Have CAFE Standards Reduced the Effect of Gasoline Prices on Domestic Automobile Manufacturers’ Market Share of the US Market?

One of macroeconomists’ major concerns is GDP volatility, and understanding what causes this volatility is essential when attempting to reduce it. For decades, the automotive industry has been a major component of US GDP. Therefore, understanding the driving forces behind this industry indirectly contributes to the study of GDP volatility. This paper focuses on CAFE standards and how they change the effect of oil prices on US automobile sales. What motivates this paper is the fact that during the mid-to-late 80s, fluctuations in the market share of domestic automobile manufacturers diminished substantially. Figure 1 presents the sales of domestic automakers’ automobiles as a fraction of the domestic market (market share) from January 1974 to June 2004. One can easily notice that around month 170, which corresponds to February 1988, there is a dramatic decrease in volatility. What could be the cause in the decrease of this volatility? [excerpt

Institutional Evolution, static and dynamic approaches in assessing performance related to development goals

1. The Resocot Projet is a research project which brought together teams of researchers from the North and Africa, not all of which were familiar with the theoretical approach used at the outset. This project aims at developing a methodology and materials to help assess the performance of the cotton commodity sectors of different countries and to assist the players concerned to steer these sectors towards improving their performance. At a time when several African sectors have already gone over to a inter-professional type of management, the output from the project could prove useful for facilitating exchanges between stakeholders, so as to enable them to develop a common vision of the problems before deciding on the actions required to resolve them.Cotton; Africa; commodity chain; methodology; theory; New Economics of institution; Benin; Mali, Burkina Faso; Ghana; Mali; Cameroon

Diffusion coefficient and shear viscosity of rigid water models

We report the diffusion coefficient and viscosity of popular rigid water models: Two non polarizable ones (SPC/E with 3 sites, and TIP4P/2005 with 4 sites) and a polarizable one (Dang-Chang, 4 sites). We exploit the dependence of the diffusion coefficient on the system size [Yeh and Hummer, J. Phys. Chem. B 108, 15873 (2004)] to obtain the size-independent value. This also provides an estimate of the viscosity of all water models, which we compare to the Green-Kubo result. In all cases, a good agreement is found. The TIP4P/2005 model is in better agreement with the experimental data for both diffusion and viscosity. The SPC/E and Dang-Chang water overestimate the diffusion coefficient and underestimate the viscosity.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. To be published in J. Phys.: Condens. Matte

Guided Machine Learning for power grid segmentation

The segmentation of large scale power grids into zones is crucial for control room operators when managing the grid complexity near real time. In this paper we propose a new method in two steps which is able to automatically do this segmentation, while taking into account the real time context, in order to help them handle shifting dynamics. Our method relies on a "guided" machine learning approach. As a first step, we define and compute a task specific "Influence Graph" in a guided manner. We indeed simulate on a grid state chosen interventions, representative of our task of interest (managing active power flows in our case). For visualization and interpretation, we then build a higher representation of the grid relevant to this task by applying the graph community detection algorithm \textit{Infomap} on this Influence Graph. To illustrate our method and demonstrate its practical interest, we apply it on commonly used systems, the IEEE-14 and IEEE-118. We show promising and original interpretable results, especially on the previously well studied RTS-96 system for grid segmentation. We eventually share initial investigation and results on a large-scale system, the French power grid, whose segmentation had a surprising resemblance with RTE's historical partitioning

The Arab Spring and Women’s (Cyber)activism: “Fourth Wave Democracy in the Making?” Case Study of Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco

According to Huntington’s (1991) theory of “reverse democracy”, countries undergoing (or having undergone) a transition to democracy during a wave are always subject to democratic backsliding in the subsequent wave. During the third wave democratization, the fall of the Soviet Union and other despotic regimes in Latin America led to the gradual “autocratization” of many of these countries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. More recently, in 2011, the collapse of several authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region underscored important aspects of democratization, a process in which both women and new media technologies played a key role. However, the direct aftermath of the Arab Spring also revealed a significant democratic backsliding with the outbreak of civil and tribal wars in the region, the rise of political Islam to power, and the resulting backlash against women’s socio-political and legal rights. Drawing on Huntington’s theory of “reverse democracy”, I question whether, and to what extent, the Arab Spring could constitute a case of “fourth wave democracy”—especially considering that this most recent wave has been little, if not at all, explored and analysed. To do so, I adopt a feminist perspective that foregrounds the role of gender as the primary focus of my analysis to examine how the Arab Spring exemplified aspects of a “reverse democracy”, namely in terms of its impact on women’s rights and their resulting social status in the aftermath of the uprisings. I take three countries as case studies: Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco

Naima Zitane’s Revolutionary Play, Dialy: Using the Vagina Trope to “Talk Back” to the Islamist Party’s Calls for ‘Halal’ Art in Morocco

In 2012, at the outset of the “Moroccan Spring” and the election of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) to power, Naima Zitane, a Moroccan feminist playwright and founder of the Aquarium Theatre, directed and released her controversial play Dialy (“Mine” in English) inspired by Ensler’s text The Vagina Monologues and drawing on the real-life testimonies of 150 Moroccan women. In a context where the recently elected Islamist party was calling for ‘clean’ and ‘halal’ art, the play tackled the topic of female sexuality and one of the biggest taboos of the Moroccan society- the vagina. Combining a textual analysis of the play’s script with an interview I conducted with Naima Zitane, my analysis revealed that Dialy aims to “talk back” not only to a hegemonic political discourse that restrains Moroccan artists’ creativity and freedom of expression, but also to the dominant social norms that alienate female sexuality by depicting the vagina as the ultimate social taboo. While it was initially banned from being performed in Morocco, Dialy managed to create a nationwide controversy around issues of (female) sexuality and artistic freedom; it remains, undoubtedly until today, one of the most famous plays in the history of Moroccan theatre

SNOWFLAKEBXTCH: A Case Study of Women’s RAPtivism in Morocco: Rapping Against Social Injustice and Traditional Gender Roles

In this study, I am interested in investigating the concept of RAPtivism in Morocco from a feminist perspective by examining the potential of women’s rap in constituting a countercultural sphere that is capable of creating wider social and political awareness. To do so, I focus on the case study of Snowflakebxtch, a twenty-four years old Moroccan woman rapper who is known for her outspoken and transgressive freestyles. I draw on a mix research methodology where I combine a content analysis of two interviews conducted with Aisha Fukushima, the founder of RAPtivism, and the selected Moroccan rapper along with a textual analysis of two of Snowflakebxtch’s most salient tracks. I argue that Snowflake’s freestyles are an effective manifestation of RAPtivism and feminist rap in Morocco whereby the young rapper deconstructs widespread gender binaries and traditional gender roles in her society, as she denounces, in parallel, several societal and political woes in the country. These aspects contribute to situate Snowflake’s work in what other scholars have theorized as the continuing (gender and cultural) revolution in the North African region whereby women artist-activists continue to struggle, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, for social justice and gender equality through creative means