The Benefits of Campaign Spending

Critics of American politics often say that spending on electoral campaigns harms our democracy. They charge that the money goes for cynical, negative, and misleading advertisements that alienate the public from politics and elections. Political scientists have collected and analyzed data on the connection between campaign spending and civic life. The data bear on several questions at issue in campaign finance debates: Does campaign spending reduce public trust? Does it reduce levels of citizen involvement in or attention to campaigns? Does it lower citizens' knowledge of information relevant to their votes? Who benefits from campaign spending? Studies indicate that campaign spending does not diminish trust, efficacy, and involvement, contrary to what critics charge. Moreover, spending increases public knowledge of the candidates, across essentially all groups in the population. Less spending on campaigns is not likely to increase public trust, involvement, or attention. Implicit or explicit spending limits reduce public knowledge during campaigns. Getting more money into campaigns should, on the whole, be beneficial to American democracy

Using the Transitional Jobs Strategy to Help Chronically Unemployed Veterans

One in nine Iraq and Afghanistan veterans was out of work in spring 2009, the unemployment rate of those veterans having risen in the course of a year from 7.2 percent to 11.2 percent -- substantially higher than the 8.8 percent rate for the non-veteran population.The disproportionate unemployment numbers among veterans also reflect a deeper problem: issues rooted in their military experience create barriers to veterans becoming or remaining employed. Thus a veteran's initial unemployment upon return often becomes chronic

Stochastic phonological grammars and acceptability

In foundational works of generative phonology it is claimed that subjects can reliably discriminate between possible but non-occurring words and words that could not be English. In this paper we examine the use of a probabilistic phonological parser for words to model experimentally-obtained judgements of the acceptability of a set of nonsense words. We compared various methods of scoring the goodness of the parse as a predictor of acceptability. We found that the probability of the worst part is not the best score of acceptability, indicating that classical generative phonology and Optimality Theory miss an important fact, as these approaches do not recognise a mechanism by which the frequency of well-formed parts may ameliorate the unacceptability of low-frequency parts. We argue that probabilistic generative grammars are demonstrably a more psychologically realistic model of phonological competence than standard generative phonology or Optimality Theory.Comment: compressed postscript, 8 pages, 1 figur

On the Theory of Ethnic Conflict

We present a theory of ethnic conflict in which coalitions formed along ethnic lines compete for the economy’s resources. The role of ethnicity is to enforce coalition membership: in ethnically homogeneous societies members of the losing coalition can defect to the winners at low cost, and this rules out conflict as an equilibrium outcome. We derive a number of implications of the model relating social, political, and economic indicators such as the incidence of conflict, the distance among ethnic groups, group sizes, income inequality, and expropriable resources.

On the Theory of Ethnic Conflict

We present a theory of ethnic conflict in which coalitions formed along ethnic lines compete for the economy's resources. The role of ethnicity is to enforce coalition membership: in ethnically homogeneous societies members of the losing coalition can defect to the winners at low cost, and this rules out conflict as an equilibrium outcome. We derive a number of implications of the model relating social, political, and economic indicators such as the incidence of conflict, the distance among ethnic groups, group sizes, income inequality, and expropriable resources.ethnic distance, exploitation

On the Theory of Ethnic Conflict

We present a theory of ethnic conflict in which coalitions formed along ethnic lines compete for the economy%u2019s resources. The role of ethnicity is to enforce coalition membership: in ethnically homogeneous societies members of the losing coalition can defect to the winners at low cost, and this rules out conflict as an equilibrium outcome. We derive a number of implications of the model relating social, political, and economic indicators such as the incidence of conflict, the distance among ethnic groups, group sizes, income inequality, and expropriable resources.

A Model for the Delivery of Evidence-Based PSHE (Personal Wellbeing) in Secondary Schools

Personal Social Health and Economic (PSHE) education is a non-statutory school subject designed to facilitate the delivery of a number of key competencies relevant to health, safety and wellbeing. As well as contributing to learning objectives in regards to these topics PSHE education has been ascribed with weighty expectations for outcomes well beyond the classroom relating to physical, mental, sexual and emotional health and safety. This paper reviews a programme of research aimed at providing guidance for the evidence-based provision of PSHE education, including a summary of the major impediments and facilitators of evidence-based programming, as well as a model curriculum for the delivery of evidence-based PSHE. An extensive literature review was conducted along with a series of interviews with programme developers, researchers, teachers and other school practitioners with the aim of developing a cohesive rationale for PSHE education and identifying evidence-based programmes which could be implemented to contribute to PSHE aims. The proposed model curriculum is comprised of evidence-based programmes which are PSHE-relevant and applicable or adaptable to the PSHE-education implementation context. While the provision of evidence-based PSHE presents a number of challenges and is limited by a lack of resources and evidence of effectiveness, with appropriate guidance PSHE education can be improved so that a comprehensive syllabus of evidence-based programmes is enacted in secondary schools. This will increase the likelihood that PSHE has the intended effect on adolescent mental and physical health and wellbeing.Health education, social-emotional learning, life-skills, prevention