D uring the tim e that I have held the office of A ttorney G eneral for the State of Ind iana , it has becom e clear to m e, and I am sure to all o ther attorneys in the state who defend public highw ay agencies in the field of tort litigation, tha t there has been a consistent and dram atic increase in lawsuits filed by drivers and passengers of vehicles who sustain injury as a result of accid...

In developing countries, the experiences of government-led development through heavy loans and grants from international donors have added to records of failure because of centralized system of plan formulation and its implementation through complex bureaucratic structure of government agencies. Realizing the inevitability of active participation of the local communities, the international dono...

The social relationships between development agencies, non-governmental organizations, private companies, and other groups working on development projects play an important role in the overall success of projects. However, traditional project selection and prioritization processes ignore the organizational relationships. This paper proposes to integrate social network analysis into multi-criter...

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 S. Nepal et al. (eds.), Social Media for Government Services, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-27237-5_17 Abstract Disaster Management is one of the most important functions of the government. FEMA and CDC are two examples of government agencies directly charged with handling disasters, whereas USGS is a scientific agency oriented towards disaster resea...

Across five studies, we found that awe increases both supernatural belief (Studies 1, 2, and 5) and intentional-pattern perception (Studies 3 and 4)-two phenomena that have been linked to agency detection, or the tendency to interpret events as the consequence of intentional and purpose-driven agents. Effects were both directly and conceptually replicated, and mediational analyses revealed that...

For decades credit rating agencies were viewed as trusted arbiters of creditworthiness and their ratings as important tools for managing risk. The common narrative is that the value of ratings was compromised by the evolution of the industry to a form where issuers pay for ratings. In this paper we show how credit ratings have value in equilibrium and how reputation insures that, in equilibrium...

This chapter examines the area of social computing and its implications for electronic government (e -government). Social computing is a broad term that refers to different products and services that supports human interaction in a computer mediated environment. Terms such as online communities, peer networking, and social software have overlapping meanings with social computing (Parameswaran a...

The problem of defining a set of ethical principles that will guide mental health practitioners in their interactions with patients is not limited to forensic psychiatry. All aspects of psychiatric practice have ethical implications, and these are particularly complex when the psychiatrist's allegiances are not directed entirely toward the patient. Any psychiatric function that obligates the ps...

All over the world, fighting against poverty is assuming a more and more central role and recent radical economic and social transformations have caused a renewed interest in this field. Poverty is a complex concept. As a consequence, the focus should not be only on monetary poverty, but also on the larger concept of well-being, which preliminarily includes the definition and measure of the fol...