find evidence to support this hypothesis. We hope our findings will contribute to an evidence-based debate on the role personalization algorithms play in shaping political content consumption.
In the last two years, the U.S. government has emphasized the importance of accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) within the government and across the nation. In particular, the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020, which became law on January 1, 2021, provides for a coordinated program across the entire federal government to accelerate AI research and application. The U.S. government can benefit from public artificial intelligence and machine learning challenges through the development of novel algorithms and participation in experiential training. Although the public, private, and non-profit sectors have a history of leveraging crowdsourcing initiatives to generate novel solutions to difficult problems and engage stakeholders, interest in public competitions has waned in recent years as a result of at least three major factors: (1) a lack of high-quality, high-impact data; (2) a narrow engagement focus on specialized groups; and (3) insufficient operationalization of challenge results. Herein we identify common issues and recommend approaches to increase the effectiveness of challenges. To address these barriers, enabling the use of public competitions for accelerating AI and ML practice, the U.S. government must leverage methods that protect sensitive data while enabling modelling, enable easier participation, empower deployment of validated models, and incentivize engagement from broad sections of the population.
Language, Literacy, and Social Change in Mongolia is an exciting new contribution to the field of Inner Asian studies, offering a fascinating account of literacy in Mongolia from the early socialist to the contemporary period. This book will appeal to both Mongolian studies scholars and social scientists interested in literacy and education more broadly. The book offers an original view into the twentieth-century socialist period in Mongolia from the perspective of new literacy studies, providing a detailed glimpse into recent history that is often only cursorily described in contemporary anthropological accounts. Phillip P. Marzluf employs a theory of literacy as social practice, giving detailed attention to unconventional and often undocumented literacies, such as the Buddhist literacies found within rural pastoralist “home school” settings, letter writing, newspapers, and public signs and advertisements. This sensitive and critical approach cuts through dominant paradigms of both literacy and education and succeeds in offering exciting new historical understandings and a fresh perspective from which new forms and formats of literacy beyond the institution of formal schooling can be imagined. Marzluf draws on a range of sources, including oral histories in the University of Cambridge’s public archive, archival materials such as government-sponsored publicfacing media and publications, primary-level socialist-era textbooks, and his own visual field methods, to document urban signage and monuments. For example, Marzluf begins the book with a translation of a short letter written in 1961 by a boy attending a rural boarding school. Addressed to his mother, sister, and brother, he sends updates and asks for money to be sent by post to buy winter boots and clothes. This fascinating use of archival material serves as an entry point to discussing a key goal of the book: “to de-naturalize reading and writing and pay more attention to literacy in our lives and its material, social, cultural, economic and political contexts and consequences” (p. 1). Marzluf’s analysis moves from the specificities of this letter to its institutional and political context to reveal the local impacts of socialist state policy at the time, including the introduction of compulsory state schooling, the development of the boarding school system to accommodate rural children, and the shift in forms of literacy utilizing new communication infrastructure such as postal systems and radio broadcasting. Interestingly, Marzluf explains that this same letter was then republished in a national newspaper in the early 1990s to support claims by democratic reformers about the shortcomings of socialist-era education. These everyday practices of communication and literacy form the rich empirical material of this book, allowing the analysis to capture a longer view of social change in Mongolia from a grounded perspective. Marzluf’s analysis of the “pastoral home school”1 (p. 29) and “grassroots literacies” (p. 33) presents a particularly original contribution to understanding the forms of everyday literacy which preceded the formal government-sponsored school system and continued throughout the twentieth century. For Marzluf, grassroots literacies are the “highly
Seiring dengan arus globalisasi yang makin menguat, pemerintah dituntut untuk lebih memperkuat komitmen dalam kebijaksanaan desentralisasi atau pemberian otonomi kepada daerah. Hal ini dimaksudkan agar pemerintah daerah memiliki kewenangan yang lebih luas untuk menentukan arah kebijaksanaan dalam mengatasi berbagai implikasi atau dampak dari proses globalisasi tersebut. Untuk meningkatkan daya saing serta kesiapan Daerah Tingkat II dalam era globalisasi ini, diperlukan beberapa langkah, yaitu: mengembangkan aparatur yang berciri akuntabilitas dan transparansi, perlu membentuk kelembagaan kemitraan di daerah, perencanaan sumber daya manusia aparatur yang matang, meningkatkan koordinasi di daerah, membangun atau melengkapi sarana dan prasarana pembangunan, serta menderegulasi perijinan yang makin cepat dan mudah.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
Twitter has been a focus of research in political science for a few years now as it provides the opportunity to make direct observations on the spread of political information in different communities. Here we will be studying the phenomena of information diffusion, and focus on nodes that are responsible for spreading political information everywhere on the Twitter network. This paper attempts to fill gaps in the literature regarding the demographics of political retweeters using various techniques on the name and location-related data from most active French political retweeters. Here I will try to state the break-down of these accounts in categories based on gender, language, location, education level, and self-descriptions. To put the information about political retweeters in context we will also create a category of non-political retweeters to draw comparisons between the groups regarding the above-mentioned variables.
Colonial South Asian history has focused on British India and the nationalists who later resisted and supplanted it. However, long before India’s independence from Britain, there were regions where neither the British nor the nationalists were primarily positioned. These were the approximately six hundred semi-autonomous kingdoms, or “princely states” (often referred to as “Indian India”), which spanned the breadth and length of the subcontinent. They comprised two-fifths of the landmass and one-third of the population, excluding Burma. Though their rulers were long marginalized in modern South Asian and imperial history as antiquated relics of the medieval era, oriental despots, or puppet princes, they were real forces in the governing of the subcontinent, not only during the precolonial era but also at the heyday of the British Empire and continue to play a part in modern South Asia. Native rulers introduced new systems of administration, taxation, law, religious and social reform, trade, education, public health, and technology, including railways, ginning factories, and telegraphs, to their states; served as patrons of architecture, the arts, culinary innovation, and sport; encouraged the introduction of representative forms of government; and, in certain cases, supported popular anticolonial movements. In some principalities, where ruling families practiced different faiths from the majority of their citizens, their policies would influence the political trajectories of their erstwhile states long after the end of colonialism. With India’s independence and Partition in 1947, the princely states merged with the new nations of South Asia, and in the 1970s former princes lost their economic entitlement of the Privy Purse. However, they continued to play a part in postcolonial South Asia, serving as diplomats, governors, patrons of educational and charitable institutions, local magnates, company directors, cabinet ministers and, perhaps most prominently, as elected politicians and leaders of heritage tourism.
Experiencing work as a calling has been associated with various positive work-related attitudes and outcomes. Recent studies have examined personal and contextual factors related to job calling; however, gaps remain in the literature on how employees’ perception of organizational environment may lead to the formation of employees’ job calling. We focused on psychological climate of innovation as the predictor of employees’ job calling and further investigated its effect on extra-role behaviors, including innovative work behavior (IWB) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). A total of 165 Malaysian employees from diverse industries and organizations participated in a self-reported online questionnaire. We found support for the mediation model in which the association between a psychological climate of innovation and increased extra-role behaviors through increased job calling. Altogether, these findings provided new insights into the important role of innovative climate on employees’ job calling and the mediating role of job calling on extra-role behaviors within occupational settings. Theoretical and practical implications are further discussed
Political science (General), Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)