The Sabbatino Case: The Supreme Court of the United States Rejects a Proposed New Theory of Sovereign Relations and Restores the Act of State Doctrine

A survey of the background and principles involved in the Sabbatino case as that case came for review before the Supreme Court of the United State

The Control of Foreign Funds by the United States Treasury

The general aim of this thesis was to test the effects of paralinguistic (emotional) and prior contextual (topical) cues on perception of poorly specified visual, auditory, and audiovisual speech. The specific purposes were to (1) examine if facially displayed emotions can facilitate speechreading performance; (2) to study the mechanism for such facilitation; (3) to map information-processing factors that are involved in processing of poorly specified speech; and (4) to present a comprehensive conceptual framework for speech perception, with specification of the signal being considered. Experi¬mental and correlational designs were used, and 399 normal-hearing adults participated in seven experiments. The main conclusions are summarised as follows. (a) Speechreading can be facilitated by paralinguistic information as constituted by facial displayed emotions. (b) The facilitatory effect of emitted emotional cues is mediated by their degree of specification in transmission and ambiguity as percepts; and by how distinct the perceived emotions combined with topical cues are as cues for lexical access. (c) The facially displayed emotions affect speech perception by conveying semantic cues; no effect via enhanced articulatory distinctiveness, nor of emotion-related state in the perceiver is needed for facilitation. (d) The combined findings suggest that emotional and topical cues provide constraints for activation spreading in the lexicon. (e) Both bottom-up and top-down factors are associated with perception of poorly specified speech, indicating that variation in information-processing abilities is a crucial factor for perception if there is paucity in sensory input. A conceptual framework for speech perception, comprising specification of the linguistic and paralinguistic information, as well as distinctiveness of primes, is presented. Generalisations of the findings to other forms of paralanguage and language processing are discussed

ALBANIAN LAW ON CITY PLANNING: CRITICAL SUMMARY OF ITS MAJOR PROVISIONS

This paper includes, as an annex, Law No. 7693, "On Urban Planning," from the People's Assembly of the Republic of Albania. Conceptually, this law has five major parts: (1) planning generally, (2) getting construction permission, (3) special provisions for tourist zones, (4) special provisions for military zones and zones with singular (that is, archaeological, historical, or cultural) value, and (5) penalties for violations. These parts are described and discussed.Cities and towns--Planning--Law and legislation--Albania, City planning and redevelopment law--Albania, Land use, Urban--Government policy--Albania, Land administration--Albania, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Insurance and the Utilization of Medical Services Among the Self-Employed

There has been substantial public policy concern over the relatively low rates of health insurance coverage among the self-employed in the United States. We use data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey conducted in 1996 to analyze how the self-employed and wage-earners differ both with respect to insurance coverage and utilization of a variety of health care services. Our results suggest that for the self-employed, the link between insurance and utilization of health care services is not as strong as assumed in the policy debate. For a number of medical care services, the self-employed have the same rates of utilization as wage-earners, despite the fact that they are substantially less likely to be insured. And when the self-employed are less likely than wage-earners to utilize a particular medical service, the differences generally do not seem very large. The self-employed thus appear to be able to finance access to health care from sources other than insurance. Further, analysis of out-of-pocket expenditures on health care suggests that doing so does not lead to substantial reductions in their ability to consume other goods and services. Finally, there is no evidence that children of the self-employed have less access to health care than the children of wage-earners. Hence, the public policy concerns that the relative lack of health insurance among the self-employed substantially reduces utilization of health care services or creates economic hardship appear to be misplaced.

LIVINGSTON COUNTY EMERGENCY SERVICES ANALYSIS

Rapid population growth challenges the ability of local government to keep pace with increasing and changing demand for public services. These challenges may be physical or organizational in nature. Physical challenges arise from the need to upgrade public infrastructure such as water and sewer service, roads, schools, and emergency services. Although installation of new infrastructure is always expensive, growth-related increases in the tax base provide new revenue for installation of new services. However, when slowing growth rates, againg infrastructure, and addition of expensive new services pressure local government to increase revenue from existing resources decision-makers may then seek to reduce per-capita costs by reorganizing the method or structure of providing community services.Public Economics,