Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Progress on Nonpoint Pollution: Barriers & Opportunities

Nonpoint source pollution is the runoff of pollutants (including soil and nutrients) from agricultural, urban, and other lands (as opposed to point source pollution, which comes directly from one outlet). Many efforts have been made to combat both types of pollution, so why are we making so little progress in improving water quality by reducing runoff of soil and nutrients into lakes and rivers? This essay examines the challenges inherent in: 1) producing science to predict and assess nonpoint management and policy effectiveness; and 2) using science for management and policy-making. Barriers to demonstrating causality include few experimental designs, different spatial scales for behaviors and measured outcomes, and lags between when policies are enacted and when their effects are seen. Primary obstacles to using science as evidence in nonpoint policy include disagreements about values and preferences, disputes over validity of assumptions, and institutional barriers to reconciling the supply and demand for science. We will illustrate some of these challenges and present possible solutions using examples from the Yahara Watershed in Wisconsin. Overcoming the barriers to nonpoint-pollution prevention may require policy-makers to gain a better understanding of existing scientific knowledge and act to protect public values in the face of remaining scientific uncertainty.
NGO Power in Global Social and Environmental Standard-Setting

We have seen a worldwide increase in new nonstate, multi-stakeholder organizations setting standards for socially and environmentally responsible behavior. These standard-setting arenas offer new channels for political participation for NGOs. Scholars have drawn attention to the rise and the role of NGOs in global politics, but there is less research on the power and long-term implications of NGO participation in transnational multi-stakeholder standard-setting. This article analyzes NGOs within three such global organizations: the Forest Stewardship Council, the Marine Stewardship Council, and the International Organization for Standardization on Social Responsibility. Using a power-based perspective, we demonstrate the impact that NGOs can have on multi-stakeholder work. In doing so, we analyze four types of NGO power: symbolic, cognitive, social, and monitoring power. The article further emphasizes institutional, structural, and discursive factors within multi-stakeholder organizations that create certain challenges to NGO power and participation in the longer term.
How Effective is Fiscal Policy in Raising National Saving?

While fiscal adjustment is commonly viewed as the cornerstone of macroeconomic stabilization, the effectiveness of alternative fiscal instruments in raising national saving is still poorly understood. This paper enters the debate by estimating a private consumption function that allows for two types of agentsfinite horizons and liquidity constraintsand nests three different consumption hypotheses. Using a large-panel data set that includes both industrial and developing countries, we reject full Ricardian equivalence. We also find substantial differences between industrial and developing countries, regarding both the extent of Ricardian offsetting and the degree to which the government budget constraint is internalized.
Nonparametric Tests for the Independence of Regressors and Disturbances as Specification Tests

Abstract We adapt techniques from the literature on chaos and nonlinear dynamics to detect misspecification in models of serially independent data by checking for dependence between the regressors and disturbances. Our tests are nonparametric in that they determine whether the distribution of the disturbances depends on the regressors without identifying a model of dependence or the distribution of the disturbances. In Monte Carlo simulations we find that these tests have good power against dependence caused by omitted variables, incorrect functional form, heteroskedasticity, and similar problems.We also apply our tests to detect misspecification in models of income imputation.
Music, Language and Environment

Interviewed by music journalist Ren van Peer, the composer and sound recordist David Dunn discusses the sound work he has done in natural environments, his motivations for doing this work, and the thoughts and theories he has developed from it. Most of these works are unique events created for a specific time and location or for specific circumstances. In these events, the sounds generated by the players set up interactions with their immediate surroundings. Soundscape recordings are another aspect of Dunn's work. His work in different natural and cultural environments has enabled him to research areas where music and language intersect.
Dirac's “Fine-Tuning Problem”: A Constructive Use of Anachronism?

In order to shed light on contemporary arguments about “fine-tuning” in cosmology, I examine a possible historical precedent for fine-tuning from the early years of Quantum Electrodynamics: the divergent self-energy of the electron in Dirac's theory. I argue that viewing this problem as a fine-tuning problem involves an anachronistic reconstruction, but that such reconstructions can be philosophically useful so long as they are not confused with real historical understanding. I relate how, historically, this problem really was conceived, and show how one important step toward its solution drew upon an interpretation of Dirac's formalism in terms of “hole theory. ” In light of the subsequent demise of hole theory, I argue that my anachronistic reconstruction can serve as a cautionary tale that should considerably weaken the conclusions that might otherwise be drawn from attempts to give theistic or multi-verse solutions to cosmological fine-tuning problems.
Neo-Darwinism and Evo-Devo: An Argument for Theoretical Pluralism in Evolutionary Biology

