Solidarity statement by academics attending MMFF

Delegates to the Melanesia Media Freedom Forum express their solidarity with media workers in Melanesia in their struggle for freedom of expression, security, and professional recognition. Delegates note the words of Secretary-General of the Pacific Islands Forum Dame Meg Taylor who told the Asia Lecture at Griffith University, Brisbane, on 11 November 2019:  ‘We live in unprecedented times of change which will test our abilities to respond.

The Melanesian Media Declaration

We, the participants at the Melanesian Media Freedom representing media from Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and West Papua, wish to express concern about growing threats to media freedom in our region and call on members of our industry and other organisations and individuals to take action to help secure the future of the Fourth Estate as a vital pillar of democracy

Ratings and rankings: Voodoo or Science?

Composite indicators aggregate a set of variables using weights which are understood to reflect the variables' importance in the index. In this paper we propose to measure the importance of a given variable within existing composite indicators via Karl Pearson's `correlation ratio'; we call this measure `main effect'. Because socio-economic variables are heteroskedastic and correlated, (relative) nominal weights are hardly ever found to match (relative) main effects; we propose to summarize their discrepancy with a divergence measure. We further discuss to what extent the mapping from nominal weights to main effects can be inverted. This analysis is applied to five composite indicators, including the Human Development Index and two popular league tables of university performance. It is found that in many cases the declared importance of single indicators and their main effect are very different, and that the data correlation structure often prevents developers from obtaining the stated importance, even when modifying the nominal weights in the set of nonnegative numbers with unit sum.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure

公けの施設の利用と表現の自由 : アメリカにおけるpublic formの法理の検討

はじめに　I 伝統的フォーラム　1 禁止の時代　2 public forumの理論の萌芽　3 public forumの理論の基礎と展開　4 一時的動揺期と再確認　Ⅱ 現代的フォーラムの拡がり　Ⅲ public forumの法理の検討　1 「時，場所および方法の規則」の原則　(1) 施設の性質，本来の利用目的　(2) 代替施設の存在　(3) 言論とフォーラムの関係　2 「政府中立」の原則　(1) content-neutral と「平等原則」の適用　(2) compellingな政治利益　(3) 「public form」の概念と内容規制　おわり

Inside Story on the Panama Canal Crisis (Part 1 of 2)

Freedom Forum discussion against the Panama Canal Treaty (Part 1 of 2): Narrated by U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch with additional speakers: U.S. Representative John M. Murphy; U.S. Senator James B. Allen; U.S. Representative Philip M. Crane; U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt; and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer

Inside Story on the Panama Canal Crisis (Part 2 of 2)

Freedom Forum discussion against the Panama Canal Treaty (Part 2 of 2): Narrated by U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch with additional speakers: U.S. Representative Philip M. Crane; U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt; and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer