Feasible Globalizations

The nation-state system, democratic politics, and full economic integration are mutually incompatible. Of the three, at most two can be had together. The Bretton Woods/GATT regime was successful because its architects subjugated international economic integration to the needs and demands of national economic management and democratic politics. A renewed 'Bretton-Woods compromise' would preserve some limits on integration, while crafting better global rules to handle the integration that can be achieved. Among 'feasible glablization,' the most promising is a multilaterally negotiated visa scheme that allows expanded (but temporary) entry into the advanced nations of a mix of skilled and unskilled workers from developing nations. Such a scheme would likely create income gains that are larger than all of the items on the WTO negotiating agenda taken together, even if it resulted in a relatively small increase in cross-border labor flows.

Studying cities to learn about minds: some possible implications of space syntax for spatial cognition

What can we learn of the human mind by examining its products? The city is a case in point. Since the beginning of cities human ideas about them have been dominated by geometric ideas, and the real history of cities has always oscillated between the geometric and the ‘organic’. Set in the context of the suggestion from cognitive neuroscience that we impose more geometric order on the world than it actually possesses, and intriguing question arises: what is the role of the geometric intuition in how we understand cities and how we create them? Here I argue, drawing on space syntax research which has sought to link the detailed spatial morphology of cities to observable functional regularities, that all cities, the organic as well as the geometric, are pervasively ordered by geometric intuition, so that neither the forms of the cities nor their functioning can be understood without insight into their distinctive and pervasive emergent geometrical forms. The city is often said to be the creation of economic and social processes, but here it is argued that these processes operate within an envelope of geometric possibility defined by the human mind in its interaction with spatial laws that govern the relations between objects and spaces in the ambient world

How major depressive disorder affects the ability to decode multimodal dynamic emotional stimuli

Most studies investigating the processing of emotions in depressed patients reported impairments in the decoding of negative emotions. However, these studies adopted static stimuli (mostly stereotypical facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions) which do not reflect the way people experience emotions in everyday life. For this reason, this work proposes to investigate the decoding of emotional expressions in patients affected by Recurrent Major Depressive Disorder (RMDDs) using dynamic audio/video stimuli. RMDDs’ performance is compared with the performance of patients with Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood (ADs) and healthy (HCs) subjects. The experiments involve 27 RMDDs (16 with acute depression - RMDD-A, and 11 in a compensation phase - RMDD-C), 16 ADs and 16 HCs. The ability to decode emotional expressions is assessed through an emotion recognition task based on short audio (without video), video (without audio) and audio/video clips. The results show that AD patients are significantly less accurate than HCs in decoding fear, anger, happiness, surprise and sadness. RMDD-As with acute depression are significantly less accurate than HCs in decoding happiness, sadness and surprise. Finally, no significant differences were found between HCs and RMDD-Cs in a compensation phase. The different communication channels and the types of emotion play a significant role in limiting the decoding accuracy

Continuity and change in party positions towards Europe in Italian parties: an examination of parties' manifestos

This paper analyses Italian parties' manifestos for national and European elections from 1979 to 1999 with the 'Wordscore' programme in order to gauge whether party positions with regard to the European Union have changed and whether the salience of the European Union has increased. Results indicate that, although there is no sign of increased salience, the leading Italian political parties have repositioned themselves in their attitudes towards the European Union, indicating that the European political space matters for national parties