Civil Conflict and Three Dimensions of Ethnic Inequality

Presentado como comunicación en el Department of Political Science, Columbia University in the City of New York, en noviembre de 2012 Presentado como comunicación en "Concentration on Conflict", Civil Conflict and Rationality. Barcelona GSE Summer Forum, celebrado del 10 al 12 de junio de 2013 en Barcelona (España)Most empirical studies on civil conflict are not able to find a significant relationship between interpersonal-measures of economic inequality and the likelihood of conflict. When individuals belong to groups, general inequality (measured by the Gini) can be decomposed into three components: between-group inequality (BGI), within-group inequality (WGI), and ‘Overlap’ (which is inversely related to the economic segregation of groups). This paper shows that is possible to establish a robust empirical relation between group-based measures of income differences and con- flict. Drawing on over 200 individual-level surveys from 89 countries, we create a new data set that allows us to measure these three components and to examine their empirical relationship with civil conflict. Consistent with Esteban and Ray’s (2011) argument about the need for labor and capital to fight civil wars, we find a strong, robust positive association between WGI and civil conflict. And consistent with the “contact hypothesis” in sociology, we find that the economic segregation of groups (as measured by a lower Overlap component) is often associated with more civil conflict. Since some components of inequality are associated with more civil conflict but others are associated with less, the analysis helps explain why it has been difficult to identify a relationship between general inequality and civil war. And the strong finding for WGI underscores the value of developing clear theories about how the internal characteristics of groups influence the incidence of civil conflictPeer Reviewe

Mymarommatoidea, a Superfamily of Hymenoptera New for the Hawaiian Islands

The family Mymarommatidae, represented by an unidentified species of Palaeomymar Meunier related to P. goethei (Girault), is reported for the first time from the Hawaiian Islands

Private education and inequality in the knowledge economy

This article explores the consequences of public and private spending on education at all levels, looking at skills and income inequality. We use data for 22 affluent democracies from 1960 or 1995 (depending on data availability) to 2017. High levels of public education spending consistently lower income inequality, both measured as wage dispersion and as the education premium. In contrast, higher levels of private education spending are associated with both higher wage dispersion and a higher education premium. We show that this effect works in part through differential skills acquisition. Public education spending raises the math scores of 15-years old students at the mean and at the 25th percentile, but private education spending has no effect on skills at these levels. We find the same pattern among skills of adults; public education spending raises skills at the 25th percentile and the mean; private spending has no effect. Finally, we also show that higher levels of adult skills indeed depress the education premium

The Chilean Left in Power: Achievements, Failures, and Omissions

In his introduction to this volume, Weyland locates the administrations of Socialist Presidents Ricardo Lagos (2000-06) and Michelle Bachelet (2006- 2010) closest to the moderate pole among current leftist governments in Latin America. We concur and hope to contribute to the discussion by elucidating the sources of this moderation and examining the performance of these governments in the areas of political management, economic policies, and social policies and labor market reforms. The Lagos and Bachelet governments have pursued similar market-friendly economic policies to their predecessors. Although both presidents have made important progress in overcoming the political institutionallegacies of Augusto Pinochet\u27s dictatorship, moderate progress in labor market policies, and impressive progress in two social policy areas, very little improvement has been seen in the realm of fostering citizen participation and empowering labor and social movements through organization and linkages to political parties. We compare the Lagos and Bachelet governments to those of their Christian Democratic predecessors as well as to each other with the goal of identifying policy successes, failures, and omissions. We argue that the administrations\u27 moderation stems from the political experiences of the leadership and their resulting approach to building relationships to the party rank-and-file and to civil society, the fact that these are coalition governments, and the constraints of the Pinochet political and economic legacies

Politics, Policies, and Poverty in Latin America

Why do Latin American countries exhibit stark differences in their ability to protect citizens from falling into poverty? Analysis of poverty levels measured by ECLAC in eighteen countries shows that political factors-including the democratic record, long-term weight of left-of-center parties in the legislature, and investment in human capital-are significant and substantively important determinants of poverty. These findings contribute to the growing literature that emphasizes the importance of regime form, parties, and policies for a variety of outcomes in Latin America, despite the weaknesses of democracy and the pathologies of some parties and party systems in the region

