China and India - a Note on the Influence of Hierarchy vs. Polyarchy on Economic Growth

This note tries to apply two versions of Sah and Stiglitz's "The Architecture of Economic Systems: Hierarchies and Polyarchies" model (SandS) to highlight some important differences between the development paths of India, the largest democracy, and China, the largest of the few remaining communist ruled economies. It argues that the original SandS model is applicable to private organisations but not to governments, to which a revised model is applied. It is the reliability of the government's decisions and the ability of the investor to rely on them that the modified SandS model tries to capture. As a communist country, China is as centralized as a huge polity of its size can be. A decision of the central authorities, a contract or promise confirmed by Beijing, can be relied upon. This provides a degree of security to the investor that his contract will be honoured and she will not be dispossessed. In the Indian federation the investor has to assure herself that all authorities involved agree to support her project, because any agency that has any say may be able to derail it. These differences are accounted for by the adjusted Sah and Stiglitz model. These differences affect not only the total quantity of investments but also their composition. Clearly, no claim is made or implied that the models introduced below provide the explanation for the differences in the development paths of these two Asian giants in the past few decades. They merely add a new perspective to the economic systems dimension of the development process.Hierarchies vs. polyarchies; Indian development; China's development

A Canadian Alternative to the "Clash of Civilizations"

This article shows how Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, following a well-established Canadian tradition of breaching cultural divides, provides an alternative to the "clash of civilizations" theory prevalent in today's international arena. It argues that the novel challenges three foundations of the theory—the consideration of religious revival in contradiction to scientific rationality, the tying of civilization to the negation of other civilizations, and the assumption that conflict between civilizations is immanent—and proposes an alternative of coexistence between civilizations, consistent with Canadian foreign policy norms.Cet article montre comment le roman de Yann Martel, L’histoire de Pi, qui perpétue la tradition canadienne bien établie consistant à combler le fossé culturel, offre une solution de rechange à la théorie du « choc des civilisations » en vogue sur la scène internationale aujourd’hui. Il soutient que le roman réfute trois piliers de la théorie — le fait de mettre le renouveau religieux en contradiction avec la rationalité scientifique, le fait d’utiliser la civilisation pour nier les autres civilisations et l’hypothèse que le conflit entre les civilisations est immanent — et propose une sorte de coexistence entre les civilisations conforme aux normes de la politique étrangère du Canada

A Canadian Alternative to the "Clash of Civilizations"

This article shows how Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, following a well-established Canadian tradition of breaching cultural divides, provides an alternative to the "clash of civilizations" theory prevalent in today's international arena. It argues that the novel challenges three foundations of the theory—the consideration of religious revival in contradiction to scientific rationality, the tying of civilization to the negation of other civilizations, and the assumption that conflict between civilizations is immanent—and proposes an alternative of coexistence between civilizations, consistent with Canadian foreign policy norms.Cet article montre comment le roman de Yann Martel, L’histoire de Pi, qui perpétue la tradition canadienne bien établie consistant à combler le fossé culturel, offre une solution de rechange à la théorie du « choc des civilisations » en vogue sur la scène internationale aujourd’hui. Il soutient que le roman réfute trois piliers de la théorie — le fait de mettre le renouveau religieux en contradiction avec la rationalité scientifique, le fait d’utiliser la civilisation pour nier les autres civilisations et l’hypothèse que le conflit entre les civilisations est immanent — et propose une sorte de coexistence entre les civilisations conforme aux normes de la politique étrangère du Canada

A Magnified View of the Kinematics and Morphology of RCSGA 032727-132609: Zooming in on a Merger at z=1.7

