Pragmatism or What? The Future of US Foreign Policy

This article discusses the intellectual sources of the presidential candidates' foreign policies. In the case of Barack Obama, the article examines the formation of his worldview, his intellectual inspirations, his most significant foreign policy appointments and the diplomatic course he has pursued as president. Mitt Romney's foreign policy views are harder to identify with certainty, but his business and political career-as well as the identity and dispositions of his advisory team-all provide important clues as to the policies he will pursue if elected in November 2012. The article finds much common ground between the two candidates; both are results-driven pragmatists, attuned to nuance and complexity, who nonetheless believe-in agreement with Robert Kagan-that US geostrategic primacy will continue through the span of the twenty-first century. The gulf between the candidates on domestic policy is vast, but on foreign policy-Romney's bellicose statements through the Republican primaries served a purpose that has passed-there is little between the

Market distortions and corporate governance.

This paper studies corporate governance when a firm operates in imperfect markets. We derive firms' decisions from utility maximisation by individuals. This reduces the usual monopoly distortion. Corporate governance can effect the equilibrium in the product (or input) markets. This enables us to endogenise the objective function of the firm. If the firm cannot commit not to change its constitution, we find a Coase-like result where all market power is lost in the limit. We present a more abstract model of governance in the presence of market distortions and discuss its implications for the governance of universities.corporate governance, stakeholder, strategic delegation, economics of universities.

Externalities, Monopoly and the Objective Function of the Firm

This paper provides a theory of general equilibrium with externalities and/or monopoly. We assume that the firm's decisions are based on the preferences of shareholders and/or other stakeholders. Under these assumptions, a firm will produce fewer negative externalities than the comparable profit maximizing firm. In the absence of externalities, equilibrium with a monopoly will be Pareto efficient if the firm can price discriminate. The equilibrium can be implemented by a 2-part tariff.Externality, general equilibrium, 2-part tariff, objective function of the firm.

Takeovers and Cooperatives

If consumers wholly or partially control a firm with market power they will charge less than the profit maximising price. Starting at the usual monopoly price, a small price reduction will have a second order e¤ect on profits but a first order effect on consumer surplus. Despite this desirable static result, it has been argued that cooperatives are vulnerable to take-over by outsiders who will run them as for-profit businesses. This paper studies takeovers of cooperatives. We argue that cooperatives are in fact quite stable due to the Grossman-Hart problem of free riding during takeovers.corporate governance, co-operative, take-over, free-rider

An effective, low-cost measure of semantic relatedness obtained from Wikipedia links

This paper describes a new technique for obtaining measures of semantic relatedness. Like other recent approaches, it uses Wikipedia to provide structured world knowledge about the terms of interest. Out approach is unique in that it does so using the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia rather than its category hierarchy or textual content. Evaluation with manually defined measures of semantic relatedness reveals this to be an effective compromise between the ease of computation of the former approach and the accuracy of the latter

A competitive environment for exploratory query expansion

Most information workers query digital libraries many times a day. Yet people have little opportunity to hone their skills in a controlled environment, or compare their performance with others in an objective way. Conversely, although search engine logs record how users evolve queries, they lack crucial information about the user's intent. This paper describes an environment for exploratory query expansion that pits users against each other and lets them compete, and practice, in their own time and on their own workstation. The system captures query evolution behavior on predetermined information-seeking tasks. It is publicly available, and the code is open source so that others can set up their own competitive environments

Extracting corpus specific knowledge bases from Wikipedia

Thesauri are useful knowledge structures for assisting information retrieval. Yet their production is labor-intensive, and few domains have comprehensive thesauri that cover domain-specific concepts and contemporary usage. One approach, which has been attempted without much success for decades, is to seek statistical natural language processing algorithms that work on free text. Instead, we propose to replace costly professional indexers with thousands of dedicated amateur volunteers--namely, those that are producing Wikipedia. This vast, open encyclopedia represents a rich tapestry of topics and semantics and a huge investment of human effort and judgment. We show how this can be directly exploited to provide WikiSauri: manually-defined yet inexpensive thesaurus structures that are specifically tailored to expose the topics, terminology and semantics of individual document collections. We also offer concrete evidence of the effectiveness of WikiSauri for assisting information retrieval

Comparison of hydroxyl radical formation in aqueous solutions at different ultrasound frequencies and powers using the salicylic acid dosimeter

Ultrasonic frequencies of 20 kHz, 382 kHz, 584 kHz, 862 kHz (and 998 kHz) have been compared with regard to energy output and hydroxyl radical formation utilising the salicylic acid dosimeter. The 862 kHz frequency inputs 6 times the number of Watts into water, as measured by calorimetry, with the other frequencies having roughly the same value under very similar conditions. A plausible explanation involving acoustic fountain formation is proposed although enhanced coupling between this frequency and water cannot be discounted. Using the salicylic acid dosimeter and inputting virtually the same Wattages it is established that 862 kHz is around 10% more efficient at generating hydroxyl radicals than the 382 kHz but both of these are far more effective than the other frequencies. Also, it is found that as temperature increases to 42 °C then the total dihydroxybenzoic acid (Total DHBA) produced is virtually identical for 382 kHz and 862 kHz, though 582 kHz is substantially lower, when the power levels are set at approximately 9 W for all systems. An equivalent power level of 9 W could not be obtained for the 998 kHz transducer so a direct comparison could not be made in this instance. These results have implications for the optimum frequencies chosen for both Advanced Oxidation Processes (AOPs) and organic synthesis augmented by ultrasound

Mining Domain-Specific Thesauri from Wikipedia: A case study

Domain-specific thesauri are high-cost, high-maintenance, high-value knowledge structures. We show how the classic thesaurus structure of terms and links can be mined automatically from Wikipedia. In a comparison with a professional thesaurus for agriculture we find that Wikipedia contains a substantial proportion of its concepts and semantic relations; furthermore it has impressive coverage of contemporary documents in the domain. Thesauri derived using our techniques capitalize on existing public efforts and tend to reflect contemporary language usage better than their costly, painstakingly-constructed manual counterparts