Topic Review
Land Change Modeling
Land change models (LCMs) describe, project, and explain changes in and the dynamics of land use and land-cover. LCMs are a means of understanding ways that humans change the Earth's surface in the past, present, and future. Land change models are valuable in development policy, helping guide more appropriate decisions for resource management and the natural environment at a variety of scales ranging from a small piece of land to the entire spatial extent. Moreover, developments within land-cover, environmental and socio-economic data (as well as within technological infrastructures) have increased opportunities for land change modeling to help support and influence decisions that affect human-environment systems, as national and international attention increasingly focuses on issues of global climate change and sustainability.
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Topic Review
Georgism
Georgism, also called in modern times geoism and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that, although people should own the value they produce themselves, the economic rent derived from land – including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations – should belong equally to all members of society. Developed from the writings of American economist and social reformer Henry George, the Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice. Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution and the control of commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g. intellectual property). Any natural resource which is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of land monopoly involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value, arguing that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes (such as on income, trade, or purchases) that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue to the people by means of a basic income or citizen's dividend. The concept of gaining public revenues mainly from land and natural resource privileges was widely popularized by Henry George through his first book, Progress and Poverty (1879). The philosophical basis of Georgism dates back to several early thinkers such as John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Paine. Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have observed that a public levy on land value does not cause economic inefficiency, unlike other taxes. A land value tax also has progressive tax effects. Advocates of land value taxes argue that they would reduce economic inequality, increase economic efficiency, remove incentives to underutilize urban land and reduce property speculation. Georgist ideas were popular and influential during the late 19th and early 20th century. Political parties, institutions and communities were founded based on Georgist principles during that time. Early devotees of Henry George's economic philosophy were often termed Single Taxers for their political goal of raising public revenue mainly or only from a land value tax, although Georgists endorsed multiple forms of rent capture (e.g. seigniorage) as legitimate. The term Georgism was invented later, and some prefer the term geoism as more generic.
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Topic Review
Design Assist
Design Assist is the procurement method by which, prior to completion of design, a construction contract may be awarded on a best value basis pursuant to which a contractor provides design assistance to the architect or engineer of record through a design professional separately retained by the contractor.
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Topic Review
Auction
An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition exist and are described in the section about different types. The branch of economic theory dealing with auction types and participants' behavior in auctions is called auction theory. The open ascending price auction is arguably the most common form of auction in use throughout history. Participants bid openly against one another, with each subsequent bid required to be higher than the previous bid. An auctioneer may announce prices, bidders may call out their bids themselves or have a proxy call out a bid on their behalf, or bids may be submitted electronically with the highest current bid publicly displayed. Auctions were and are applied for trade in diverse contexts. These contexts are antiques, paintings, rare collectibles, expensive wines, commodities, livestock, radio spectrum, used cars, online advertising, even emission trading and many more.
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Topic Review
Certis CISCO
Coordinates: 1°19′16.88″N 103°53′30.67″E / 1.3213556°N 103.8918528°E / 1.3213556; 103.8918528 Certis CISCO Security Private Limited, formerly CISCO Security Private Limited, is one of the five commercial Auxiliary Police forces authorized to provide armed security officers to government organizations as well as private companies or individuals in Singapore. It has its roots as a department of the Singapore Police Force (SPF), which branched out as the Commercial and Industrial Security Corporation, a statutory board with a monopoly over most areas of the local private armed security industry. From 1 June 2005, the statutory board was dissolved and Cisco Security Pte Ltd was formed upon its corporatisation as a fully owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings, and inaugurated on 5 July 2005. The abbreviation of the former statutory board, "CISCO", was retained due to its reputation in the local market. The company was renamed as Certis CISCO Security Pte Ltd on 13 September 2007. Cisco Annual Security Report on 20 January 2016 reveals a decline in defender confidence and the increased impact of industrialized attackers. As the oldest Auxiliary Police Force with a monopoly over most of the private armed security sector in Singapore for 33 years, CISCO maintains a visible presence in many key establishments, including the private residences of VVIPs. They were deployed in major events such as the Singapore 2006 IMF Meetings, the New Year Countdown at Marina Bay in 2007 and 2008, the Chingay Parade and the Thaipusam processions. They also continue to dominate some services such as the transportation of valuables, most visibly in the form of delivering cash to automated teller machines.
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Topic Review
PledgeMusic
PledgeMusic is an online direct-to-fan music platform, launched in August 2009, that facilitates musicians reaching out to their fanbase (termed Pledgers) to pre-sell, market, and distribute music projects including recordings, music videos, and concerts. Broadly speaking it bears some similarities to such platforms as ArtistShare, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Patreon, RocketHub and Sellaband.
