Narrative and Belonging: The Politics of Ambiguity, The Jewish State, and the Thought of Edward Said and Hannah Arendt

At the core of this thesis, I examine the difficulties of giving an account of oneself in modern associational life. By integrating the theory and political activism of both Edward Said and Hannah Arendt, I follow the Zionist response to European antisemitism and the Palestinian responses to Jewish settler colonialism. Both parties struggle against their ambiguous presence within local and regional hegemonic social taxonomy, and within the world order. Contemporarily, this struggle takes place in the protracted conflict between Israeli and local Arab groups, which has been managed through violence and objectification, as opposed to allowing the dynamism and reconfiguration of political subjectivities. In their later writings, Arendt and Said respond to the violence and resentment that arises from the form of the nation-state by prescribing, and arguably practicing, an understanding of politics where the “other” is constitutive of the “self.” By seeing this relation of alternity as the contemporary heir to diasporic Judaism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, I argue that this project holds the historical traction to reinvigorate the future beyond static and growing violence and dispossession

Decision trees, monotone functions, and semimatroids

We define decision trees for monotone functions on a simplicial complex. We define homology decidability of monotone functions, and show that various monotone functions related to semimatroids are homology decidable. Homology decidability is a generalization of semi-nonevasiveness, a notion due to Jonsson. The motivating example is the complex of bipartite graphs, whose Betti numbers are unknown in general. We show that these monotone functions have optimum decision trees, from which we can compute relative Betti numbers of related pairs of simplicial complexes. Moreover, these relative Betti numbers are coefficients of evaluations of the Tutte polynomial, and every semimatroid collapses onto its broken circuit complex.Comment: 16 page

Survey of Tribal Court Effectiveness Studies

This article examines empirical studies that have been conducted on the effectiveness of tribal courts, both in terms of reduction in recidivism and participant attitudes, and a look at some of the challenges to implementing a tribal court effectiveness study in Alaska.[Introduction] / Alaska at a Glance / Studies of Effectiveness of Tribal Courts / Studies Conducted Throughout the Contiguous United States / Studies Conducted in Alaska / Additional Studies of Tribal Courts / The Need for More Research and Identified Obstacles to Overcome / Tribal Court Jurisdiction / Alaska’s Challenging Geography / Minor Consuming Alcohol as a Quantitative Measure / Conclusion / [SIDEBAR:] Tribal Court Studies — ReferencesYe

Commentary : global demographic change : economic impacts and policy challenges

Population ; Economic conditions

International Reserves Under Alternative Exchange Rate Regimes and Aspects of The Economics of Managed Float

This paper contains an analysis of the role of international reserves under a regime of pegged exchange rates and under a regime of managed floating. It presents evidence on the stability of the demand for reserves during the periods 1963-72 and 1973-75. It is shown that the demand for reserves by developed countries differs from that of less-developed countries and that the system underwent a structural change by the end of 1972. In view of the drastic change in the international monetary system, the extent of the structural change has not been as large as might have been expected, thus leading to the observation that economic behavior seems to be more stable than legal arrangements. From the policy perspective it follows that the problems concerning the role of the International Monetary Fund in this context are as relevant at the present as they were in the past. The paper concludes with a sketch of a stochastic framework for the analysis of the optimal degree of managed floating. And its purpose is to suggest an additional set of variables which might be incorporated into the specification of the demand for international reserves. It is shown that the optimal degree of exchange rate flexibility depends on the stochastic nature of the shocks that the economy faces. The stochastic characteristics of the shocks include a distinction between real and monetary shocks, domestic and foreign shocks and depend on the covariances among the various shocks.