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A business operating at peak performance excels at the details of implementing its strategy. Using a “strategic report card” can help a company to chart how well (or how poorly) its strategy translates into action.

Insurance is a dynamic business highly affected by the environment it operates in. Alongside the practice of insurance, come principles on which the business of insurance is based. One of the principles, that is not short of controversy, is the doctrine of utmost good faith which requires full disclosure of material facts by the contracting parties. The author, in this chapter, explored the need for change in the regulation of this insurance principle and discussed the drivers behind these changes and the commensurate effect on the practice of insurance. The author delved into case studies, practices and literature and traced back to the origins of the long-standing principle of utmost good faith. This principle is one on which the acceptance (or otherwise) and premium of an insurance contract is based and through which certain factors and developments in the industry have led to a major reform in some jurisdiction.

The author discussed the development and drivers leading to reform and concluded that reform is ultimately the result of public outcry, through individual cases heard predominantly in court, a well-established reform committee, the socio-political environment of that country and the advent of technology. Moreover, although, different countries have their own jurisdictions, laws and regulations as well as market practices and international trade have made it imperative to have common technical practices between market players especially in insurance, which depends on the spread of risks between countries internationally. Smooth insurance business can only be established if this reform is harmonised between jurisdictions.

This research is concerned with youth activism in Singapore historically and the importance of legitimacy for understanding the further development of youth activism and Singapore’s democratization process. It takes into account issues pertaining to good governance, economic performance and democratic participation (legitimacy). The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The research adopts a historical approach, qualitative in nature with some quantitative analysis based on documentary research, press reports and content analysis.

Historically youth activism was vibrant and dynamic in the fight for independence and against inequality and injustice during the colonial era in Singapore. Under Lee Kuan Yew’s rule, the scope and boundary of democratic participation (legitimacy) were delimited and controlled by the state. State-contained or controlled participation has replaced contentious politics. In the Singapore General Election in 2011, the younger generation of Singapore electorate, who are better educated and well-travelled, however, proved themselves to be rational and pragmatic when they exercised their rights to reject polices detrimental to their socio-economic well-beings as well as to the inclusiveness of society. The People’s Action Party (PAP) had the lowest vote share (60 per cent) in history. Since then the PAP government had stepped up its efforts in improving welfare gains of the citizens as well as managing public discontents with more effective policies. The PAP victory in the Singapore election (GE 2015), however, showed that among other reasons, welfare gains and good governance helped in salvaging the electoral legitimacy vis-à-vis the political legitimacy of the PAP government. However, the PAP government’s continual harsh treatment of critics, young and old, means that to achieve democratic legitimacy, it has to break through the shackles of authoritarian leadership style and elite governance, which have led to the regime’s failure to face up to the reality of an emerging civic participatory culture in the Singapore contexts.

Legitimacy is an important concept. To date there is no systematic application of this concept to the study of Singapore electoral politics. This paper employs Bruce Gilley’s determinants of legitimacy – democratic legitimacy, welfare gains and good governance – to explicate the basis of the PAP’s regime legitimacy, the contradictions inherent in state-contained participation and political representation that delimited and undermined the nature, scope and boundary of democratic legitimacy.

In an evaluation of a job training program, the causal effects of the program on wages are often of more interest to economists than the program's effects on employment or on income. The reason is that the effects on wages reflect the increase in human capital due to the training program, whereas the effects on total earnings or income may be simply reflecting the increased likelihood of employment without any effect on wage rates. Estimating the effects of training programs on wages is complicated by the fact that, even in a randomized experiment, wages are truncated by nonemployment, i.e., are only observed and well-defined for individuals who are employed. We present a principal stratification approach applied to a randomized social experiment that classifies participants into four latent groups according to whether they would be employed or not under treatment and control, and argue that the average treatment effect on wages is only clearly defined for those who would be employed whether they were trained or not. We summarize large sample bounds for this average treatment effect, and propose and derive a Bayesian analysis and the associated Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo computational algorithm. Moreover, we illustrate the application of new code checking tools to our Bayesian analysis to detect possible coding errors. Finally, we demonstrate our Bayesian analysis using simulated data.

