Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 31 - 51 of 51

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

A General Framework For Price Regulation Of Airports, Sock Yong Phang Mar 2016

A General Framework For Price Regulation Of Airports, Sock Yong Phang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Price cap regulation (PCR) was first implemented for privatized utilities in the UK in the 1980s. It has since been adopted by numerous countries as a regulatory regime in several sectors. This paper focuses on the development of different forms of price regulation of airports of which PCR is one variant. In countries where airport privatization is still in the early stages, the spectrum of airports and varied nature of regulatory regimes can be confusing and the lack of a general framework can itself become an obstacle to privatization. This paper proposes a general framework comprising decisions to be made …


Saravanan Gopinathan [Singapore, Dean Of National Institute Of Education], Saravanan Gopinathan Feb 2016

Saravanan Gopinathan [Singapore, Dean Of National Institute Of Education], Saravanan Gopinathan

Digital Narratives of Asia

Former Dean of National Institute of Education, Saravanan Gopinathan, sees his decades of contribution to education as a unique journey closely linked with the development of the Singapore state. He discusses the need to re-mould the current schooling for the new economic environment, and presents his critiques on some aspects of the system.


Use Our Diversity To Strengthen Social Cohesion, Tan K. B. Eugene Feb 2016

Use Our Diversity To Strengthen Social Cohesion, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Two Cabinet Ministers recently offered a sobering view of the state of ethnic relations in Singapore, against the backdrop of rising religiosity and global terrorism. Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam spoke of four threats to social cohesion, including Muslims growing more distant from the rest of society and feelings of Islamophobia among non-Muslims. Environment and Water Resources Minister Masagos Zulkifli reiterated the importance of practising religion suited to the local context and for Muslims not to be influenced by radical foreign ideologies — often easily spread through social media.


Quantity Discounts And Capital Misallocation In Vertical Relationships, Ken Onishi Feb 2016

Quantity Discounts And Capital Misallocation In Vertical Relationships, Ken Onishi

Research Collection School Of Economics

I study transactions between aircraft manufacturers and airlines as well as airlines' utilization of their fleet. Aircraft production is characterized by economies of scale via learning-by-doing, which creates a trade-off between current profit and future competitive advantage in the aircraft market. The latter consideration makes large buyers more attractive than small buyers and induces quantity discounts. The resulting nonlinear pricing strategy may distort both production and allocation in favor of large buyers. In the data, there is a negative correlation between the size of aircraft orders and the per-unit price, and a positive correlation between the price paid and the …


Ict-Travel: Mobile Public Transport Companion For The Visually Impaired, Linting Cui, Kenny Ngo, Benjamin Kok Siew Gan Feb 2016

Ict-Travel: Mobile Public Transport Companion For The Visually Impaired, Linting Cui, Kenny Ngo, Benjamin Kok Siew Gan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The smartphone application widespread adoption has brought about many conveniences to the general population. Unfortunately, like most technology adoption, the focus lacks behind for people with disabilities. Yet, the potential for IT to personalize the mobile application for these groups is high. In our capstone project at Singapore Management University, we developed an iOS application for the visually impaired to use the public transport in Singapore. Beyond meeting the initial requirements, we tested with the visually impaired in order to empathize and cater to their specific needs. This software engineering project is a lesson in iterative software development with changing …


Online Spatio-Temporal Matching In Stochastic And Dynamic Domains, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Patrick Jaillet Feb 2016

Online Spatio-Temporal Matching In Stochastic And Dynamic Domains, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-temporal matching of services to customers online is a problem that arises on a large scale in many domains associated with shared transportation (ex: taxis, ride sharing, super shuttles, etc.) and delivery services (ex: food, equipment, clothing, home fuel, etc.). A key characteristic of these problems is that matching of services to customers in one round has a direct impact on the matching of services to customers in the next round. For instance, in the case of taxis, in the second round taxis can only pick up customers closer to the drop off point of the customer from the first …


The Realpolitik Of Nuclear Risk: When Political Expediency Trumps Technical Democracy, Hiro Saito, Sang-Hyoun Pahk Feb 2016

The Realpolitik Of Nuclear Risk: When Political Expediency Trumps Technical Democracy, Hiro Saito, Sang-Hyoun Pahk

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In recent years, a growing number of researchers in science and technology studies have begun to examine the relationship between science and politics. Specifically, they focus on citizen participation in highly technical policy problems and explore the possibility of a technical democracy that avoids pitfalls of technocracy. This focus, however, downplays a possibly more serious obstacle to technical democracy than technocracy, namely, realpolitik. Based on ethnographic and textual data on citizen–government interactions in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, we first show how citizens mobilised radiation detectors and counter-experts to force the Japanese government to admit scientific uncertainty …


Efficient Collective Spatial Keyword Query Processing On Road Networks, Yunjun Gao, Jingwen Zhao, Baihua Zheng, Gang Chen Feb 2016

