Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Picking the Wrong Fight: Why Attacks on the World Trade Organization Pose the Real Threat to National Environmental and Public Health Protection

A principal reason for popular concern about the World Trade Organisation is that national rulesespecially those for environmental and public health pro-tectionmay be overturned because they are incompatible with the WTO's rules. This article argues that while these concerns are not totally unfounded, they are exaggerated. A central reason for this exaggeration is that environmental and consumer advocates discount the pivotal role of governments in the dispute resolution process. Governments agree to the multilateral rules in the first place. Governments decide which market access barriers to pursue and how aggressively. Governments determine how to comply with a WTO judgment that goes against them. Furthermore, this article contends that by exaggerating the constraint imposed upon national governments by the WTO, consumer and environmental advocates run the risk of actually discouraging the very environmental and public health regulations they favor.
Online Course-taking and Student Outcomes in California Community Colleges

This paper uses fixed effects analyses to estimate differences in student performance under online versus face-to-face course delivery formats in the California Community College system. On average, students have poorer outcomes in online courses in terms of the likelihood of course completion, course completion with a passing grade, and receiving an A or B. These estimates are robust across estimation techniques, different groups of students, and different types of classes. Accounting for differences in instructor characteristics (including through the use of instructor fixed effects) dampens but does not fully explain the estimated relationships. Online course-taking also has implications for downstream outcomes, although these effects are smaller. Students are more likely to repeat courses taken online, but are less likely to take new courses in the same subject following courses taken online.
Planting Trees to Mitigate Climate Change: Contested Discourses of Ecological Modernization, Green Governmentality and Civic Environmentalism

Forest plantations or so-called carbon sinks have played a critical role in the climate change negotiations and constitute a central element in the scheme to limit atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations set out by the Kyoto Protocol. This paper examines dominant discursive framings of forest plantation projects in the climate regime. A central proposition is that these projects represent a microcosm of competing and overlapping discourses that are mirrored in debates of global environmental governance. While the win-win discourse of ecological modernization has legitimized the inclusion of sink projects in the Kyoto Protocol, a green governmentality discourse has provided the scientific rationale necessary to turn tropical tree-plantation projects operational on the emerging carbon market. A critical civic environmentalism discourse has contested forest sink projects depicting them as unjust and environmentally unsound strategies to mitigate climate change. The article examines the articulation and institutionalization of these discourses in the climate negotiation process as well as the wider implications for environmental governance.
Understanding Migration: The Case for Public Administration

ABSTRACT Migration has emerged as a key issue for governments in the 21st century. While multiple disciplines address migration, the study of public administration has been slow to do so. Given the complexities of migration policy implementation, and the multiple levels of government involved, public administration can add significantly to the current understandings of the phenomenon. This article examines what is known on migration, what still needs to be understood, and how public administration can assist in understanding migration.
Right Node Raising and Extraction in Tagalog

Classic analyses of this construction assume a derivation involving across-the-board (ATB) rightward movement (Ross 1967, Postal 1974, Abbott 1976, Grosu 1976). According to this analysis, the shared constituent in (1) (henceforth, the pivot) moves out of each conjunct and right-adjoins to a position external to the coordinate structure. Since the work of Wexler and Culicover (1980), this analysis has been subject to extensive criticism. In particular, Wexler and Culicover, and many authors working on RNR since then, offer evidence that the ‘‘gaps’’ in RNR constructions like (1) do not behave like ordinary gaps either of rightward movement, in particular, or of extraction (wh-movement, relativization, etc.) more generally (see McCawley 1982, Levine 1985, McCloskey 1986, Wilder 1997, Hartmann 2000). To mention just one argument, rightward movement in English cannot strand prepositions, as the ungrammaticality of (2a) shows (cf. Whose office were you looking for —— all day? ). As (2b) illustrates, on the other hand, preposition stranding is unexceptional with RNR. (2) a. *We’ve been looking for —— all day the dean’s office. b. We’ve been looking for ——, but haven’t yet found, the dean’s office.
Summary of General Discussion on “The Institutional Root Causes of the Challenges to Vietnam's Long-Term Economic Growth”