There is an ongoing debate over the relationship between so-called neo-Darwinism and evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) that is motivated in part by the possibility of a theoretical synthesis of the two (e.g., Amundson 2005; Brigandt and Love 2010; Laubichler 2010; Minelli 2010; Pigliucci and Müller 2010). Through analysis of the terms and arguments employed in this debate, I argue that an alternative line of argument has been missed. Specifically, I use the terms of this debate to argue that a relative significance issue (Beatty 1995, 1997) exists and reflects a theoretical pluralism that is likely to remain.
Hybrids Are Hubs: Transdisciplinarity, the Two Cultures and the Special Status of Artscientists

Much has been said and written about the two-culture paradigm separating the world between artists and scientists. On one side of this debate are those who accept this cultural art/science divide. On the other side are those who reject it altogether to promote a better integration of artscience practices. In this paper, the author presents a network analysis of 40 papers submitted to the SEAD Network for Science, Engineering, Arts and Design and tests the hypothesis that the papers submitted by artists and scientists are disconnected in the corresponding graph, as predicted by the art/science separation. Rejecting this hypothesis will provide support for the alternative artscience integration.
Design and Democracy

I shall present a few thoughts about the relationship between democracy and design, and about the relationship between critical humanism and operational humanism. This issue leads to the question of the role of technology and industrialization as a procedure for democratizing the consumption of goods and services, and finally to the ambivalent role of esthetics as the domain of freedom and manipulation. The main theme of my lecture is the relationship between design—in the sense of projecting—and autonomy. My reflections are open-ended, and do not pretend to give quick and immediate answers. The university still offers a place to pursue these questions that normally will not be addressed in professional practice, with its pressures and contingencies. Looking at the present design discourse, one notes a surprising—and I would say alarming—absence of questioning design activities. Concepts such as branding, competitiveness, globalization, comparative advantages, lifestyle design, differentiation, strategic design, fun design, emotion design, experience design, and smart design prevail in design magazines and the all too few books about design. Sometimes, one gets the impression that a designer aspiring to two minutes of fame feels obliged to invent a new label for setting herself or himself apart from the rest of what professional service offers. I leave aside “coffee table” books on design that abound in pictures and exempt the reader from intellectual efforts. The issue of design and democracy doesn’t enjoy popularity—apart from a few laudable exceptions. If we look at the social history of the meaning of the term “design,” we note on the one side a popularization that is a horizontal extension, and on the other side a contraction that is a vertical reduction. The architectural critic Witold Rybczynski recently commented on this phenomenon: “Not so long ago, the term ‘designer’ described someone such as Eliot Noyes, who was responsible for the IBM Selectric typewriter in the 1960s, or Henry Dreyfuss, whose clients included Lockheed Aircraft and the Bell Telephone Company . or Dieter Rams, who created a range of austere-looking, but very practical, products for the German company Braun. Today, ‘designer’ is more likely to bring to mind Ralph Lauren or Giorgio Armani, that is, a fashion designer. While fashion designers usually start as couturiers, they—or at least their names—often are associated with a wide variety of consumer products including cosmetics, perfume, luggage, home furnishings, and even house
Fortunate Sons: New Estimates of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States Using Social Security Earnings Data

Previous studies, relying on short-term averages of fathers' earnings, have estimated the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) in earnings to be approximately 0.4. Due to persistent transitory fluctuations, these estimates have been biased down by approximately 30 or more. Using administrative data containing the earnings histories of parents and children, the IGE is estimated to be around 0.6. This suggests that the United States is substantially less mobile than previous research indicated. Estimates of intergenerational mobility are significantly lower for families with little or no wealth, offering empirical support for theoretical models that predict differences due to borrowing constraints.
Post-socialist transition as a driving force of the sustainable agriculture: a case study from the Czech Republic

ABSTRACT The study considers how post-socialist transition has been reflected in the newly emerging concept of sustainability of agriculture, and explains the factors that accounted for the rapid development of the Czech organic sector during the transitional period (1989–1992). The paper utilises qualitative research methods. Primary data for the study have been collected and processed with the use of document analysis. Our findings suggest that the radical shift of agriculture in early 1990s was mainly driven by negative experience of the socialist model of industrial agriculture. However, the organic sector lost momentum in the later period of economic transformation (1993–1998), due to the underdeveloped institutional framework. This historical setting resulted in a strongly competitive relationship between the conventional and organic sectors in Czech agriculture. The study undermines the general notion that organic agriculture in post-socialist countries represents an outcome of policy-based measures, rather than the activities of a social (organic) movement. The conclusions of the study confirm the thesis that the organic sector cannot achieve a breakthrough in the absence of certain elements of the institutional environment (i.e. civil society, policy, consumers).
Toward a globally sensitive patriotism

