The War on Drugs – A War on Drug Users

The authors argue that since the 1980s UK drug policy has largely been ill considered, reactive and counter- productive. Rather than reducing drug taking and drug related crime, such policies have exacerbated the problem and contributed towards an environment in which drug use and illegal drug activities are likely to flourish. One of the consequences of this 'war on drugs' is that it manifests itself as a 'war on drug users' with an emphasis not upon the development of appropriate rehabilitative models, but upon prevention, prohibition and punishment. Drawing on the authors' qualitative research on Merseyside, England involving 200 problem drug users, it will be argued that the war on drug users has subjected these people to a process of stigmatization, marginalization and social exclusion, and prevented many of them from recovery by hindering their re-integation into the wider social and economic community. Instead, growing numbers of problematic drug users remain locked into a cycle of chronic drug relapse

Forecasting Algorithms for Causal Inference with Panel Data

Conducting causal inference with panel data is a core challenge in social science research. We adapt a deep neural architecture for time series forecasting (the N-BEATS algorithm) to more accurately predict the counterfactual evolution of a treated unit had treatment not occurred. Across a range of settings, the resulting estimator ("SyNBEATS") significantly outperforms commonly employed methods (synthetic controls, two-way fixed effects), and attains comparable or more accurate performance compared to recently proposed methods (synthetic difference-in-differences, matrix completion). Our results highlight how advances in the forecasting literature can be harnessed to improve causal inference in panel data settings

A Stochastic Analysis of Proposals for the New US Farm Bill

Most of the large scale modeling systems used in the analysis of agricultural policies produce deterministic projections. In reality, however, the agricultural sector is subject to a high degree of uncertainty as a result of fluctuations in exogenous factors such as the weather or macroeconomic variation. A stochastic approach can provide additional information to policy makers regarding the implications of this uncertainty, through the use of stochastically generated projections. This paper also shows how deterministic analysis may result in systematic errors in the projection of some variables. As an applied example, the FAPRI model of the US agricultural sector is simulated stochastically to analyse the impact of proposals for the new US farm bill.Stochastic simulation, US Farm Bill, policy analysis, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Opportunities in Software Engineering Research for Web API Consumption

Nowadays, invoking third party code increasingly involves calling web services via their web APIs, as opposed to the more traditional scenario of downloading a library and invoking the library's API. However, there are also new challenges for developers calling these web APIs. In this paper, we highlight a broad set of these challenges and argue for resulting opportunities for software engineering research to support developers in consuming web APIs. We outline two specific research threads in this context: (1) web API specification curation, which enables us to know the signatures of web APIs, and (2) static analysis that is capable of extracting URLs, HTTP methods etc. of web API calls. Furthermore, we present new work on how we combine (1) and (2) to provide IDE support for application developers consuming web APIs. As web APIs are used broadly, research in supporting the consumption of web APIs offers exciting opportunities.Comment: Erik Wittern and Annie Ying are both first author

Global Markets for Agricultural Products 2003 - 2012

Further information may be found at http://www.tnet.teagasc.ie/fapri/pubandrep2003.htmThe 2003 global baseline reflects a variety of the short-term issues that have and will continue to affect the sector. These range from crop short-falls in the northern and southern hemisphere to the continued economic weakness, from the continuing sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) difficulties in a number of countries around the world, to the unfolding agricultural policy and trade reform process. There are three major macroeconomic drivers of this baseline projection. They are (i) continued weakness in Latin American economies, (ii) recovery in most of the rest of the world -- particularly central Europe and several members of the Former Soviet Union, and (iii) a significant devaluation of the United States dollar relative to many of the other major currencies including the euro

Reforming the CAP: A Partial Equilibrium Analysis of the MTR Proposals

Contributed paper selected for presentation at the 25th International Conference of Agricultural Economists, August 16-22, 2003, Durban, South Africa.In the Mid-Term Review (MTR), the European Commission proposed a series of changes to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). An important part of these changes was significant decoupling of support payments from production. In this paper, a partial equilibrium model of the EU agricultural sector is used to estimate the potential impacts of the MTR proposals on EU and world agricultural markets over the period 2004-2009. Effects of the MTR proposals are evaluated by comparing estimated outcomes under the proposals to those that would result under a current-policy baseline. The changes that are made in the MTR have the effect of reducing the production of the major commodities by varying amounts based on the importance of payments in production and the degree to which these payments are currently production inducing. For example, total area harvested for nine major crops falls by about 2 percent under the MTR proposals. In the livestock sector, however, where current payments are strongly coupled and form a large part of producers' income, the reductions in production are projected to be more significant