The Jerusalem Embassy Act

The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 (“Act”) was introduced to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. In addition to policy issues, which have been the subject of considerable debate, the Act raises interesting questions concerning the scope of congressional and executive authority in the conduct of foreign affairs, and the extent to which Congress can use its appropriations power to influence executive action in this area. President Clinton opposed the Dole-Kyl Bill on policy grounds and the Justice Department prepared a memorandum (“Memorandum”) arguing that the Dole-Kyl Bill is unconstitutional. Essentially, the Memorandum argued that the Bill: (1) interfered with the President\u27s power to conduct foreign affairs and make decisions pertaining to recognition, and (2) is an inappropriate exercise of Congress\u27 appropriations power because it includes an unconstitutional condition. The issue is whether Congress can enact legislation that may effect U.S. foreign policy interests, and whether it can do so by use of the appropriations power. Long established practice, the writings of scholars and statesmen, and judicial decisions, all indicate that the answer to both is clearly yes

Time series models of GDP: a reappraisal.

We propose a model diagnostic device to compare different linear and non linear parametric time series models of real GDP business cycle.The comparison appears of remarkable economic importance since different models have very different implications in term of long run persistence of negative shocks on the level of aggregate output.On the basis of the proposed diagnostic six popular models of real GDP are compared in a Monte Carlo simulation.We find that SETAR models and three stages Markov-switching models significantlly overperform the other statistical representation of the series.Since the SETAR form of non linearity is far easier to handle for both estimation and testing we argue in their favour.SETAR models, ARMA models, Markov-switching models, impulse response functions, residual based misspecification tests,busyness-cycle stylized facts

When silver glitters more than gold: Bootstrapping an Italian part-of-speech tagger for Twitter

We bootstrap a state-of-the-art part-of-speech tagger to tag Italian Twitter data, in the context of the Evalita 2016 PoSTWITA shared task. We show that training the tagger on native Twitter data enriched with little amounts of specifically selected gold data and additional silver-labelled data scraped from Facebook, yields better results than using large amounts of manually annotated data from a mix of genres.Comment: Proceedings of the 5th Evaluation Campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian (EVALITA 2016

Vascular flora of calcareous outcrops in North-Western Sardinia (Italy)

Calcareous outcrops in North-Western Sardinia cover a large area (about 380 Km2) known as "Sassarese". In this study the vascular flora of this area is investigated. The actual flora is checked and, when possible, older references, synonyms and critical notes are given. The floristic list includes 840 entities. Among them, 18 have been cultivated (cultae), 11 are considered erroneously reported and so they are excluded from this area (excludendae) and 81 are in various ways considered not confirmed and to enquiry (inquirendae). The current floristic contingent is therefore reduced to 730 entities, divided into 98 families and 385 genera, many of them here documented for the first time in this area. Among them the more relevant are the Sardinian-Corsican endemic Silene nodulosa Viv. and the Sardinian endemic Hieracium gallurense Arrigoni, previously reported only for granite substrata in North-Eastern Sardinia. The biological spectrum shows a clear dominance of therophytes (41%). The chorological spectrum highlights the dominance of the Tethydic element, in which the dominance of more strictly Mediterranean element emerges. Four entities have in this area their locus classicus: Centaurea corensis Valsecchi et Filigheddu, Limonium racemosum (Lojac.) Diana and Scrophularia morisii Valsecchi, exclusive of the region object of this study, and Ophrys sphegodes Mill. subsp. praecox Corrias. Some entities, though not endemic, have a limited or fragmentary distribution in Sardinia, e.g. Capparis spinosa L. subsp. rupestris (Sm.) Nyman, Coridothymus capitatus (L.) Reichenb. f. and Erica multiflora L., whereas Viola arborescens L.. Borago pygmaea (DC.) Chater et Greuter and Carex panormitana Guss. are included in the Red Book of Italian Plants. Although the area is strongly urbanised and subjected since long time ago to agricultural and pastoral uses, its flora is still rather diversified. The presence of species depending on the existence of hedges, dry-stone walls and other smaller structures belonging to traditional agricultural activities still present, is also substantial, even though their dilapidated state is often high. Finally the presence of floristic elemento of great interest together with small residuals of spontaneous vegetation are of very high value. Indeed, several natural elements from traditionally agricultural activities are present within an area of intense anthropic impact. The indiscriminate building development of the valleys, the reckless exploitation of the water sources and the diffusion of dumps, threaten increasingly some habitats of the region. The improvement of the natural resources could be done through an adeguate ecological net starting from a basic knowledge of the floristic biodiversity, that is the main aim of this work

Lectotypification of <i>Artemisia variabilis</i> Ten. (Compositae)

The name Artemisia variabilis Ten. is here lectotypified. Observations and synonyms are given

The Impact of Annotation on the Performance of Protein Tagging in Biomedical Text

In this paper we discuss five different corpora annotated for protein names. We present several within- and cross-dataset protein tagging experiments showing that different annotation schemes severely affect the portability of statistical protein taggers. By means of a detailed error analysis we identify crucial annotation issues that future annotation projects should take into careful consideration

To Normalize, or Not to Normalize: The Impact of Normalization on Part-of-Speech Tagging

Does normalization help Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging accuracy on noisy, non-canonical data? To the best of our knowledge, little is known on the actual impact of normalization in a real-world scenario, where gold error detection is not available. We investigate the effect of automatic normalization on POS tagging of tweets. We also compare normalization to strategies that leverage large amounts of unlabeled data kept in its raw form. Our results show that normalization helps, but does not add consistently beyond just word embedding layer initialization. The latter approach yields a tagging model that is competitive with a Twitter state-of-the-art tagger.Comment: In WNUT 201

Towards Neutral Principles in the Administration of Criminal Justice: A Critique of Supreme Court Decisions Sanctioning the Plea Bargaining Process

This article compares the Court\u27s reasoning in plea bargaining cases with its reasoning in non-plea-bargaining cases that involve the same legal principles. It analyzes the Court\u27s arguments for sustaining guilty pleas induced by fear of the death penalty or by promises of leniency, and for sanctioning the imposition of harsher penalties on those who reject prosecutional offers to plead and insist on a trial. Finally, it briefly addresses the contention that the system for the administration of criminal justice in the United States could not function if use of a sentencing differential to induce guilty pleas were prohibited