Vietnam has achieved impressive economic growth since the dramatic deepening of its economic reforms in March 1989. Although Vietnam’s achievements are laudable, the economy appears to face increasingly serious challenges to sustained, robust economic performance in the long term. This paper analyzes Vietnam’s economic growth to identify the institutional root causes that will make it difficult for Vietnam to sustain its high growth rates. There are three categories of institutional root causes – economic, administrative, and political – and these three categories are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The economic institutional weaknesses are the absence of an independent central bank and the dominant role of the state-owned sector. The administrative institutional limitation is the lack of public management capabilities; and the political institutional limitation is the absolute monopolization of power by the Communist Party of Vietnam. I contend that without fundamental institutional reforms, Vietnam will not only be unable to achieve robust economic performance in the long term but also be at risk of experiencing a severe crisis when the regional or global economy experiences a severe shock in the future.
Development, Discouragement, or Diversion? New Evidence on the Effects of College Remediation Policy

Half of all college students will enroll in remedial coursework but evidence of its effectiveness is mixed. Using a regression-discontinuity design with data from a large urban community college system, we make three contributions. First, we articulate three alternative hypotheses regarding the potential impacts of remediation. Second, in addition to credits and degree completion we examine several underexplored outcomes, including initial enrollment, grades in subsequent courses, and post-treatment proficiency test scores. Finally, we exploit rich high school background data to examine impact heterogeneity by predicted dropout risk. We find that remedial assignment does little to develop students’ skills. But we also find little evidence that it discourages initial enrollment or persistence, except for a subgroup we identify as potentially misassigned to remediation. Instead, the primary effect of remediation appears to be diversionary: students simply take remedial courses instead of college-level courses. These diversionary effects are largest for the lowest-risk students.
Quantum Physics, Topology, Formal Languages, Computation: A Categorical View as Homage to David Hilbert

The deep structural properties of a quantum information theoretic approach to formal languages and universal computation (the unifying tool being the Quantum Spin Network Automaton scheme of computation), as well as those of the topology problem of defining the presentation of the Mapping Class Group of a smooth, compact manifold are shown to be grounded in the common categorical features of the two problems.
The Policy Context of Biofuels: A Case of Non-Governance at the Global Level?

The large-scale production of crop-based biofuels has been one of the fastest and most controversial global changes of recent years. Global biofuel outputs increased six-fold between 2000 and 2010, and a growing number of countries are adopting biofuel promotion policies. Meanwhile, multilateral bodies have been created, and a patchwork of biofuel policies is emerging. This article investigates the global biofuel policy context and analyzes its nature, its institutional architecture, and issues of access and allocation. Our assessment reveals a density of national policies but a paucity of international consensus on norms and rules. We argue that the global biofuel context remains a non-regime and that it has overlooked serious issues of access even as a risky North-South allocation pattern is created. Although biofuel governance is not completely absent, existing international institutions do not take account of the different voices in the debate and leave a large vacuum of unaddressed social and environmental issues.
Book Review

Studies of near-death experiences (NDEs) tend inevitably to fall into either secular or survivalist modes of thinking, with the question of whether or not the visions can be explained within the physicalist paradigm guiding conclusions from the research. This book by Ornella Corazza, Ph.D., avoids the standard polarity and instead looks at the phenomenon from an Oriental, mainly Japanese perspective. Specifically the author, an NDE researcher at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, is concerned to challenge the tendency towards mind-body dualism in Western NDE research. The book includes a few new Japanese cases, and—on a somewhat different track—a new study of the visions of ketamine users and their considerable parallels to NDEs. There’s a lot going on here, and I was curious to see whether the book would fulfill its promise of providing a fresh new perspective. To what extent would the author’s Japanese cases confirm the tendency for NDEs in other parts of the world to differ in certain important points from those in Western countries? With regard to ketamine, the publisher’s blurb on the back of the book cover highlights the “challenge to the conventional survivalist hypothesis” posed by the fact that drug users can often have essentially the same experience, which is fair enough, yet seemed implicitly to promise the standard dust-up
Is It Possible To Solve The Nuclear Waste Problem? Innovations Case Discussion: Siting of Eurajoki Nuclear Waste Facility

in February 2007 the world faces the stark reality that it must reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately or face dire consequences. Nuclear energy provides a reliable source of carbon dioxide-free electricity, and a global expansion of nuclear power could replace fossil-fuel fired plants significantly within twenty to fifty years. One of the main impediments to the expansion of nuclear energy is the unresolved problem of what to do with the nuclear waste. Though nuclear power has been with us almost fifty years, to date, not one of the 30 countries with nuclear power plants has opened a nuclear waste repository. There is a general consensus among experts that geologic repositories are the solution to the problem of nuclear waste, and this consensus has been in place for 50 years. Given that, why has no repository yet opened? In 1998, the United States opened a facility to dispose of transuranic waste from the nuclear weapons complex (plutonium-contaminated materials) in southern New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The unresolved issue for the nuclear power industry is the disposition of used (“spent”) nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. Technically, it is feasible to dispose of nuclear waste. The main issues to resolve are where to site a repository and how long such a facility can prevent the radioacAllison Macfarlane
Recent U.S. Macroeconomic Stability: Good Policies, Good Practices, or Good Luck?

