Why Do They (Still) Sing Stories? Singing Narratives in Tanjung Bunga (Eastern Flores, Lamaholot, Indonesia)

In eastern Flores, on the Tanjung Bunga peninsula (among Western Lamaholot speakers), several times a year, ritual narratives (opak) are performed on a square dancing area, where all the clans of the same ceremonial land meet. Three types of narrative are sung, according to three kinds of rituals. The article explains the context, content and performance details of these stories, performed all night long. Why do the various clans continue to sing all these narrative? What values do these long poems have for people who sing them? Until now, studies on this subject have been remarkably few, and not even a partial transcription or translation of these narratives is available. This article offers a preliminary insight into these sung narratives, to show how vital they still are in eastern Flores

Mobile Money: Implications for Emerging Markets

Developing countries lack effective infrastructure: transportation, telecommunications, financial systems, etc. The positive economic impact of the improved telecommunications infrastructure has been demonstrated. The ability of microfinance has been shown to stimulate and enhance economic activity. Now a hybrid of the technologies has begun to emerge: mobile money. The ubiquity of cell phone service, coupled with the notion of microfinance offers the possibility of service in remote areas of a country where it would be otherwise economically unsustainable to provide banking services. Mobile money has all of the attributes of money including store of value and medium of exchange. This paper addresses the economics and policy issues of mobile money: What are the economics of mobile money? What policy issues does it raise? Is it a threat to the traditional banking system? How should it be regulated? What can we learn from the microfinance literature? Do we have empirical evidence of its impact on growth and development?Competition, economic dynamics, neoclassical economics, pricing policy, regulation.

Regulatory Failure: Time for a New Policy Paradigm

Regulation is presumed to be designed to avoid (potential) market failures,usually because of firms' market power, the consequence of which leads to a decrease in economic welfare. However, the cost of regulation may outweigh any effects policy makers have on the firm due to administrative costs, regulatory capture and other effects that have been addressed by others. More importantly, policy makers have been using the wrong models to guide their decisions, with a major impact on the investment incentives of firms, a misallocation of resources and a lowering of social welfare. As policy makers misread economic theory, they produce results worse than those they are attempting to correct. Thus, these distorting effects are equally as bad, or worse than, the market failure regulators hoped to ameliorate. However, this need not be the case. By concentration on dynamic models, rather than the simple static models on which policy makers have focused, it is possible to improve economics welfare and obtain results that at least are better than the costs associated with current regulatory practices. Ofcom appears to be moving in this direction. Will other policy makers learn from Ofcom? This paper shows some of the failures of the current model and sets forth some of the necessary steps to make improvements. However, it is unclear whether the institutional structures will allow for such a departure from the current paradigm.competition; economic dynamics; neoclassical economics; pricing policy; regulation

A Transition-Based Directed Acyclic Graph Parser for UCCA

We present the first parser for UCCA, a cross-linguistically applicable framework for semantic representation, which builds on extensive typological work and supports rapid annotation. UCCA poses a challenge for existing parsing techniques, as it exhibits reentrancy (resulting in DAG structures), discontinuous structures and non-terminal nodes corresponding to complex semantic units. To our knowledge, the conjunction of these formal properties is not supported by any existing parser. Our transition-based parser, which uses a novel transition set and features based on bidirectional LSTMs, has value not just for UCCA parsing: its ability to handle more general graph structures can inform the development of parsers for other semantic DAG structures, and in languages that frequently use discontinuous structures.Comment: 16 pages; Accepted as long paper at ACL201

BLEU is Not Suitable for the Evaluation of Text Simplification

BLEU is widely considered to be an informative metric for text-to-text generation, including Text Simplification (TS). TS includes both lexical and structural aspects. In this paper we show that BLEU is not suitable for the evaluation of sentence splitting, the major structural simplification operation. We manually compiled a sentence splitting gold standard corpus containing multiple structural paraphrases, and performed a correlation analysis with human judgments. We find low or no correlation between BLEU and the grammaticality and meaning preservation parameters where sentence splitting is involved. Moreover, BLEU often negatively correlates with simplicity, essentially penalizing simpler sentences.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2018 (Short papers