Just who is the ‘analyst’ who practices rhythmanalysis? The extension of the name ‘rhythmanalyst’ to other than scholarly practitioners makes possible an investigation of the relationship of rhythmanalysis to other rhythmanalytic forms of knowing and representing urban space and the ways in which these differing but related practices may challenge, undermine or inform each other. In this paper, drawing on years of ethnographic and autoethnographic research in three North American cities, I discuss the rhythmanalytical practice involved in cabdriving, as this is shaped by the technologies drivers use to sense the city and by the transformation of the taxicab into the ‘ridesharing’ or soft cab. First, I discuss the occupational knowledge and wayfinding practice of cabdrivers and the extent to which their work requires the development by means of a variety of tools and practices, of a sense of the city as composed of multiple interacting rhythmic movements or polyrhythmia, with which they must strategically converge and facilitate. Second, I discuss the redelegation of the role of rhythmanalyst to predictive algorithms and mobile interfaces, as part of the reinvention of the taxicab, and its associated micropolitics and power/knowledge relations, by smartphone-enabled hailing and dispatching services. Struggles over, and transformations of, these non-academic forms of rhythmanalysis may provide insight, in turn, into the contemporary politics of the production of social space.

This chapter aims to examine the comparative economic performance of the United States versus China in the digital era. This chapter uses the Threshold Autoregressive (TAR) model method in comparing economic performance. The US economy was shaken quite significantly in 2008 due to the subprime mortgage crisis. On the other hand, China’s economic performance continues to improve. Based on the estimation results of China’s economic performance which continues to increase with faster economic growth than the United States, it is found that China has resistance to shocks from the 1997 crisis, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and the European debt crisis in 2011 and has the potential to compete with the United States as the dominant country in economic terms. China’s economic growth is getting faster and faster since 1979. It indicates that China’s economy can surpass the US economy, which currently owns the largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world.

This paper aims to describe innovations at the Games + Learning + Society Center to explore the future of education.

This paper is an overview of several published studies and design interventions.

Commercial partnerships, particularly generating copyrightable materials can maximize impact and diversify research funding, but they also run counter to the culture and purpose of many research universities.

Researchers interested in forging new partnerships to maximize impact might explore relationships with commercial entities but be aware that they are running counter to the grain of most institutions and goals. Other universities of different sizes, ages and orientations may have different results.

Building private partnerships requires different staffing and skill sets than traditional research. Guidance for staffing key roles and projects are provided.

This paper is a reflection on unique research initiative that generated revenue and helped shape a subfield of education.

This chapter takes a look at the Social Web. Humanities scholars are, by and large, a fairly social group. Attend any of the Modern Language Association conferences and you will be inundated with invitations to attend events hosted by publishers, groups within MLA, universities, and alumni organizations. The way we now include apps as an inherent part of our socialization, however, is changing and evolving as a result of some of the tools that are to be associated with the digital humanities, albeit not necessarily as apparently so as some others. This chapter explores the familiar players like Facebook™, Google+™, Twitter™, and others and discusses how they are being used by those in the field, contextualizing them within a variety of disciplines in the humanities through case studies while situating the category alongside theories that make sense of their use. Not as commonly used in academic social networks are vlogging applications along with student blog sites, which are also examined in this chapter. It is in this and subsequent chapters where augmented reality enhancements will be used. Please follow the directions at the beginning of Chapter 2 to access these additions.

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the history and development of transaction log analysis (TLA) in library and information science research. Organizing a literature review of the first twenty‐five years of TLA poses some challenges and requires some decisions. The primary organizing principle could be a strict chronology of the published research, the research questions addressed, the automated information retrieval (IR) systems that generated the data, the results gained, or even the researchers themselves. The group of active transaction log analyzers remains fairly small in number, and researchers who use transaction logs tend to use this method more than once, so tracing the development and refinement of individuals' uses of the methodology could provide insight into the progress of the method as a whole. For example, if we examine how researchers like W. David Penniman, John Tolle, Christine Borgman, Ray Larson, and Micheline Hancock‐Beaulieu have modified their own understandings and applications of the method over time, we may get an accurate sense of the development of all applications.