The volatility of U.S. real GDP growth since 1984 has been markedlylowerthanoverthepreviousquartercentury.Weutilizefrequency-domain and VAR methods to distinguish among competing explanations for this reduction: improvements in monetary policy, better business practices, and a fortuitous reduction in exogenous disturbances. We find that reduced innovation variances account for much of the decline in aggregate output volatility, suggesting that good luck is the most likely explanation. Good practices and good policy appear to have played a more important role in explaining the post-1984 decline in the volatility of consumer price inflation.
Second-Position Clitics in the vP Phase: The Case of the Armenian Auxiliary

SECOND-POSITION CLITICS IN THE VP PHASE: THE CASE OF THE ARMENIAN AUXILIARY Arsalan Kahnemuyipour University of Toronto Karine Megerdoomian MITRE Prince, Ellen. 1990. Syntax and discourse: A look at resumptive pronouns. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Parasession on the Legacy of Grice, ed. by Kira Hall, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Michael Meacham, Sondra Reinman, and Laurel A. Sutton, 482–497. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley Linguistics Society. Rohde, Doug. 2003. Linger: A flexible platform for language processing experiments, version 2.94. Available at http://tedlab.mit . edu/ dr/Linger/. Ross, John Robert. 1967. Constraints on variables in syntax. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA. [Published as Infinite syntax! Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986. ] Shlonsky, Ur. 1992. Resumptive pronouns as a last resort. Linguistic Inquiry 23:443–468. Sprouse, Jon, Shinichiro Fukuda, Hajime Ono, and Robert Kluender. To appear. Grammatical operations, parsing processes, and the nature of wh-dependencies in English and Japanese. Syntax. Sprouse, Jon, Matt Wagers, and Colin Phillips. 2010. A test of the relation between working memory capacity and syntactic island effects. Ms., University of California at Irvine, University of California at Santa Cruz, and University of Maryland, College Park. Szabolcsi, Anna. 2006. Strong vs. weak islands. In The Blackwell companion to syntax, volume IV, ed. by Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, 479–531. Oxford: Blackwell. Truswell, Robert. 2007. Extraction from adjuncts and the structure of events. Lingua 117:1355–1377. Zukowski, Andrea, and Jenny Larsen. 2004. The production of sentences that we fill their gaps. Poster presented at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, University of Maryland, College Park.
Capacità interne, relazioni esterne e performance in un cluster emergente: un’analisi empirica nel settore Life Sciences

Obiettivi . Valutare come capacita interne, relazioni esterne e la loro interazione contribuiscano alle performance innovative e strategiche di imprese high-tech localizzate in un cluster regionale emergente. Metodologia . Il lavoro si basa su un dataset di 132 imprese toscane del settore life science. L e misure di performance e le capacita interne (manageriali, relazionali e tecnologiche) sono state operazionalizzate attraverso scale multi-items validate. Le relazioni esterne sono state suddivise in legami intra- ed extra-cluster. Le ipotesi di ricerca sono state testate utilizzando un’analisi di regressione multipla gerarchica. Risultati . L e capacita tecnologiche e quelle manageriali si associano in maniera positiva rispettivamente alle performance innovative e a quelle strategiche. Le capacita relazionali invece giocano un ruolo significativo nei confronti di entrambe le misure di performance e rappresentano un fattore di mediazione importante nelle connessioni con universita e parchi scientifici locali. Non risultano infine significative le relazioni extra-cluster. Limiti della ricerca . Futuri studi potrebbero utilizzare un disegno di ricerca longitudinale per esaminare la dinamica nel tempo delle relazioni esaminate. Inoltre una comparazione internazionale tra cluster life sciences al medesimo stadio di sviluppo potrebbe aiutare a validare ulteriormente i risultati raggiunti. Implicazioni pratiche . Lo studio fornisce un supporto al sistema imprenditoriale per individuare pratiche efficaci per il miglioramento dei risultati aziendali nonche amplia la base informativa per migliorare gli interventi di policy del decisore pubblico. Originalita del lavoro . Il lavoro rappresenta il primo tentativo di integrare in un solo modello le relazioni tra capacita interne, connessioni esterne, performance innovative e di business.
A Hard Scientific Quest: Understanding Voluntary Movements

