| PO L I T I C I A N S and civil servants seem to be attaching more weight to using research in policymaking than ever before. Over the past decade, it has become de rigueur for governments and international organizations to stress the need for ‘evidence-based’ policy. The tendency was well exemplified by the Labour administration that came to power in Britain in 1997. The new government accentuated the need for policy to be underpinned by rigorous scientific analysis (Parsons 2002). Policymaking, it was argued, should be ‘based on a comprehensive and foresighted understanding of the evidence’, ensuring approaches ‘that are forward-looking and shaped by the evidence rather than a response to short-term pressures’.1 The intention was to move away from policy based on ‘dogma’ to ‘sound evidence’ of ‘what works’.2 Evidence-based policymaking has become especially modish in the fields of health, education, labour market policy and criminal justice. As one advisor to former Prime Minister Tony Blair put it, ‘Governments have become ravenous for information and evidence.’ They recognize that their success now ‘depends on much more systematic use of knowledge than it did in the past’. |
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 Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource KitWhether you’re a small business or a global organization, deploy and support Microsoft Office 2003 Editions with expertise direct from the Microsoft Office product team. This official Resource Kit packs the in-depth technical information you need to customize and install Office, plan and implement messaging with Microsoft... |  | Natural User Interfaces in .NET
Whether it's tapping, flicking, pinching, or stretching, the vocabulary and gestures of user interfaces have changed a lot in the past year. Multitouch surfaces are now common across almost all platforms and device types. The new Windows Touch API, along with innovations from the Surface project, make it easier than ever to build... | | Data Mashups in R
Programmers may spend a good part of their careers scripting code to conform to commercial
statistics packages, visualization tools, and domain-specific third-party software.
The same tasks can force end users to spend countless hours in copy-paste purgatory,
each minor change necessitating another grueling round of formatting tabs and... |
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