Economic Transition and Elections in Poland

Poland's economic and political transition, one of the most successful transitions, has depended very heavily on the job creation in new firms to replace the jobs lost in the formerly state-owned enterprises. This uses evidence from both survey and aggregate data to analyze four Polish elections during the transition. These analyses indicate that these de novo firms, the individuals they employ, and the residents in the local areas where they exist become an important constituency supporting pro-reform political parties and constraining the actions of parties less sympathetic to the reforms. The creation of this political constituency helps explain how countries can successfully pursue both economic and political reforms.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39775/3/wp391.pd

Explicit Reasoning over End-to-End Neural Architectures for Visual Question Answering

Many vision and language tasks require commonsense reasoning beyond data-driven image and natural language processing. Here we adopt Visual Question Answering (VQA) as an example task, where a system is expected to answer a question in natural language about an image. Current state-of-the-art systems attempted to solve the task using deep neural architectures and achieved promising performance. However, the resulting systems are generally opaque and they struggle in understanding questions for which extra knowledge is required. In this paper, we present an explicit reasoning layer on top of a set of penultimate neural network based systems. The reasoning layer enables reasoning and answering questions where additional knowledge is required, and at the same time provides an interpretable interface to the end users. Specifically, the reasoning layer adopts a Probabilistic Soft Logic (PSL) based engine to reason over a basket of inputs: visual relations, the semantic parse of the question, and background ontological knowledge from word2vec and ConceptNet. Experimental analysis of the answers and the key evidential predicates generated on the VQA dataset validate our approach.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, AAAI 201

In search of isoglosses: continuous and discrete language embeddings in Slavic historical phonology

This paper investigates the ability of neural network architectures to effectively learn diachronic phonological generalizations in a multilingual setting. We employ models using three different types of language embedding (dense, sigmoid, and straight-through). We find that the Straight-Through model outperforms the other two in terms of accuracy, but the Sigmoid model's language embeddings show the strongest agreement with the traditional subgrouping of the Slavic languages. We find that the Straight-Through model has learned coherent, semi-interpretable information about sound change, and outline directions for future research

Political Support for Reforms: Economics of Voting in Transition Countries

I analyze the relationship between economics and politics across eight parliamentary elections in four transition countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. I argue that support for reform reflects the balance between positive and negative effects of the reform. Accordingly, I identify economic groups that support or oppose the reform. The former are private entrepreneurs, white collar workers and university educated voters. The latter are the unemployed, retirees, and blue collar and agricultural workers. This general pattern holds both within countries and across countries, and across tenures of different governments. In contrast with the responsibility hypothesis, voters in the transition countries are found to be forward looking, not retrospective.Transition;economics of voting;Central and Eastern Europe

Economic transition and elections in Poland 1

Poland's economic and political transition, one of the most successful, has depended very heavily on job creation in new firms to replace the jobs lost in the formerly state-owned enterprises. This paper uses survey and aggregate data from three Polish elections to suggest that these de novo firms, the individuals they employ, and the residents in the local areas where they exist become an important constituency supporting pro-reform political parties and constraining the actions of parties less sympathetic to the reforms. The creation of this political constituency helps explain how countries can successfully pursue both economic and political reforms. JEL classification: D72, P26.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72227/1/1468-0351.00139.pd

Archives to Go: Creating a Virtual Primary Source Instruction Packet

This case study examines the process of creating a virtual primary source instruction packet using the Young Lords in Lincoln Park collection. The authors hoped to create a packet of scanned primary source materials from the collection that could be taken and used by any faculty instructor, at GVSU or beyond, without additional facilitation by archivists. The packet would complement instruction and enrich students’ experiences when archival visits were not possible for a variety of reasons. The authors scanned primary source documents and created a full lesson plan including primary source literacy learning objectives. The desired outcome was a packet flexible enough to be used by instructors who did not have previous familiarity with the collection or archival background. While assessment is ongoing for this packet, future iterations might benefit from a close collaboration with interested faculty members. Within the case study, readers will find information on how decisions were made about what collection to use, how the packet was formed, as well as lessons learned

Upstream-binding factor is sequestered into herpes simplex virus type 1 replication compartments

Previous reports have shown that adenovirus recruits nucleolar protein upstream-binding factor (UBF) into adenovirus DNA replication centres. Here, we report that despite having a different mode of viral DNA replication, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) also recruits UBF into viral DNA replication centres. Moreover, as with adenovirus, enhanced green fluorescent protein-tagged fusion proteins of UBF inhibit viral DNA replication. We propose that UBF is recruited to the replication compartments to aid replication of HSV-1 DNA. In addition, this is a further example of the role of nucleolar components in viral life cycle

Religion and Political Parties in Brazil

An overview of religion and politics in Brazil, including democratisation, party moderation and secularisation, social constituency representation and interest articulation