Dædalus Summer 2008 In 1892, a World’s Fair, called the Columbian Exposition, was scheduled to take place in Chicago. Clearly, it was gearing up to be a celebration of unfettered greed and egoism. Industry and innovation were to be its central foci, as America planned to welcome the world with displays of technological prowess and material enrichment. Gross inequalities of opportunity in the nation were to be masked by the glowing exterior of the buildings that came to be called the ‘White City. ’1 Advocates for the poor, upset by the plan, got together to think about how the celebration might incorporate ideas of equal opportunity and sacri1⁄2ce. A group of Christian socialists 1⁄2nally went to President Benjamin Harrison with an idea: at the Exposition the president would introduce a new public ritual of patriotism, a pledge of allegiance to the flag, which would place the accent squarely on the nation’s core moral values, include all Americans as equals, and rededicate the nation to something more than individual greed. The words that were concocted to express these sentiments were: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands: one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. ”2 As so often happens with patriotic sentiment, however, the Pledge soon proved a formula of both inclusion and exclusion. Francis Bellamy, the Pledge’s auMartha C. Nussbaum
An Empirical Analysis of Formality in Online Communication

This paper presents an empirical study of linguistic formality. We perform an analysis of humans’ perceptions of formality in four different genres. These findings are used to develop a statistical model for predicting formality, which is evaluated under different feature settings and genres. We apply our model to an investigation of formality in online discussion forums, and present findings consistent with theories of formality and linguistic coordination.
The “Hearts and Minds” Fallacy: Violence, Coercion, and Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare

Abstract Debates over how governments can defeat insurgencies ebb and flow with international events, becoming particularly contentious when the United States encounters problems in its efforts to support a counterinsurgent government. Often the United States confronts these problems as a zero-sum game in which the government and the insurgents compete for popular support and cooperation. The U.S. prescription for success has had two main elements: to support liberalizing, democratizing reforms to reduce popular grievances; and to pursue a military strategy that carefully targets insurgents while avoiding harming civilians. An analysis of contemporaneous documents and interviews with participants in three cases held up as models of the governance approach—Malaya, Dhofar, and El Salvador—shows that counterinsurgency success is the result of a violent process of state building in which elites contest for power, popular interests matter little, and the government benefits from uses of force against civilians.
How Does Medicaid Expansion Affect Premiums in the Health Insurance Marketplaces? New Evidence from Late Adoption in Pennsylvania and Indiana

This paper studies the impact of the recent Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion on premiums in the health insurance marketplaces. Exploiting the late adoption of the Medicaid expansion in Pennsylvania and Indiana in 2015, I use both difference-in-differences and the synthetic control method to estimate the effect of the Medicaid expansion on marketplace premiums. The preferred estimates indicate that Medicaid expansion is associated with statistically significant lower premiums for gold plans (17 percent) and the second-lowest-priced silver plans (25 percent). I also find evidence that Medicaid expansion decreases average premiums for other silver and bronze plans by about 16 and 13 percent, respectively. Overall, these findings are consistent with lower expected medical cost after Medicaid expansion removed certain low-income individuals from the marketplace risk pools.
Crony capitalism in the Palestinian Authority: a deal among friends

Abstract This article interrogates the multifaceted political–economic networks entrenched within the multiple structures of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA). The main argument of this article is that crony capitalism is a defining feature of the PA’s relations with a handful of capitalists and business groups. The demonstration of this argument is exhibited through the large-scale public and private monopolistic practices in strategic sectors of the Palestinian economy, which function within the framework of Israel’s settler-colonial reality and the persistent patterns of international aid to the occupied West Bank. While acknowledging the existence of cronyism as a feature of the capitalist system in its diverse typologies, crony capitalism may be more pronounced in situations characterised by political uncertainty, whereby political–business collusion strategizes the expansion of neo-patrimonial networks and rent-seeking opportunities as a meta-mechanism for social control and political stabilisation. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, crony capitalism was developed as part of the political allegiances and economic alliances that underpin the structures created by the Oslo process, which are fostered by Israeli policies and the international donor community to maintain the cohesiveness of the PA regime.
Moraic Affixes and Morphological Colors in Dinka

Dinka has two patterns of vowel-lengthening morphology: lengthening by one mora and imposition of a bimoraic template. Flack (2007) claims that these data provide conclusive evidence for morphemespecific indexed markedness constraints. In this article, I reanalyze the Dinka data in Colored Containment Theory (van Oostendorp 2006), effectively showing that the Dinka data are consistent with a more restrictive approach to the morphology-phonology interface: a markedness constraint may not refer to specific morphemes; rather, it may refer only to morphological colors (i.e., whether two phonological objects are part of the same morpheme or not).
Fixing the EU Emissions Trading System Understanding the Post-2012 Changes

