THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE U.S.-MEXICO FREE TRADE AGREEMENT: ANALYSIS OF THE CONGRESSIONAL FAST TRACK VOTE

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the strategic forces shaping U.S.-Mexico trade relationships and the possibilities of extending the trade agreement to the rest of the Americas. The paper concludes that constituency interests, party loyalty, the proportion of a state's population of Hispanic origin, and the influence of textile-related employment in the state were significant explanatory factors in the Congressional Fast Track vote that occurred in May of 1991.Free trade agreement, Fast track, Textiles, Congressional voting, International Relations/Trade, Political Economy,

Did We Learn Anything From That Exercise? Could We?

Exercises are a source of information on tactics, force capabilities, scenario outcomes, and hardware systems effectiveness. But they distort battle operations in ways which prevent the immediate application of their results to real world situations

English for the computer

What about English as a programming language? Few would question that this is a desirable goal. On the other hand, I dare say every one of us has rather deep reservations both about its feasibility and about a number of problems that it entails. This paper presents a point of view which gives some clarity to the relationship between English and programming languages. This point of view has found substance in an experimental system called DEACON. The second paper in this session will describe the specific DEACON system and its capabilities

Solutions to issues depend on the knowledge representation

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Shifting to a Higher Gear in a Natural Language System

We have completed the development of the REL System, a system for communicating with the computer in natural language concerning a relational database. We have been using that system in a series of experiments on how people actually do communicate in solving an intellectual task. These experiments, together with our general experience with REL, and related work elsewhere, have led us to the specification and development of a new system, the POL (Problem Oriented Language) System. POL is an evolutionary extension of REL, preserving what has worked, and extending and adding new capabilities to meet observed needs. These improvements include more responsive diagnostics, handling of sentence fragments, inter knowledge base communications, and new facilities for building and extending the knowledge bases of users. This paper introduces POL

How to get a Large Natural-language System into a Personal Computer

The answer to the question of how to get a large natural-language system into a personal computer lies in the paging architecture of the system. The key is to use the input sentence, in conjunction with the lexicon and grammar table, to identify the minimal segments of both object code and data that must be brought into main memory. Once such a maximally paged architecture has been effectively implemented, it has wide ranging implications for process integration, networking and knowledge base distribution, and for the software engineering environment. The Natural Access System optimizes this architecture and exploits these implications

Systemic design of an Idea Zone at a science center.

In this working paper we bring key systems and cybernetics ideas to the design of an Idea Zone in a large regional science center. Most notably, we bring the ecology and systems approaches of Gregory Bateson and the cybernetic systems designapproachesofRanulphGlanville,tothisevolvingdesign project and explore how our learning from this particular case may also inform more general systemic design principles. This includes issues of context at many levels, movement across boundaries, as well as the importance of the design of a communicationprocessforthedesignofanIdeaZon

REL: a Rapidly Extensible Language System II. REL English

REL, a Rapidly Extensible Language System, is an integrated information system operating in conversational interaction with the computer. It is intended for work with large or small data bases by means of highly individualized languages. The architecture of REL is based on theoretical assumptions about human information dynamics [I], among them the expanding process of conceptualization in working with data, and the idiosyncratic language use of the individual workers. The result of these assumptions is a system which allows the construction of highly individualized languages which are closely knit with the structure of the data and which can be rapidly extended and augmented with new concepts and structures through a facile definitional capability. The REL language processor is designed to accommodate a variety of languages whose structural characteristics may be considerably divergent. The REL English is one of the languages within the REL system. It is intended to facilitate sophisticated work with computers without the need for mastering programming languages. The structural power of REL English matches the extremely flexible organization of data in ring forms. Extensions of the basic REL English language can be achieved either through defining new concepts and structures in terms of the existing ones or through addition of new rules