Progress in poverty reduction depends primarily upon policy and institutional changes in low-income countries. The Bank's previous approach to inducing these changes has been through negotiated loan conditionalities. The empirical evidence suggests that this approach has been largely ineffective where change occurred it was chosen by governments rather than induced by loans. I discuss various c...

Given the multitude of sources for reconstructing the evolutionary history between entities, phylogenetic reconstruction methods often provide several trees classifying these entities. A key step in reconciling the different trees is to construct a consensus view of the history. If we consider each tree as a collection of laminar splits (two-way partitions), the primary problem in arriving at a...

Consensus is an important building block for building replicated systems, and many consensus protocols have been proposed. In this paper, we investigate the building blocks of consensus protocols and use these building blocks to assemble a skeleton that can be configured to produce, among others, three well-known consensus protocols: Paxos, Chandra-Toueg, and Ben-Or. Although each of these prot...

Background: Research partnership approaches that engage community members within the research team (for example, integrated knowledge translation, community-based participatory research) are typically used to enhance relevance and usefulness of findings. However, outcomes generated through partnered do not de facto address priorities those most affected nor take inclusion or power dynamics into...