Welfare state and representation: do women make the welfare state or does the welfare state make women representatives?

The relationship between welfare states and women’s representation in parliaments has been of great interest to scholars. However, different strands of the literature on gender and political representation suggest opposing directions of causality. On the one hand it is argued that a rise in welfare spending increases women’s representation in parliaments, but on the other hand, more women in parliaments is said to expand welfare spending. This paper analyses the problem empirically and finds that the lagged values of women’s parliamentary representation are better predictors of welfare spending than the lagged values of spending are of women’s percent in parliaments. In other words, women make the welfare state and welfare spending does not make female representatives

Weak braided monoidal categories and their homotopy colimits

We show that the homotopy colimit construction for diagrams of categories with an operad action, recently introduced by Fiedorowicz, Stelzer and Vogt, has the desired homotopy type for diagrams of weak braided monoidal categories. This provides a more flexible way to realize E-2 spaces categorically.Comment: 7 page

Law, legitimacy and equality the bureaucratization of religion and conditions of belief in Indonesia

Secularity in the sense of a social imaginary, an appreciation for the differentiation between religious and political authority, and the acknowledgement of religious plurality surely exist. While, like Senegal and Turkey, Indonesia is a Muslim state that is in the process of translating democracy into its own institutional legacies and of crafting its own brand of democratic religion-state relations, it is probably unique as a case where, although religious and political authority is separated, citizenship is tied to religion. This implies that one’s declared religious affiliation determines the type of religious education and personal law one will be subject to. And there is more: religions are in some ways highly regulated by the state. As the author will argue in the following, in an effort to subsume all social and civic life in the two post-independence authoritarian regimes (1945-1965 and 1965-1998) to the twin goals of political order and economic growth, state bureaucrats sought to ‘modernize’ religion and thereby highly bureaucratized it. Religion in post-independence Indonesia was not only made ‘manageable’ but also put into the service of government policy.La laicidad, como imaginario social, como atención hacia la diferenciación entre autoridad religiosa y política y reconocimiento de la pluralidad religiosa, en la Indonesia de la post-independencia sin lugar a dudas existe. Si, por una parte – tal como Senegal y Turquía – Indonesia es un Estado islámico a punto de introducir la democracia en su sistema institucional tradicional y de elaborar un modelo propio de las relaciones religión-estado en sentido democrático, por otra parte es el único Estado en el que la ciudadanía está relacionada con la religión, aunque religión y autoridad política estén separadas. Esto implica que la pertenencia religiosa determina el tipo de educación religiosa y el “derecho de la persona” al cual uno está sometido. Además, las religiones están, pues, fuertemente reglamentadas por el Estado. Tal como subraya la autora en este artículo, con la intención de englobar toda la vida social y civil en los dos regímenes autoritarios de la post-independencia (1945-1965 e 1965-1998) para llegar al objetivo del orden político y del crecimiento económico, los burócratas estatales han intentado “modernizar” la religión, burocratizándola profundamente. En la Indonesia de la post-independencia, la religión no solo ha sido convertida en “manejable”, “accesible”, sino también ha sido entregada al servicio de las políticas del Gobierno

Causes of mortality and characterisation of Mycobacteriosis in adult New Zealand sea lions (Phocarctos Hookeri) at Enderby Island : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Veterinary Science in Wildlife Health at Massey University, Manawatū, Palmerston North, New Zealand

The New Zealand sea lion (Phocarctos hookeri) is classified as endangered and “Nationally Critical” due to a declining population and restricted population range. There have been recent bacterial epizootic events at the breeding colonies of this species, however the role of disease in the population decline is not known. As part of the investigation into the population decline, the species management plan recommends investigation of disease agents affecting this species, their epidemiology and their long-term effects on population dynamics. Since the 1998/1999 breeding season, post mortem examinations have been performed on deceased New Zealand sea lions at the Enderby Island breeding colonies during each breeding season, including the collection of samples for histology and bacteriology. This study describes the causes of mortality in New Zealand sea lions one year of age and older at Enderby Island between the 1998/99 to 2010/11 breeding seasons inclusive, using the archived post mortem reports, histology samples and bacteriology samples. Conspecific trauma was found to be a significant cause of mortality (34.3%), as were various infectious causes (35.7%). The organism Klebsiella pneumoniae was isolated from non-pup New Zealand sea lions both from individuals that died from other causes and individuals that showed apparent morbidity as a result of this bacteria. These findings suggest that older animals may be reservoirs of infection for K. pneumoniae, which causes significant mortality in neonatal New Zealand sea lions. Another important infectious agent that was described in non-pup New Zealand sea lions was Mycobacterium pinnipedii, which caused both subclinical and clinical disease. Mycobacteriosis of the lymph nodes, lungs, pleura, liver, peritoneum and reproductive tract was described in this study. Strain determination of the M. pinnipedii isolates grown show only minor strain variation among isolates, which may reflect the isolated geographic distribution of these animals. There was no apparent association between the individual strains of M. pinnipedii and their pathogenicity as indicated by the pathology present in infected animals

Ebermast – eine Herausforderung für den Ökolandbau

Das Thema Kastration von männlichen Ferkeln wird immer wieder kontrovers zwischen Landwirten, Tierschützern und Politikern diskutiert. Die Kastration mit Betäubung und/oder Schmerzmitteln ist nur teilweise eine Verbesserung. Eine für den Ökolandbau interessante und tierfreundlichere Alternative stellt dagegen die Ebermast dar

TASI Lectures: Particle Physics from Perturbative and Non-perturbative Effects in D-braneworlds

In these notes we review aspects of semi-realistic particle physics from the point of view of type II orientifold compactifications. We discuss the appearance of gauge theories on spacetime filling D-branes which wrap non-trivial cycles in the Calabi-Yau. Chiral matter can appear at their intersections, with a natural interpretation of family replication given by the topological intersection number. We discuss global consistency, including tadpole cancellation and the generalized Green-Schwarz mechanism, and also the importance of related global $U(1)$ symmetries for superpotential couplings. We review the basics of D-instantons, which can generate superpotential corrections to charged matter couplings forbidden by the global $U(1)$ symmetries and may play an important role in moduli stabilization. Finally, for the purpose of studying the landscape, we discuss certain advantages of studying quiver gauge theories which arise from type II orientifold compactifications rather than globally defined models. We utilize the type IIa geometric picture and CFT techniques to illustrate the main physical points, though sometimes we supplement the discussion from the type IIb perspective using complex algebraic geometry.Comment: 35 pages. Based on lectures given by M.C. at TASI 2010. v2: added references, fixed typo

Cross-Lingual Speaker Discrimination Using Natural and Synthetic Speech

This paper describes speaker discrimination experiments in which native English listeners were presented with either natural speech stimuli in English and Mandarin, synthetic speech stimuli in English and Mandarin, or natural Mandarin speech and synthetic English speech stimuli. In each experiment, listeners were asked to decide whether they thought the sentences were spoken by the same person or not. We found that the results for Mandarin/English speaker discrimination are very similar to results found in previous work on German/English and Finnish/English speaker discrimination. We conclude from this and previous work that listeners are able to identify speakers across languages and they are able to identify speakers across speech types, but the combination of these two factors leads to a speaker discrimination task which is too difficult for listeners to perform successfully, given the quality of across-language speaker adapted speech synthesis at present. Index Terms: speaker discrimination, speaker adaptation, HMM-based speech synthesi