The Curse of Diamonds

Sierra Leone and Liberia have exported rough diamonds since the discovery of diamonds in the Mano River basin in the 1930s.i It was not until the late 20th century when these minerals were nicknamed conflict diamonds, loot-able resources sold to fund rebel movements and terrorist organizations. Conflict diamonds have been linked to civil war, corruption, and human rights violations. Both countries suffered through bloody civil wars, slow development, and a low standard of living. Sierra Leone\u27s civil war resulted in thousands of deaths and the displacement of one-third of the country. Liberia\u27s civil war resulted in over 200,000 deaths and displacement of more than a million Liberians. Could diamonds be the link to these two countries\u27 misfortune? Could a diamond curse exist as scholars have speculated The Oil Curse

The Curse of Diamonds

Sierra Leone and Liberia have exported rough diamonds since the discovery of diamonds in the Mano River basin in the 1930s.i It was not until the late 20th century when these minerals were nicknamed conflict diamonds, loot-able resources sold to fund rebel movements and terrorist organizations. Conflict diamonds have been linked to civil war, corruption, and human rights violations. Both countries suffered through bloody civil wars, slow development, and a low standard of living. Sierra Leone\u27s civil war resulted in thousands of deaths and the displacement of one-third of the country. Liberia\u27s civil war resulted in over 200,000 deaths and displacement of more than a million Liberians. Could diamonds be the link to these two countries\u27 misfortune? Could a diamond curse exist as scholars have speculated The Oil Curse

The \u27Truthiness\u27 of the \u27Daily Show Effect\u27: A Presidency Study

News-gathering for the American public changed in the past decade with a decline in trust for journalists and news media (Jones 2009), technology advancement (Haynes and Pitts 2009), and entertainment becoming a priority (Jones 2009; Haynes and Pitts 2009; Baumgartner and Morris 2006; Colletta 2009). Television, radio, and newspapers (the traditional media) are still used today with broadcast and cable television being the dominate news source (Colletta 2009; Haynes and Pitts 2009), however, an increased amount of Americans utilize the internet for their news information through what is known as new media, referring to Web blogs and social networks. Haynes and Pitts (2009) found that 55% of the public went online during the 2008 Presidential Elections to get their political news and information on candidates. Those who like political information will have greater ease in finding it [online], while those who prefer entertainment and the like will as well (Haynes and Pitts 2009, 53). People, however, are finding that entertainment aspect in news-gathering within traditional media. Soft news, in particularly political satire television, is becoming increasingly popular as news-gathering sources. Colletta defined satire as a form that holds up human vices and follies to ridicule, a criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, and a critique of what an author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards. Comedy and satire differ in that comedy evokes laughter, while satire uses laughter as a weapon (859). Parody, seen in sketch comedy in Saturday Night Live, is therefore satiric

Cosmological and communal wellbeing in the JSRP’s research on justice provision

In this blog, Tom Kirk and Holly Porter explore the JSRP’s work on how local understandings of justice are often embedded in notions of cosmological and communal wellbeing. Furthermore, they argue that practitioners that do not ground their interventions in these understandings risk creating a gap between their own normative assertions about what justice ought to achieve, and how justice is understood and practised by ordinary people

Uniform Boundedness of S-Units in Arithmetic Dynamics

Let K be a number field and let S be a finite set of places of K which contains all the Archimedean places. For any f(z) in K(z) of degree d at least 2 which is not a d-th power in \bar{K}(z), Siegel's theorem implies that the image set f(K) contains only finitely many S-units. We conjecture that the number of such S-units is bounded by a function of |S| and d (independently of K and f). We prove this conjecture for several classes of rational functions, and show that the full conjecture follows from the Bombieri--Lang conjecture

Overlap Bias in the Case-Crossover Design, With Application to Air Pollution Exposures

The case-crossover design uses cases only, and compares exposures just prior to the event times to exposures at comparable control, or “referent” times, in order to assess the effect of short-term exposure on the risk of a rare event. It has commonly been used to study the effect of air pollution on the risk of various adverse health events. Proper selection of referents is crucial, especially with air pollution exposures, which are shared, highly seasonal, and often have a long term time trend. Hence, careful referent selection is important to control for time-varying confounders, and in order to ensure that the distribution of exposure is constant across referent times, a key assumption of this method. Yet the referent strategy is important for a more basic reason: the conditional logistic regression estimating equations commonly used are biased when referents are not chosen a priori and are functions of the observed event times. We call this bias in the estimating equations overlap bias. In this paper, we propose a new taxonomy of referent selection strategies in order to emphasize their statistical properties. We give a derivation of overlap bias, explore its magnitude, and consider how the bias depends on properties of the exposure series. We conclude that the bias is usually small, though highly unpredictable, and easily avoided

Referent Selection Strategies in Case-Crossover Analyses of Air Pollution Exposure Data: Implications for Bias

The case-crossover design has been widely used to study the association between short term air pollution exposure and the risk of an acute adverse health event. The design uses cases only, and, for each individual, compares exposure just prior to the event with exposure at other control, or “referent” times. By making within-subject comparisons, time invariant confounders are controlled by design. Even more important in the air pollution setting is that, by matching referents to the index time, time varying confounders can also be controlled by design. Yet, the referent selection strategy is important for reasons other than control of confounding. The case-crossover design makes the implicit assumption that there is no trend in exposure across the referent times. In addition, the statistical method that is employed, conditional logistic regression, is only unbiased with certain referent strategies. This paper reviews the case-crossover literature in the air pollution context, focusing on key referent selection issues. It concludes with a set of recommendations for choosing a referent strategy with air pollution exposure data. We advocate the time stratified approach to referent selection because it ensures unbiased conditional logistic regression estimates, avoids bias due to time trend in the exposure series, and can be tailored to match on specific time-varying confounders