Egypt Adrift Five Years After The Uprising

As Egypt approaches the fifth anniversary of its 2011 uprising, one would be forgiven for assuming that a major challenge to the regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was gathering coherence and force, based upon its panicked and paranoid current actions. But such a conclusion would be misplaced. The regime's overblown fears of a largely neutered opposition raise a pertinent question: What is driving the Egyptian security establishment's overbroad and suffocating repression?The run-up to January 25 has seen a major crackdown that has included arrests, disappearances, random searches (including random surveillance of social media accounts), the shuttering of nonpolitical cultural fora, such as art galleries, and a heightening of visa monitoring for foreigners. For this upcoming symbolic date, the regime will not be caught unaware and flat-footed -- it believes that the mistakes of 2011 will not be repeated any time soon.Speaking to Reuters, an official at Egypt's Homeland Security Agency explained the state's motivations for the crackdown quite bluntly, stating that "We have taken several measures to ensure activists don't have breathing space and are unable to gather, and several cafes and other meeting places have been closed, while some have been arrested in order to scare the rest."Whereas late 2010 was marked by creeping dissatisfaction, increasing boldness, and stepped-up organizational efforts among opposition actors, there are no corollaries in today's Egypt. While the government continues to fare poorly in terms of overall performance, political life is stunted by fear and fragmentation, and there are few avenues that allow for the amplification of dissatisfaction into a broad-based challenge to the regime. Opposition forces are fragmented and intimidated, while the regime, the state, and social elites retain a baseline of cohesion, and domestic and regional instability have produced quiescence in some sectors of society.It is clear that 2016 will not be the year of the next Egyptian uprising, let alone revolution. Yet, despite indications that, for the time being, the regime is safe from any popular threat, it is behaving as if it faces an imminent challenge. Its actions reveal a deeply ingrained worldview in which even minor forms of dissent and nonconformity are no longer permissible

Environmental Regulations, Air and Water Pollution, and Infant Mortality in India

Using the most comprehensive data file ever compiled on air pollution, water pollution, environmental regulations, and infant mortality from a developing country, the paper examines the effectiveness of India's environmental regulations. The air pollution regulations were effective at reducing ambient concentrations of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. The most successful air pollution regulation is associated with a modest and statistically insignificant decline in infant mortality. However, the water pollution regulations had no observable effect. Overall, these results contradict the conventional wisdom that environmental quality is a deterministic function of income and underscore the role of institutions and politics.

The Content-Dependence of Imaginative Resistance

An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved

Whirling skirts and rotating cones

Steady, dihedrally symmetric patterns with sharp peaks may be observed on a spinning skirt, lagging behind the material flow of the fabric. These qualitative features are captured with a minimal model of traveling waves on an inextensible, flexible, generalized-conical sheet rotating about a fixed axis. Conservation laws are used to reduce the dynamics to a quadrature describing a particle in a three-parameter family of potentials. One parameter is associated with the stress in the sheet, aNoether is the current associated with rotational invariance, and the third is a Rossby number which indicates the relative strength of Coriolis forces. Solutions are quantized by enforcing a topology appropriate to a skirt and a particular choice of dihedral symmetry. A perturbative analysis of nearly axisymmetric cones shows that Coriolis effects are essential in establishing skirt-like solutions. Fully non-linear solutions with three-fold symmetry are presented which bear a suggestive resemblance to the observed patterns.Comment: two additional figures, changes to text throughout. journal version will have a wordier abstrac

The Married Widow: Marriage Penalties Matter!

Marriage penalties are a controversial feature of many government policies. Empirical evidence of their behavioral effects is quite mixed. This is surprising because economic theory predicts that they should have an impact on the headship decision. We investigate the removal of marriage penalties from the surviving spouse pensions of the Canadian public pension system in the 1980s. These reforms provide a simple and transparent source of identification. Our results indicate that marriage penalties can have large and persistent effects on marriage decisions. We also present evidence suggesting that it is individuals with characteristics correlated with greater wealth who respond to the penalties.

Dipoles in thin sheets

A flat elastic sheet may contain pointlike conical singularities that carry a metrical "charge" of Gaussian curvature. Adding such elementary defects to a sheet allows one to make many shapes, in a manner broadly analogous to the familiar multipole construction in electrostatics. However, here the underlying field theory is non-linear, and superposition of intrinsic defects is non-trivial as it must respect the immersion of the resulting surface in three dimensions. We consider a "charge-neutral" dipole composed of two conical singularities of opposite sign. Unlike the relatively simple electrostatic case, here there are two distinct stable minima and an infinity of unstable equilibria. We determine the shapes of the minima and evaluate their energies in the thin-sheet regime where bending dominates over stretching. Our predictions are in surprisingly good agreement with experiments on paper sheets.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Environmental Regulations, Air and Water Pollution, and Infant Mortality in India

Using the most comprehensive data file ever compiled on air pollution, water pollution, environmental regulations, and infant mortality from a developing country, the paper examines the effectiveness of India’s environmental regulations. The air pollution regulations were effective at reducing ambient concentrations of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. The most successful air pollution regulation is associated with a modest and statistically insignificant decline in infant mortality. However, the water pollution regulations had no observable effect. Overall, these results contradict the conventional wisdom that environmental quality is a deterministic function of income and underscore the role of institutions and politics.MIT Energy Initiativ

Environmental Regulations, Air and Water Pollution, & Infant Mortality in India

February 18, 2013 revision to this paper is available at http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/81950.Using the most comprehensive data file ever compiled on air pollution, water pollution, environmental regulations, and infant mortality from a developing country, the paper examines the effectiveness of India’s environmental regulations. The air pollution regulations were effective at reducing ambient concentrations of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. The most successful air pollution regulation is associated with a modest and statistically insignificant decline in infant mortality. However, the water pollution regulations had no observable effect. Overall, these results contradict the conventional wisdom that environmental quality is a deterministic function of income and underscore the role of institutions and politics

Equipment Effects on Anhydrous Ammonia Application

Nitrogen fertilizer is a major input in terms of cost and energy into production of com, wheat, and other nationally important crops such as cotton and rice. Anhydrous ammonia is the most popular form of nitrogen application. In Iowa, 623,000 tons of anhydrous ammonia were applied in 1997 (Terry and Kirby, 1997). In the United States, 4.9 million tons of anhydrous ammonia were applied in both 1996 and 1997. Comparing fertilizer usage by source, anhydrous ammonia supplied 1.0 billion pounds of N (nitrogen) to Iowa cornfields in 1997 while the next most popular source, nitrogen solutions, supplied just 0.5 billion pounds of N. Nationwide, 8.0 billion pounds of N were applied to crops as anhydrous ammonia in both 1996 and 1997. At a cost of $200 to$275/ton of anhydrous ammonia, typical Iowa grower applications of 120 lbs of N per acre on com result in purchased crop input costs of about $15 to$20 per acre, respectively