Economic Nationalism and Economic Integration: The Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century

This paper seeks to reconcile two seemingly contradictory strands in the literature on economic development in the late nineteenth century Habsburg Empire - one emphasizing the centrifugal impact of rising intra-empire of nationalism, the other stressing significant improvements in market integration across the empire. We argue that the process of market integration was systematically asymmetric, shaped by intensifying intra-empire nationality conflicts. While grain markets in Austria-Hungary became overall more integrated over time, they also became systematically biased: regions with a similar ethno-linguistic composition of their population came to display significantly smaller price gaps between each other than regions with different compositions. The emergence and persistence of this differential integration cannot be explained by changes in infrastructure and transport costs, simple geographical features or asymmetric integration with neighbouring regions abroad. Instead, differential integration along ethno-linguistic lines was driven by the formation of ethno-linguistic networks. Finally, the analysis shows that the emerging pre-war regional integration patterns – shaped by nationalist sentiment – effectively anticipated the post-war settlement: the fault lines along which the Habsburg Empire was to break up eventually are evident in the price data about a quarter of a century or so before the outbreak of the First World War.Habsburg Empire, market integration, nationalism, networks, pre-1914 Europe

Dialogue-Oriented Review Summary Generation for Spoken Dialogue Recommendation Systems

In this paper we present an opinion summarization technique in spoken dialogue systems. Opinion mining has been well studied for years, but very few have considered its application in spoken dialogue systems. Review summarization, when applied to real dialogue systems, is much more complicated than pure text-based summarization. We conduct a systematic study on dialogue-system-oriented review analysis and propose a three-level framework for a recommendation dialogue system. In previous work we have explored a linguistic parsing approach to phrase extraction from reviews. In this paper we will describe an approach using statistical models such as decision trees and SVMs to select the most representative phrases from the extracted phrase set. We will also explain how to generate informative yet concise review summaries for dialogue purposes. Experimental results in the restaurant domain show that the proposed approach using decision tree algorithms achieves an outperformance of 13% compared to SVM models and an improvement of 36% over a heuristic rule baseline. Experiments also show that the decision-tree-based phrase selection model can achieve rather reliable predictions on the phrase label, comparable to human judgment. The proposed statistical approach is based on domain-independent learning features and can be extended to other domains effectively

Chinese Agricultural Reform, the WTO and FTA Negotiations

China's early industrialization created distortions. This paper identifies major distortions in the Chinese economy in the pre-reform era and brings agricultural distortions into perspective. Comparison is made of the reform experience in Chinese industry and agriculture. It suggests that with limited arable land, it is difficult to align Chinese agricultural production fully with its comparative advantage without also reforming China's grain policy. Reform has substantially freed up agricultural production but border distortions serve as one of a few remaining effective measures to ensure the grain self-sufficiency target. Unlike agricultural protection in rich countries, China's grain self-sufficiency policy ahs much weaker institutional underpinnings and is susceptible to the influence of interest groups. The patterns of Chinese agricultural trade explain its ambiguous positions in WTO agriculture negotiations. In terms of grain sectoral adjustment, a possible comprehensive China-Australia FTA is consistent with the multilateral process, while the China-ASEAN FTA is not. There is no evidence that the China-ASEAN FTA helps with the WTO agriculture negotiations, particularly when rice is excluded from the deal; but China-Australia FTA could generate competitive liberalization in grain trade, and thus help with the global agricultural liberalization.Agricultural Trade, WTO, Free Trade Agreement

Dynamics of collective performance in collaboration networks

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Today, many complex tasks are assigned to teams, rather than individuals. One reason for teaming up is expansion of the skill coverage of each individual to the joint team skill set. However, numerous empirical studies of human groups suggest that the performance of equally skilled teams can widely differ. Two natural question arise: What are the factors defining team performance? and How can we best predict the performance of a given team on a specific task? While the team members' task-related capabilities constrain the potential for the team's success, the key to understanding team performance is in the analysis of the team process, encompassing the behaviors of the team members during task completion. In this study, we extend the existing body of research on team process and prediction models of team performance. Specifically, we analyze the dynamics of historical team performance over a series of tasks as well as the fine-grained patterns of collaboration between team members, and formally connect these dynamics to the team performance in the predictive models. Our major qualitative finding is that higher performing teams have well-connected collaboration networks-as indicated by the topological and spectral properties of the latter-which are more robust to perturbations, and where network processes spread more efficiently. Our major quantitative finding is that our predictive models deliver accurate team performance predictions-with a prediction error of 15-25%-on a variety of simple tasks, outperforming baseline models that do not capture the micro-level dynamics of team member behaviors. We also show how to use our models in an application, for optimal online planning of workload distribution in an organization. Our findings emphasize the importance of studying the dynamics of team collaboration as the major driver of high performance in teams.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1322254

Geomatics Applications to Contemporary Social and Environmental Problems in Mexico

Trends in geospatial technologies have led to the development of new powerful analysis and representation techniques that involve processing of massive datasets, some unstructured, some acquired from ubiquitous sources, and some others from remotely located sensors of different kinds, all of which complement the structured information produced on a regular basis by governmental and international agencies. In this chapter, we provide both an extensive revision of such techniques and an insight of the applications of some of these techniques in various study cases in Mexico for various scales of analysis: from regional migration flows of highly qualified people at the country level and the spatio-temporal analysis of unstructured information in geotagged tweets for sentiment assessment, to more local applications of participatory cartography for policy definitions jointly between local authorities and citizens, and an automated method for three dimensional (3D) modelling and visualisation of forest inventorying with laser scanner technology