Efficient Collective Spatial Keyword Query Processing On Road Networks, Yunjun Gao, Jingwen Zhao, Baihua Zheng, Gang Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The collective spatial keyword query (CSKQ), an important variant of spatial keyword queries, aims to find a set of the objects that collectively cover users' queried keywords, and those objects are close to the query location and have small inter-object distances. Existing works only focus on the CSKQ problem in the Euclidean space, although we observe that, in many real-life applications, the closeness of two spatial objects is measured by their road network distance. Thus, existing methods cannot solve the problem of network-based CSKQ efficiently. In this paper, we study the problem of collective spatial keyword query processing on road …


How Narrative Focus And A Statistical Map Shape Health Policy Support Among State Legislators, Jeff Niederdeppe, Sungjong Roh, Caitlin Dreisbach Feb 2016

How Narrative Focus And A Statistical Map Shape Health Policy Support Among State Legislators, Jeff Niederdeppe, Sungjong Roh, Caitlin Dreisbach

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study attempts to advance theorizing about health policy advocacy with combinations of narrative focus and a statistical map in an attempt to increase state legislators’ support for policies to address the issue of obesity by reducing food deserts. Specifically, we examine state legislators’ responses to variations in narrative focus (individual vs. community) about causes and solutions for food deserts in U.S. communities, and a statistical map (presence vs. absence) depicting the prevalence of food deserts across the United States. Using a Web-based randomized experiment (N = 496), we show that narrative focus and the statistical map interact to produce …


Interpreting China’S New Urban Spaces: State, Market, And Society In Action, Shenjing He, Lily Kong, George C. S. Lin Feb 2016

Interpreting China’S New Urban Spaces: State, Market, And Society In Action, Shenjing He, Lily Kong, George C. S. Lin

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Chinese urbanism has long historical roots and has profoundly influenced world civilizations. Yet, the Chinese city has not, until very recently, attracted sustained or intense global attention. In the post-reform era, especially after 1992, the scale and speed of China’s urbanization, and the intricacy of its dynamics and socio-spatial consequences have dwarfed those of other countries in the world. The latest reform era of urban China is characterized by a renewed and thriving urbanism, which manifests itself in the sheer scale of new urban space (re)production and the intricate interrelationships among the state, market, and society. The proliferation of new …


Zainul Abidin Rasheed [Malaysia, Minister Of State For Foreign Affairs], Zainul Abidin Rasheed Jan 2016

Zainul Abidin Rasheed [Malaysia, Minister Of State For Foreign Affairs], Zainul Abidin Rasheed

Digital Narratives of Asia

Former editor of Berita Harian, who rose to become head of Mendaki, and then Senior Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Zainul Abidin Rasheed, tells DNA how his experiences during the 1964 racial riots had shaped his political views. He recalls how Lee Kuan Yew retracted from closing down Nanyang University, and Mr Goh Chok Tong's consensual style that welcomes the contributions of the Association of Muslim Professionals.


Building Participatory Organizations For Common Pool Resource Management: Water User Group Promotion In Indonesia, Jacob I. Ricks Jan 2016

Building Participatory Organizations For Common Pool Resource Management: Water User Group Promotion In Indonesia, Jacob I. Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

States are increasingly striving to create participatory local organizations for joint management of common pool resources. What local conditions determine success of such state efforts? What effect do these efforts have? Drawing on controlled comparisons between three districts in Indonesia and an original survey of 92 water user groups, I demonstrate that local political contexts condition the effectiveness of participatory irrigation policies. When irrigation is politically salient, local politicians pressure bureaucrats to better engage with farmers. The data also show that training programs are not as effective at increasing water user organization activity as frequent contact between bureaucrats and farmers.


In A Funk Over Trump, David Chan Jan 2016

In A Funk Over Trump, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Cynicism, for instance about startling turns in global affairs, can be toxic. A dose of healthy scepticism is a much better approach. Trust is an important foundation in interactions between people, and this applies in relationships between friends, employee and employer, or citizens and the government. At the government level, recent surprise world events, such as Brexit, when Britons voted to leave the European Union, and last week's election of anti-establishment figure Donald Trump to the United States presidency, suggest a disruption of that foundation of trust. One challenge from such a turn of events is the rise of cynicism. …


Public Vs. Private Schooling As A Route To Universal Basic Education: A Comparison Of China And India, William C. Smith, Devin K. Joshi Jan 2016

Public Vs. Private Schooling As A Route To Universal Basic Education: A Comparison Of China And India, William C. Smith, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article examines whether focusing primarily on public schooling can lead to more rapid achievement of universal basic education (UBE) than relying on a mixture of public and private schooling. Through a structured, focused comparison, we find China's greater emphasis on public schooling has contributed to higher enrollment, attendance, graduation rates, gender parity, and proportion of students entering higher education than India, the country with the world's largest private sector in primary and secondary education. This comparison suggests that greater emphasis on public schooling in developing countries may lead to more rapid UBE attainment than encouraging privatization.


