The U.S. Role in Saving the Global Environment

In the following excerpt from his book Earth in the Balance, Vice President-elect Gore describes what he believes should be components of the U.S. role in this Global Marshall Plan --a new global economics. Then he describes what happened at the Earth Summit and where we all go from here

Developments in Space Law

A democratic society could not long endure without the voluntary support of its citizens of application of legal proceedings for settlement of disputes. Perhaps few take the time to consider the extent to which our daily lives are affected by the judicial machinery which a free people have established. Here I refer not merely to the deterrent effect of criminal laws by which we deal with offenses against society. I refer also to our system for the legal settlement of controversies arising between individuals. After all, without our courts and our lawyers, questions involving tort and breach of contract would have to be decided by fisticuffs or perhaps with guns. And so, those who follow the legal profession do not merely serve their clients. In a larger sense, they serve society as a whole. Without lawyers there could be no such thing as the rule of law, nor could we preserve our concept of a government of law as opposed to a government of men. There are many imperfections in our laws. Perhaps our legal system could also be improved in some respects. On the whole, however, it works better than any other system yet devised for the preservation of individual rights and freedom

Albert Gore to Dr. Silver, 9 November 1959

Personal correspondenc

Cooperation in the snowdrift game on directed small-world networks under self-questioning and noisy conditions

Cooperation in the evolutionary snowdrift game with a self-questioning updating mechanism is studied on annealed and quenched small-world networks with directed couplings. Around the payoff parameter value $r=0.5$, we find a size-invariant symmetrical cooperation effect. While generally suppressing cooperation for $r>0.5$ payoffs, rewired networks facilitated cooperative behavior for $r<0.5$. Fair amounts of noise were found to break the observed symmetry and further weaken cooperation at relatively large values of $r$. However, in the absence of noise, the self-questioning mechanism recovers symmetrical behavior and elevates altruism even under large-reward conditions. Our results suggest that an updating mechanism of this type is necessary to stabilize cooperation in a spatially structured environment which is otherwise detrimental to cooperative behavior, especially at high cost-to-benefit ratios. Additionally, we employ component and local stability analyses to better understand the nature of the manifested dynamics.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

Bureaucratization in Public Research Institutions

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature of bureaucratization within public research bodies and its relationship to scientific performance, focusing on an Italian case-study. The main finding is that the bureaucratization of the research sector has two dimensions: public research labs have academic bureaucratization since researchers spend an increasing part of their time in administrative matters (i.e., preparing grant applications, managing grants/projects, and so on); whereas universities mainly have administrative bureaucratization generated by the increase over time of administrative staff in comparison with researchers and faculty. In addition, I show that research units with higher bureaucratization have lower scientific performance