Gravitational Radiation from First-Order Phase Transitions

It is believed that first-order phase transitions at or around the GUT scale will produce high-frequency gravitational radiation. This radiation is a consequence of the collisions and coalescence of multiple bubbles during the transition. We employ high-resolution lattice simulations to numerically evolve a system of bubbles using only scalar fields, track the anisotropic stress during the process and evolve the metric perturbations associated with gravitational radiation. Although the radiation produced during the bubble collisions has previously been estimated, we find that the coalescence phase enhances this radiation even in the absence of a coupled fluid or turbulence. We comment on how these simulations scale and propose that the same enhancement should be found at the Electroweak scale; this modification should make direct detection of a first-order electroweak phase transition easier.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

A Miniaturized Multi Sensor Array for Balloon-Borne Air Measurements, Phase II

Weber State University’s High-Altitude Ballooning team, HARBOR, is developing a lightweight, flexible, expandable sensor array for both high-altitude balloon flight and low-altitude drone flight. The system will have the following capabilities: 1.Gas sensor and air quality board/chamber: a. Gases: CO, CO2, NO2, NH3, SO2, O3, VOCs b. Particulates: PM1, PM2.5, PM10. 2. Metrological data measurement suite: a.Temperature, pressure (with two sensors), %RH. b. Wind by proxy for balloon flights via the GPS. 3. Flight dynamics and geolocation suite: a. High altitude GPS b. 9-axis inertial measurement: acceleration, gyroscope, and magnetometer. 4. Onboard data logging to a microSD card. 5. Live data downlink via 900 MHz XBee to two matching ground stations (one fixed, one mobile). 6. Onboard user interface with removable OLED display. The goal is to create a uniform data set that can be used by balloon and air measurement teams that will save the data in a basic csv format. A separate program will add metadata related to the fight conditions and save the complete dataset in the NASA standard ICARTT file format. Once we have the system optimized, we’ll share it with other balloon teams nationally and internationally. The goal is to create a standard data set that will make college and high school high altitude balloon flights more consistent and thus more useful for atmospheric research

Angular Sizes and Effective Temperatures of O-type Stars from Optical Interferometry with the CHARA Array

We present interferometric observations of six O-type stars that were made with the Precision Astronomical Visible Observations beam combiner at the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array. The observations include multiple brackets for three targets, λ Ori A, ζ Oph, and 10 Lac, but there are only preliminary, single observations of the other three stars, ξ Per, α Cam, and ζ Ori A. The stellar angular diameters range from 0.55 mas for ζ Ori A down to 0.11 mas for 10 Lac, the smallest star yet resolved with the CHARA Array. The rotational oblateness of the rapidly rotating star ζ Oph is directly measured for the first time. We assembled ultraviolet to infrared flux measurements for these stars, and then derived angular diameters and reddening estimates using model atmospheres and an effective temperature set by published results from analysis of the line spectrum. The model-based angular diameters are in good agreement with those observed. We also present estimates for the effective temperatures of these stars, derived by setting the interferometric angular size and fitting the spectrophotometry

Robust artificial neural networks and outlier detection. Technical report

Large outliers break down linear and nonlinear regression models. Robust regression methods allow one to filter out the outliers when building a model. By replacing the traditional least squares criterion with the least trimmed squares criterion, in which half of data is treated as potential outliers, one can fit accurate regression models to strongly contaminated data. High-breakdown methods have become very well established in linear regression, but have started being applied for non-linear regression only recently. In this work, we examine the problem of fitting artificial neural networks to contaminated data using least trimmed squares criterion. We introduce a penalized least trimmed squares criterion which prevents unnecessary removal of valid data. Training of ANNs leads to a challenging non-smooth global optimization problem. We compare the efficiency of several derivative-free optimization methods in solving it, and show that our approach identifies the outliers correctly when ANNs are used for nonlinear regression