A Question of Timing

US labour law violates ILO standards not at the margins, but at the core

Interactive rhythms across species: The evolutionary biology of animal chorusing and turn-taking

The study of human language is progressively moving toward comparative and interactive frameworks, extending the concept of turn‐taking to animal communication. While such an endeavor will help us understand the interactive origins of language, any theoretical account for cross‐species turn‐taking should consider three key points. First, animal turn‐taking must incorporate biological studies on animal chorusing, namely how different species coordinate their signals over time. Second, while concepts employed in human communication and turn‐taking, such as intentionality, are still debated in animal behavior, lower level mechanisms with clear neurobiological bases can explain much of animal interactive behavior. Third, social behavior, interactivity, and cooperation can be orthogonal, and the alternation of animal signals need not be cooperative. Considering turn‐taking a subset of chorusing in the rhythmic dimension may avoid overinterpretation and enhance the comparability of future empirical work

If Supply-Oriented Drug Policy is Broken, Can Harm Reduction Help Fix It?—Melding Disciplines and Methods to Advance International Drug Control Policy

Critics of the international drug control regime contend that supply-oriented policy interventions are not just ineffective, but they also produce unintended adverse consequences. Research suggests their claims have merit. Lasting local reductions in opium production are possible, albeit rare; but, unless global demand shrinks, production will shift elsewhere, with little or no effect on the aggregate supply of heroin and, potentially, at some expense to exiting and newly emerging suppliers. The net consequences of the international drug control regime and related national policies are as yet unknown. In this paper, we consider whether “harm reduction,” a subject of intense debate in the demand-oriented drug policy community, can provide a unifying foundation for supply-oriented drug policy, one capable of speaking more directly to policy goals. Despite substantial conceptual and technical challenges, we find that harm reduction can provide a basis for assessing the net consequences of supply-oriented drug policy, choosing more rigorously among policy options, and identifying new policy options. In addition, we outline a practical path forward for assessing harms and policy options.

Competing Explanations of U.S. Defense Industry Consolidation in the 1990s and Their Policy Implications

Was the consolidation of defense industry in the 1990s driven by U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) directives, or was it driven instead by the same forces that drove consolidation in many other sectors of the U.S. economy in the 1990s? To better understand the roles of DOD policy and economy-wide forces in shaping the U.S. defense industry, we test for structural breaks in defense industry and spending data and compare our findings to those relating to other sectors and the general economy. We identify structural breaks in the defense-related data in the early 1980s and throughout the 1990s, roughly consistent with changes in the U.S. economy, including broader merger trends. Overall, our results are more consistent with the view that economy-wide factors drove defense industry consolidation, largely independent of the DOD policy changes that occurred early in the 1990s.

Masters Thesis- Criticality Alarm System Design Guide with Accompanying Alarm System Development for the Radioisotope Production Laboratory in Richland, Washington

A detailed instructional manual was created to guide criticality safety engineers through the process of designing a criticality alarm system (CAS) for Department of Energy (DOE) hazard class 1 and 2 facilities. Regulatory and technical requirements were both addressed. A list of design tasks and technical subtasks are thoroughly analyzed to provide concise direction for how to complete the analysis. An example of the application of the design methodology, the Criticality Alarm System developed for the Radioisotope Production Laboratory (RPL) of Richland, Washington is also included. The analysis for RPL utilizes the Monte Carlo code MCNP5 for establishing detector coverage in the facility. Significant improvements to the existing CAS were made that increase the reliability, transparency, and coverage of the system