Social Justice And Human Rights In Education Policy Discourse: Assessing Nelson Mandela's Legacy, Abrehet Gebremedhin, Devin Joshi Jan 2016

Social Justice And Human Rights In Education Policy Discourse: Assessing Nelson Mandela's Legacy, Abrehet Gebremedhin, Devin Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Twenty years after South Africa's democratisation, Nelson Mandela's passing has prompted scholars to examine his legacy in various domains. Here we take a look at his legacy in education discourse. Tracing Mandela's thoughts and pronouncements on education we find two major emphases: a view of education as a practical means to economic development, and education as a means to social justice, human rights, and democracy. Assessing the legacy of these twin emphases, we conducted qualitative and quantitative content analysis of turning point documents in education policy and annual reports from the respective South African ministries of education over the last …


Public Vs. Private Schooling As A Route To Universal Basic Education: A Comparison Of China And India, William C. Smith, Devin K. Joshi Jan 2016

Public Vs. Private Schooling As A Route To Universal Basic Education: A Comparison Of China And India, William C. Smith, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article examines whether focusing primarily on public schooling can lead to more rapid achievement of universal basic education (UBE) than relying on a mixture of public and private schooling. Through a structured, focused comparison, we find China's greater emphasis on public schooling has contributed to higher enrollment, attendance, graduation rates, gender parity, and proportion of students entering higher education than India, the country with the world's largest private sector in primary and secondary education. This comparison suggests that greater emphasis on public schooling in developing countries may lead to more rapid UBE attainment than encouraging privatization.


The Word Outside And The Pictures In Our Heads: Contingent Framing Effects Of Labels On Health Policy Preferences By Political Ideology, Sungjong Roh, Jeff Niederdeppe Jan 2016

The Word Outside And The Pictures In Our Heads: Contingent Framing Effects Of Labels On Health Policy Preferences By Political Ideology, Sungjong Roh, Jeff Niederdeppe

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study uses data from systematic Web image search results and two randomized survey experiments to analyze how frames commonly used in public debates about health issues, oper- ationalized here as alternative word choices, influence public support for health policy reforms. In Study 1, analyses of Bing (N = 1,719), Google (N = 1,872), and Yahoo Images (N = 1,657) search results suggest that the images returned from the search query “sugar-sweetened beverage” are more likely to evoke health-related concepts than images returned from a search query about “soda.” In contrast, “soda” search queries were more likely to incorporate brand-related …


Ideas, Interests And Practical Authority In Reform Politics: Decentralization Reform In South Korea In The 2000s, Yooil Bae Jan 2016

Ideas, Interests And Practical Authority In Reform Politics: Decentralization Reform In South Korea In The 2000s, Yooil Bae

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explains the reason why the hitherto statist country, Korea, has carried out significant decentralization since the 2000s. In explaining the motivation for decentralization, extant literature has focused on the role of parties, bureaucratic politics, democratization, or territorial interests. Yet there is still limited explanation of how the decentralization laws in Korea could be successfully passed in the 2000s, while cental stakeholders still persisted. By tracing the process of decentralization reform in the 2000s, this article demonstrates how structural factors created favourable circumstances and discursive background for institutional change, and how the idea of decentralization, through the idea diffusion …


Education As The Weakest Institutional Link In Japan's Nuclear Regulation, Hiro Saito Jan 2016

Education As The Weakest Institutional Link In Japan's Nuclear Regulation, Hiro Saito

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Debates over the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster pointed to a set of institutional and organizational failures in Japan’s nuclear regulation as a primary cause of the disaster. While the Japanese government has implemented reforms to strengthen nuclear regulation, I argue that these reforms have largely left out the education system as a key institution that produces and distributes expertise necessary for nuclear regulation. First, the Japanese education system has traditionally produced only a small number of experts in the fields related to nuclear regulation, aligned top-ranked experts with the pro-nuclear government, and weakened the civil society’s capacity to mobilize counter-experts. …


Getting To The Heart Of Great Public Spaces, Su Fern Hoe, Jacqueline Liu, Tan Tarn How Jan 2016

Getting To The Heart Of Great Public Spaces, Su Fern Hoe, Jacqueline Liu, Tan Tarn How

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has flaggedthe start of car-free Sundays in the Civic District and Central BusinessDistrict this year.This move to make the area people-friendly is part of a $740 millionplan, announced in the 2015 Budget, to revitalise the Civic District andtransform it into "an integrated arts, culture and lifestyleprecinct". Highlights of the plan include the Jubilee Walk - an 8km trailthat wraps around landmarks from the National Museum to the Esplanade - and thenewly opened National Gallery Singapore


Achieving Regulatory Excellence In The Agri-Food Biotechnology Sector: Building Policy Capacity, Michael Howlett, Ishani Mukherjee Jan 2016

Achieving Regulatory Excellence In The Agri-Food Biotechnology Sector: Building Policy Capacity, Michael Howlett, Ishani Mukherjee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

What capacities are needed on the part of policymakers in areas such as the agri-food biotechnology sector in order to attain excellence at the individual, organisational and systemic levels of regulatory operation? To address this question, this paper draws upon work recently carried out on regulatory excellence by the Penn Programme on Regulation and couples it with recent studies on how to build policy capacity. Derived from a multi-jurisdiction, multi-sector review of regulation, the Penn programme identified three core areas or `pillars' of regulatory excellence - namely, stellar competence, empathic engagement and utmost integrity -which reflect the kinds of individual …