Naval History by Conspiracy Theory: The British Admiralty before the First World War and the Methodology of Revisionism

Revisionist interpretations of British naval policy in the Fisher era claim that an elaborate smoke screen was created to hide the Royal Navy’s real policies; while documents showing the true goals were systematically destroyed. By asserting this, revisionists are able to dismiss those parts of the documentary record that contradict their theories, while simultaneously excusing the lack of evidence for their theories by claiming it has been destroyed. This article shows that this methodology is misleading and untenable

Changing Channels and Crisscrossing Cultures: A Survey of Latinos on the News Media

Presents findings from a comprehensive telephone survey that was designed to explore Latinos' preferences for sources of news, their attitudes towards the news media, and the extent to which choices of media affect opinions on key policy issues

Survey of Latino Attitudes on the War in Iraq

Presents findings from a survey conducted in January 2005. Includes differences within the Hispanic population according to gender, education, income, and country of origin

Lying in Business: Insights from Hannah Arendt’s ‘Lying in Politics’

The famous political philosopher Hannah Arendt develops several arguments why truthfulness cannot be counted among the political virtues. This article shows that similar arguments apply to lying in business. Based on Hannah Arendt’s theory, we distinguish five reasons why lying is a structural temptation in business: business is about action to change the world and therefore businessmen need the capacity to deny current reality; commerce requires successful image-making and liars have the advantage to come up with plausible stories; business communication is more often about opinions than about facts, giving leeway to ignore uncomfortable signals; business increasingly makes use of plans and models, but these techniques foster inflexibility in acknowledging the real facts; businessmen fall easily prey to self-deception, because one needs to act as if the vision already materializes. The theory is illustrated by a case study of Landis that grew from a relative insignificant into a large organization within a short period of time, but ended with outright lies and bankruptcy.Lying;deceit in business;Hannah Arendt;image-making;self-deception;accounting fraud;politics and business;Landis

Defaulting on the Social Security Trust Fund: What It Would Mean and How It Would Be Done

Some policymakers have asserted that the Social Security program will begin to face serious problems in 2018. This paper shows that the date would only pose a problem if the U.S. government were to default on the bonds held by the Social Security trust fund.

Perpetual Impunity: Lessons learned from the global system of rendition and secret detention

It is now well documented that the Blair government was colluding at the highest levels in the global system for the rendition, detention and interrogation of terror suspects, at the same time as repeatedly denying any involvement. This paper seeks to explain why the UK so confidently maintained its position of denial. The main argument is that involvement in the global rendition system was facilitated and protected by an architecture of impunity. That is to say that the global rendition system deliberately consisted of a set of practices that were designed to ensure impunity for those agents involved at various levels, particularly Western governments and their intelligence agencies. Furthermore, if aspects of a state’s involvement were exposed, the architecture of impunity was sufficiently robust that the state could control the level of exposure. For example, the state could allow the light to be shone on certain aspects but could keep others very much in the dark. The state could also take specific actions to mitigate the effects, for example by withholding key information, destroying evidence, or by deflecting attention. Finally, where state involvement was exposed, again because the architecture of impunity was so robust, the authorities were in a strong position to seriously hamstring or avert investigations into wrongdoing. We conclude by offering some reflections on what this tells us about the challenges of holding governments to account for human rights violations of this nature, especially where they arise through a transnational network of state violence/crime

School experience as a potential determinant of post-compulsory participation

This paper considers the views of young people aged 14 to 16 about their future education, training and occupation. It is based on a study of around 3,000 year 11 pupils in 45 educational settings in England during 2007/08, supplemented by documentary analysis, official statistics, and interviews and surveys with staff and parents. Pupil-reported plans to continue in formal education and their aspirations for professional occupations are heavily stratified by individual and family background, including prior attainment. This is as expected. But once this variation has been accounted for, in a logistic regression model, there is both a small school mix ‘effect’ and a much larger school experience effect. The patterns in the pupil stories suggest that there are some simple levers available to policy-makers and to practitioners for the improvement of young peoples’ plans to participate

Active Learning in Sophomore Mathematics: A Cautionary Tale

Math 245: Multivariate Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Equations with Computer I is the first half of a year-long sophomore sequence that emphasizes the subjects\u27 interconnections and grounding in real-world applications. The sequence is aimed primarily at students from physical and mathematical sciences and engineering. In Fall, 1998, as a result of my affiliation with the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Teacher Education Collaborative (STEMTEC), I continued and extended previously-introduced reforms in Math 245, including: motivating mathematical ideas with real-world phenomena; student use of computer technology; and, learning by discovery and experimentation. I also introduced additional pedagogical strategies for more actively involving the students in their own learning—a collaborative exam component and in-class problem-solving exercises. The in-class exercises were well received and usually productive; two were especially effective at revealing normally unarticulated thinking. The collaborative exam component was of questionable benefit and was subsequently abandoned. Overall student performance, as measured by traditional means, was disappointing. Among the plausible reasons for this result is that too much material was covered in too short a time. Experience here suggests that active-learning strategies can be useful, but are unlikely to succeed unless one sets realistic limits to content coverage

The class of shareholdings and its impacts on corporate performance: a case of state shareholding composition in Chinese publicly listed companies.

Does the class of shareholdings matter for corporate performance? To address the question, our paper starts by classifying shareholdings on the basis of the principle of ultimate ownership. At present, the shareholding structure of Chinese quoted companies is state-dominant in that 84% of public companies ultimately are found controlled by the state, compared with 16% of non-statecontrolled ones. In contrast to our identified shareholdings, the Chinese official shareholding record only reports the state and the legal person share classes that are inevitably ambiguous for the identification of ultimate owners of public corporations, which in turn has misled many previous studies in assessing the impact of shareholding classes on performance. Based on our newly established shareholding classes, we make a nested performance comparison between these different classes, such as the state direct control versus the state indirect control, and find significant evidence from the Chinese data that the class of shareholdings does matter for company performance. The least inefficient shareholding class is the holding companies that are wholly listed and have focused industrial business through the state indirect control of the downstream public corporations. This finding provides ground for us to think more about how the corporate control mechanism could be further improved in China’s current corporate governance reform