Swamp dredge: Research into grunge

For this project I have researched grunge music and created a body of work influenced by this genre. During my extended contextual research into the genre, I looked at both the artists and producers. I wrote/co-wrote the songs, played some of the instruments and produced the recordings. These are now available for download on www.soundcloud.com/swampdredg

Should Latin America Fear China?

This paper compares growth conditions in China and Latin America to assess fears that China will displace Latin America in the coming decades. China`s strengths include the size of the economy, macroeconomic stability, abundant low-cost labor, the rapid expansion of physical infrastructure, and the ability to innovate. China`s weaknesses, stemming from insufficient separation between market and state, include poor corporate governance, a fragile financial system and misallocation of savings. Both regions share important weaknesses: the rule of law is weak, corruption endemic, and education is poor and very poorly distributed.

Inversión pública en infraestructura en América Latina: ¿Es la deuda la culpable?

Se usaron datos de panel para siete países de América Latina para evaluar la influencia del endeudamiento público de la inversión pública en infraestructura durante el período 1987-2001. Los aumentos de deuda se asocian con inversión alta de infraestructura pública, un efecto que es resistente a la inclusión de muchas otras variables fiscales y macroeconómicas. Este trabajo también encuentra alguna evidencia de complementariedad entre la inversión pública y privada y en el efecto negativo de los préstamos de ajuste del FMI en gastos de infraestructura. No se encuentra evidencia que los incumplimientos de la deuda afectan la inversión pública en infraestructura.

A Decade of Structural Reform in Latin America: What Has Been Reformed and How to Measure It

During the past decade, structural polices in the region have been aimed increasingly at improving economic efficiency and reducing government interference in economic decisions. The effects of this shift have not yet been accurately evaluated due to the lack of systematic measurements of the magnitude of structural reforms. The aim of this document is to summarize the most characteristic features of the reform process during the past decade and to propose a method for quantifying the state of structural policies

A Crowdsourced Frame Disambiguation Corpus with Ambiguity

We present a resource for the task of FrameNet semantic frame disambiguation of over 5,000 word-sentence pairs from the Wikipedia corpus. The annotations were collected using a novel crowdsourcing approach with multiple workers per sentence to capture inter-annotator disagreement. In contrast to the typical approach of attributing the best single frame to each word, we provide a list of frames with disagreement-based scores that express the confidence with which each frame applies to the word. This is based on the idea that inter-annotator disagreement is at least partly caused by ambiguity that is inherent to the text and frames. We have found many examples where the semantics of individual frames overlap sufficiently to make them acceptable alternatives for interpreting a sentence. We have argued that ignoring this ambiguity creates an overly arbitrary target for training and evaluating natural language processing systems - if humans cannot agree, why would we expect the correct answer from a machine to be any different? To process this data we also utilized an expanded lemma-set provided by the Framester system, which merges FN with WordNet to enhance coverage. Our dataset includes annotations of 1,000 sentence-word pairs whose lemmas are not part of FN. Finally we present metrics for evaluating frame disambiguation systems that account for ambiguity.Comment: Accepted to NAACL-HLT201

What makes reforms likely: Political economy determinants of reforms in Latin America

The purpose of this paper is to test the main hypotheses of the recent theoretical literature on the political economy of reform for the case of the Latin American countries between 1985 and 1995. The paper first reviews the literature and extracts the main testable hypotheses. Then, a system of indices that measure the extent of reform in five policy areas is presented. These indices are used as the dependent variables in panel regressions where the main explanatory variables are indicators of crisis, political variables and indicators of channels of contagion. We find very strong support for the well-known hypothesis that crises make reform viable and also for the (less theoretically sound) hypotheses that reforms are more likely at the beginning of government periods. None of the hypotheses on the role of political and distributional variables, the importance of compensation schemes or contagion, finds support in our results. Rather disappointingly, however, most of the reforms seem to have responded to a process of convergence.structural reforms, political economy, Latin America

Television and the future internet: the NoTube project

[1st paragraph] 'New technology is transforming the TV industry', Mark Thompson, BBC Director General told the newspaper The Observer. The classic notion of TV being a set in the living room with finite channels and linear programming is already gone: TV has moved into the world of Internet and mobile technology and content is growing exponentially in terms of number and diversity. The notion of channels is being replaced by individual choice and on-demand programming. Distinctions between TV and other streaming content are blurred: both live in a shared connected online world. We expect that as the Future Internet develops, TV will complete this disruptive paradigm shift into becoming ubiquituous, always-available, and increasingly personalized. NoTube is a EU funded project (in the Objective 4.3 Intelligent Information Management) which began February 2009 and runs for three years, with the goal to prepare TV for the Future Internet – addressing challenges of TV content ubiquity and choice, personalization and integration

The Electoral Consequences of the Washington Consensus

This paper assesses how electoral outcomes in both presidential and legislative elections in Latin America have been affected by the adoption of economic policies that seek to improve macroeconomic stability and facilitate the functioning of markets. The database includes 17 Latin American countries for the period 1985-2002, and a total of 66 presidential and 81 legislative elections. The set of testable hypotheses is derived from a review of the literature and is structured around the hypothesis of economic voting. It is found that (i) the incumbent’s party is rewarded for reductions in the rate of inflation and, to a lesser extent, for increases in the rate of growth; (ii) the more fragmented or ideologically polarized the party system, the higher the electoral rewards of reducing the inflation rate or raising the economic growth rate; (iii) voters care not only about economic outcomes, but also about some of the policies adopted: while the electorate seems blind to macroeconomic policies such as fiscal or exchange-rate policies, it is averse to pro-market policies, irrespective of their effects on growth or inflation; and (iv) the electorate is more tolerant of pro-market reforms when the incumbent’s party has a more market-oriented ideology. These results suggest that reforming parties have paid a hefty price for the adoption of pro-market reforms, except when such reforms have been undertaken in conjunction with stabilization policies in high-inflation economies.