We present a detailed analysis of multi-wavelength HST/WFC3 imaging and Keck/OSIRIS near-IR AO-assisted integral field spectroscopy for a highly magnified lensed galaxy at z=1.70. This young starburst is representative of UV-selected star-forming galaxies (SFG) at z~2 and contains multiple individual star-forming regions. Due to the lensing magnification, we can resolve spatial scales down to 100pc in the source plane of the galaxy. The velocity field shows disturbed kinematics suggestive of an ongoing interaction, and there is a clear signature of a tidal tail. We constrain the age, reddening, SFR and stellar mass of the star-forming clumps from SED modelling of the WFC3 photometry and measure their H-alpha luminosity, metallicity and outflow properties from the OSIRIS data. With strong star formation driven outflows in four clumps, RCSGA0327 is the first high redshift SFG at stellar mass <10^10 M_sun with spatially resolved stellar winds. We compare the H-alpha luminosities, sizes and dispersions of the star-forming regions to other high-z clumps as well as local giant HII regions and find no evidence for increased clump star formation surface densities in interacting systems, unlike in the local Universe. Spatially resolved SED modelling unveils an established stellar population at the location of the largest clump and a second mass concentration near the edge of the system which is not detected in H-alpha emission. This suggests a picture of an equal-mass mixed major merger, which has not triggered a new burst of star formation or caused a tidal tail in the gas-poor component.Comment: 22 pages, 16 figures, accepted to Ap

Publishing an E-journal on a shoe string: Is it a sustainaible project?.

The aim of this article is to report on an experiment in publishing an open access journal and learn from it about the larger field of open access publishing. The experiment is the launch of the European Journal of Comparative Economics (EJCE), an on-line refereed and open access journal, founded in 2004 by the European Association for Comparative Economic Studies and LIUC University in Italy. They embarked upon this project in part to respond to the rising concentration in the market for scientific publishing and the resulting use of market power to raise subscription prices and restrict access to scientific output. We had hoped that open access journals could provide some countervailing power and increase competition in the field. Our experience running a poorly endowed journal has shown that entry to the field may be easy, yet that making it a sustainable enterprise is not straightforward.Open-access publishing, online journals, scientific publication

Exploration of Potential Risk Factors For Texas County COVID-19 Infection Rates

There have been over 2 million COVID-19 cases within the United States. When considering where infections take place, there appears to be variability between states and even between counties (Gardner 2020). To understand the reasons underlying this phenomenon, we used Texas county data on Covid-19 infection rates and utilized auxiliary data such as age, race, gender, diabetes and obesity rates, temperature, humidity, median household income, metropolitan or rural designation, and poverty rates to see what confers greater risk for higher total infection at a county level. Our study found a positive relationship between diabetes and obesity rates and COVID-19 infection rates, and a negative relationship between the rates of lower educational status and COVID-19 infection rates. Further studies should investigate the underlying mechanisms regarding why those with diabetes, obesity, or a High School Diploma or less are more susceptible to COVID-19 infection as well as the role that population density and different stay-at-home policies affected infection rates in each county

The dynamics of syntax acquisition: facilitation between syntactic structures

This paper sets out to show how facilitation between different clause structures operates over time in syntax acquisition. The phenomenon of facilitation within given structures has been widely documented, yet inter-structure facilitation has rarely been reported so far. Our findings are based on the naturalistic production corpora of six toddlers learning Hebrew as their first language. We use regression analysis, a method that has not been used to study this phenomenon. We find that the proportion of errors among the earliest produced clauses in a structure is related to the degree of acceleration of that structure's learning curve; that with the accretion of structures the proportion of errors among the first clauses of new structures declines, as does the acceleration of their learning curves. We interpret our findings as showing that learning new syntactic structures is made easier, or facilitated, by previously acquired ones

Stress Inducing Demands in Virtual Environments

This study investigated how simulated features in a virtual reality (VR) induce stress by means of user-focused demands in serious games. VR serious games have been used for therapeutic interventions, standardized stress tests, and occupational training. However, it is an open question how stress can be induced using serious games formal features, such as tasks/sensory modalities, music, pace of the game, and graphics. The Highrise VR standardized stress simulation was built to induce stress cohesively based on emotional, social, cognitive, and physical demands. The simulation induces stress by requiring coping with emotional demand (innate fear) of being at a simulated height, social demand of being evaluated by researchers, cognitive demand of a mental math task, and physical demand of balancing on a walking-plank. The stress response in participants was measured with two biomarkers: heart rate and salivary cortisol. Heart rate and salivary cortisol both showed significant and prolonged increases in response to the Highrise VR, suggesting that the task can successfully induce a stress response using game features. Among the participants, the response rate to the stressor was 77%, demonstrating a response rate on par with traditional standardized stress tests. Findings from this study warrant further investigation into how VR simulations induce stress for serious games and may add to a new body of literature that uses VR to investigate underlying mechanisms of physiological stress reactivity