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Topic Review
Over-the-Counter
Over-the-counter (OTC) or off-exchange trading or pink sheet trading is done directly between two parties, without the supervision of an exchange. It is contrasted with exchange trading, which occurs via exchanges. A stock exchange has the benefit of facilitating liquidity, providing transparency, and maintaining the current market price. In an OTC trade, the price is not necessarily publicly disclosed. OTC trading, as well as exchange trading, occurs with commodities, financial instruments (including stocks), and derivatives of such products. Products traded on the exchange must be well standardized. This means that exchanged deliverables match a narrow range of quantity, quality, and identity which is defined by the exchange and identical to all transactions of that product. This is necessary for there to be transparency in trading. The OTC market does not have this limitation. They may agree on an unusual quantity, for example. In OTC, market contracts are bilateral (i.e. the contract is only between two parties), and each party could have credit risk concerns with respect to the other party. The OTC derivative market is significant in some asset classes: interest rate, foreign exchange, stocks, and commodities. In 2008 approximately 16 percent of all U.S. stock trades were "off-exchange trading"; by April 2014 that number increased to about 40 percent. Although the notional amount outstanding of OTC derivatives in late 2012 had declined 3.3% over the previous year, the volume of cleared transactions at the end of 2012 totalled US$346.4 trillion. "The Bank for International Settlements statistics on OTC derivatives markets showed that notional amounts outstanding totalled $693 trillion at the end of June 2013... The gross market value of OTC derivatives – that is, the cost of replacing all outstanding contracts at current market prices – declined between end-2012 and end-June 2013, from $25 trillion to $20 trillion."
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Topic Review
Trust (Emotion)
In a social context, trust has several connotations. Definitions of trust typically refer to a situation characterized by the following aspects: One party (trustor) is willing to rely on the actions of another party (trustee); the situation is directed to the future. In addition, the trustor (voluntarily or forcedly) abandons control over the actions performed by the trustee. As a consequence, the trustor is uncertain about the outcome of the other's actions; they can only develop and evaluate expectations. The uncertainty involves the risk of failure or harm to the trustor if the trustee will not behave as desired. Trust can be attributed to relationships between people. It can be demonstrated that humans have a natural disposition to trust and to judge trustworthiness that can be traced to the neurobiological structure and activity of a human brain. Some studies indicate that trust can be altered e.g. by the application of oxytocin. When it comes to the relationship between people and technology, the attribution of trust is a matter of dispute. The intentional stance demonstrates that trust can be validly attributed to human relationships with complex technologies. However, rational reflection leads to the rejection of an ability to trust technological artefacts. One of the key current challenges in the social sciences is to re-think how the rapid progress of technology has impacted constructs such as trust. This is specifically true for information technology that dramatically alters causation in social systems. In the social sciences, the subtleties of trust are a subject of ongoing research. In sociology and psychology the degree to which one party trusts another is a measure of belief in the honesty, fairness, or benevolence of another party. The term "confidence" is more appropriate for a belief in the competence of the other party. A failure in trust may be forgiven more easily if it is interpreted as a failure of competence rather than a lack of benevolence or honesty. In economics, trust is often conceptualized as reliability in transactions. In all cases trust is a heuristic decision rule, allowing the human to deal with complexities that would require unrealistic effort in rational reasoning. In religion, trust is the faith and hope in good God who forgives everything and gives everlasting happiness.
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Topic Review
E-Government
E-government (short for electronic government) is the use of electronic communications devices, computers and the Internet to provide public services to citizens and other persons in a country or region. According to Jeong, 2007 the term consists of the digital interactions between a citizen and their government (C2G), between governments and other government agencies (G2G), between government and citizens (G2C), between government and employees (G2E), and between government and businesses/commerces (G2B). E-government delivery models can be broken down into the following categories: This interaction consists of citizens communicating with all levels of government (city, state/province, national, and international), facilitating citizen involvement in governance using information and communication technology (ICT) (such as computers and websites) and business process re-engineering (BPR). Brabham and Guth (2017) interviewed the third party designers of e-government tools in North America about the ideals of user interaction that they build into their technologies, which include progressive values, ubiquitous participation, geolocation, and education of the public. Other definitions are more away from technology as an object, to see them simply as facilitators or instruments and focus on specific changes in Public Administration issues, and in the internal transformation of a Government, is the case of the definition that established the specialist technologist Mauro D. Ríos in the paper "In search of a definition of Electronic Government", he says: "Digital Government is a new way of organization and management of public affairs, introducing positive transformational processes in management and the structure itself of the organization chart, adding value to the procedures and services provided, all through the introduction and continued appropriation of information and communication technologies as a facilitator of these transformations."
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Topic Review
Double Auction
A double auction is a process of buying and selling goods when potential buyers submit their bids and potential sellers simultaneously submit their ask prices to an auctioneer, and then an auctioneer chooses some price p that clears the market: all the sellers who asked less than p sell and all buyers who bid more than p buy at this price p. Buyers and sellers that bid or ask for exactly p are also included. As well as their direct interest, double auctions are reminiscent of Walrasian auction and have been used as a tool to study the determination of prices in ordinary markets. A simple example of a double auction is a bilateral trade scenario, in which there is a single seller who values his product as S (e.g. the cost of producing the product), and a single buyer who values that product as B.
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