The Semantic Web: Apotheosis of annotation, but what are its semantics?

This article discusses what kind of entity the proposed Semantic Web (SW) is, principally by reference to the relationship of natural language structure to knowledge representation (KR). There are three distinct views on this issue. The first is that the SW is basically a renaming of the traditional AI KR task, with all its problems and challenges. The second view is that the SW will be, at a minimum, the World Wide Web with its constituent documents annotated so as to yield their content, or meaning structure, more directly. This view makes natural language processing central as the procedural bridge from texts to KR, usually via some form of automated information extraction. The third view is that the SW is about trusted databases as the foundation of a system of Web processes and services. There's also a fourth view, which is much more difficult to define and discuss: If the SW just keeps moving as an engineering development and is lucky, then real problems won't arise. This article is part of a special issue called Semantic Web Update

How to Make Institutional Economics Policy-Relevant: Theoretical Considerations and an Application to Rural Credit Markets in Developing Countries

Welfare economics as the traditional, prescriptive theory framework used in agricultural economics has been criticised by institutional economists as being largely irrelevant to real-world policy issues. We therefore ask how normative statements are possible within an economic theory framework that does recognise the importance of institutional arrangements. Instead of applying established outcome-oriented criteria of social welfare, we examine whether the rules of economic interaction allow the acquisition of gains from cooperation. We suggest to reconstruct any interaction as an existing or repealed social dilemma. This approach helps to identify common rule interests which create room for improvement of all parties involved, and to suggest desirable institutional reforms. An application to credit markets in developing countries demonstrates the insufficiency of welfare economic arguments and the potential insights generated by a social dilemma heuristic. The latter sheds new light on the role of various forms of collateral and informal arrangements to overcome credit rationing.Agricultural Finance, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, D02, D63, D74, Q14,

Property Rights and the Nature of the Firm

This paper provides a framework for addressing the question of when transactions should be carried out within a firm and when through the market. Following Grossman and Hart, we identify a firm with the assets that its owners control. We argue that the crucial difference for party 1 between owning a firm (integration) and contracting for a service from another party 2 who owns this firm (nonintegration) is that, under integration, party 1 can selectively fire the workers of the firm (including party 2), whereas under nonintegration he can "fire" (i.e., stop dealing with) only the entire firm: the combination of party 2, the workers, and the firm's assets. We use this idea to study how changes in ownership affect the incentives of employees as well as those of owner-managers. Our frame- work is broad enough to encompass more general control structures than simple ownership: for example, partnerships and worker and consumer cooperatives all emerge as special cases.Economic

Ownership structure and efficiency: An incentive mechanism approach

Corporate Performance;Corporate Ownership

Corporate currency hedging and currency crises

We examine the impact of corporate currency hedging on economic stability by introducing hedging activity in a Mundell-Fleming-Tobin framework for analyzing currency and financial crises. The ratio between hedged and unhedged firms is modelled depending on firm size as well as hedging costs. The results indicate that, with an increasing fraction of hedged firms in an economy, the magnitude of a crisis decreases and from a specific hedging level onwards currency crises are ruled out. In order to improve corporate risk management access to hedging instruments should be made possible and hedging costs should be reduced.Mundell-Fleming-Tobin model, currency crises, currency hedging, hedging costs

On welfare criteria and optimality in an endogenous growth model

In this paper we explore the consequences for optimality of a social planner adopting two different welfare criteria. The framework of analysis is an OLG model with physical and human capital. We first show that, when the SWF is a discounted sum of individual utilities defined over consumption per unit of natural labour, the precise cardinalization of the individual utility function becomes crucial for the characterization of the social optimum. Also, decentralizing the social optimum requires an education subsidy. In contrast, when the SWF is a discounted sum of individual utilities defined over consumption per unit of efficient labour, the precise cardinalization of preferences becomes irrelevant. More strikingly, along the optimal growth path, education should be taxed.endogenous growth, human capital, intergenerational transfers, education policy

The Role of Consent and Uncertainty in the Formation of Customary International Law

While treaty norms only bind states that have explicitly consented to a treaty, the case is less clear with customary international law. According to the prevailing opinion in international law scholarship, states are not bound by a customary norm if they have persistently objected to the formation of the norm. This contribution will show that the concept of persistent objection cannot be consistently applied to all areas of international law. It proposes a classification of three different types of norms – norms protecting a common good, norms of coordination and norms related to ethical values. In each of these three fields, the considerations for whether states can be bound against their expressed will differ. In the case of common goods, state consent is perceived as an epistemological tool in order to cope with uncertainty. Dissent is, therefore, no compelling reason for a state not to be bound by a specific norm. Norms of coordination basically protect the expectations of other states, so that only such states are bound that do not explicitly object. The most difficult case is ethical norms, where states have a margin of discretion in balancing competing rights and interests, but cannot inhibit the validity of the norm through individual objection.

The Cowl - v.28 - n.11 - May 07, 1975

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 28, Number 11 - May 7, 1975. 12 pages. Note: The volume number printed on the banner page of this issue (XXVIII) duplicates the volume number for 1965-66 academic year

Spartan Daily, May 10, 1988

Volume 90, Issue 61https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/7720/thumbnail.jp