This article explains why the significant changes in the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) for the 20132020 phase were adopted in 2008. The combination of a more stringent EU-wide cap, allocation of emission allowances for payment, and limits on imports of credits from third countries have strengthened the system for the post-2012 period. This will promote reduction in greenhouse gases compared to the old system. The main reasons for these changes are, first, changes in the positions of the member states due to unsatisfactory experience with performance of the EU ETS so far. Second, a package approach where the EU ETS reform was integrated into wider energy and climate policy facilitated agreement on the changes. Third, changes in the position of nonstate actors and a desire to affect the international climate negotiations contributed to the reform.
Stigmatized Asset Value: Is It Temporary or Long-Term?

Stigma is a negative attribute of real estate acquired by environmental contamination and reflected in its value (Elliot-Jones, 1996). Using a model of neighborhood turnover with external economies, we show that both temporary stigma and long-term stigma are possible equilibrium outcomes after the discovery and cleanup of a hazardous waste site. The existence and duration of stigma are examined using hedonic price techniques with data from housing sales prices in Dallas County, Texas. We find that results depend critically on distance from the hazardous waste site. Neighborhood turnover due to changes in the level of poverty also appears likely.
Evoking Agency: Attention Model and Behavior Control in a Robotic Art Installation

ABSTRACT Robotic embodiments of artificial agents seem to reinstate a body-mind dualism as consequence of their technical implementation, but could this supposition be a misconception? The authors present their artistic, scientific and engineering work on a robotic installation, the Articulated Head, and its perception-action control system, the Thinking Head Attention Model and Behavioral System (THAMBS). The authors propose that agency emerges from the interplay of the robot's behavior and the environment and that, in the system's interaction with humans, it is to the same degree attributed to the robot as it is grounded in the robot's actions: Agency cannot be instilled; it needs to be evoked.
Market Power versus Efficiency Effects of Mergers and Research Joint Ventures: Evidence from the Semiconductor Industry

Merger control authorities may approve a merger based on an efficiency defense. An important aspect in clearing mergers is that the efficiencies need to be merger-specific. Joint ventures, and in particular research joint ventures (RJVs), may achieve comparable efficiencies possibly without the anticompetitive (market power) effects of mergers. We empirically account for the endogenous formation of mergers and RJVs and provide evidence that at the semiconductor level, mergers and RJVs achieve dominant (net) efficiency effects. Our counterfactuals provide evidence that the efficiency gains caused by mergers would have been achieved by RJVs as well. Therefore, RJVs often represent viable alternatives to mergers from the consumer welfare point of view. At the more disaggregate level we find that the efficiency effects are larger in the microcomponents than in the memory market. This finding emphasizes the importance of market determinants (such as product differentiation and entry) having an impact on efficiency and market power effects.
Natural Disasters, Technology Diversity, and Operating Performance

Abstract In this paper, we empirically measure the impact of natural disasters on firm-level operating performance and examine if such impact can be mitigated by technology diversification. Using major natural disasters specified by Barrot and Sauvagnat (2015) and factory location data from the toxic release inventory (TRI) database, we first find that firms with factories located in states affected by natural disasters are much less profitable. Second, we find that firms with diversified technologies are significantly less subject to the impact of natural disasters, suggesting that technology diversity enhances firms’ sustainability.
Inference with Difference-in-Differences and Other Panel Data

We examine inference in panel data when the number of groups is small, as is typically the case for difference-in-differences estimation and when some variables are fixed within groups. In this case, standard asymptotics based on the number of groups going to infinity provide a poor approximation to the finite sample distribution. We show that in some cases the t-statistic is distributed as t and propose simple two-step estimators for these cases. We apply our analysis to two well-known papers. We confirm our theoretical analysis with Monte Carlo simulations.
OF NEW CLASSES OF DIGITAL INTERACTION

This article introduces a new concept, digital interactivity, through examining local digital culture; and video game culture is employed as a metaphor to interpret local digital culture. As a result, ‘control-’ and ‘communication’-based interaction are initiated, based on ‘user to media’ relationships. Based on the degree of physical interaction, ‘liminal’ and ‘transitive’ interactions are initiated. Less physical digital interaction is described as ‘liminal’ interaction and more physical digital interaction is described as ‘transitive’ interaction. These new classes of digital interaction can be applied to real-world examples, such as digital interactive installation artworks and video games.