In this article we explore the complexities of what goes on in the brain when one wishes to perform even the simplest everyday movements. In doing so, we describe experiments indicating that the spinal cord interneurons are organized in functional modules and that each module activates a distinct set of muscles. Through these modules the central nervous system has found a simple solution to controlling the large number of muscle fibers active even during the execution of the simplest action. We also explore the many different neural signals that contribute to pattern formations, including afferent information from the limbs and information of motor memories.
Making Process, Not Progress: ASEAN and the Evolving East Asian Regional Order

Since the Asian financial crisis of 1998, regional scholars and diplomats have maintained that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) represents an evolving economic and security community. In addition, many contend that what is known as the ASEAN process not only has transformed Southeast Asia's international relations, but has started to build a shared East Asian regional identity. ASEAN's deeper integration into a security, economic, and political community, as well as its extension into the ASEAN Plus Three processes that were begun after the 1997 financial crisis, offers a test case of the dominant assumptions in both ASEAN scholarship and liberal and idealist accounts of international relations theory. Three case studies of ASEAN operating as an economic and security community demonstrate, however, that the norms and practices that ASEAN promotes, rather than creating an integrated community, can only sustain a pattern of limited intergovernmental and bureaucratically rigid interaction.
Negation, Polarity, and Deontic Modals

Universal deontic modals may vary with respect to whether they scope over or under negation. For instance, English modals like must and should take wide scope with respect to negation; modals like have to and need to take narrow scope. Similar patterns have been attested in other languages. In this article, we argue that the scopal properties of modals with respect to negation can be understood if (a) modals that outscope negation are positive polarity items ( PPIs); (b) all modals originate in a position lower than I0; and (c) modals undergo reconstruction unless reconstruction leads to a PPI-licensing violation.
A General Theory of Climate Denial

The question at hand is, “Why is there a social counter-movement that rejects climate change? ” This article begins by first naming this counter-movement “climate denial” and working through the various apparent options by specifically looking at the scholarship on Holocaust denial for insight. Through this insight, we can understand the counter-movement as a reactionary force working to sow confusion for ideological reasons that promote a specific privilege. At the same time, privilege is also protected by the presentation of climate change science as a binary position of “acknowledgement or rejection” that itself promotes privilege and dysfunction across the intersection of science and society. In the end, at least one answer to the question “why denial? ” appears to be “because it is serious and threatening” and this, at least partially, explains the existence of this counter-movement.
Coup-proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East

In the aftermath of the U.S.-led coalition’s defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, many observers believed that Saddam Hussein would eventually be toppled in a military coup. After years of dashed hopes, however, few expect that the Iraqi military is likely to undertake such action. Many analysts claim that the Iraqi regime is, in fact, coup-proof. Saddam Hussein’s staying power should cause any similarly led U.S. coalition to rethink not just the possibilities of both coups and coupprooang but how it would aght and defeat a coup-proof regime. In this article, I analyze how states become coup-proof, focusing speciacally on the policies that Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria have adopted to achieve this goal. These policies include reliance on groups with special loyalties to the regime and the creation of parallel military organizations and multiple internal security agencies. The United States has a particular interest in how these countries have made their regimes coup-proof. Saudi Arabia is an important U.S. ally, Iraq is a hostile state, and Syria is somewhere in between. Conoict between the United States and either Iraq or Syria, however, pits a superpower with a short attention span against regimes that have accepted serious constraints on their ability to exercise their full military potential. Both states have developed heavily politicized militaries that are incapable of realizing this potential as long as their leaderships continue to divert resources to protect their regimes. At the same time, they have created a militarized politics that is surprisingly resilient in the face of defeat. If a U.S-led coalition decides that it wants to overthrow a coup-proofed regime through military action, it will have to devote serious attention to the regime’s true underpinnings. Field commanders will need more extensive means of understanding their opponent’s political-military situation and greater insight into the coalition’s political intentions. Moreover, the coordination of political-military operations will require greater political involvement
Do Fluctuations in U.S. Inflation Rates Reflect Infrequent Large Shocks or Frequent Small Shocks?

We investigate whether fluctuations in U.S. inflation rates are better described by infrequently occurring large shocks or by frequently occurring small shocks. We estimate a model that encompasses the two hypotheses within the framework of non-Gaussian state-space models. Our results indicate support for infrequently occurring large shocks, but this weakens somewhat once we allow for outliers and conditional heteroskedasticity. It appears that, for the purpose of forecasting monthly U.S. inflation rates, recognizing the distinction between frequent small shocks and infrequent large shocks does not matter much once outliers and conditional heteroskedasticity are allowed for.