Book review: dial m for murdoch: news corporation and thecorruption of britain

Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers had been hacking phones, blagging information and causing emotional stress to those in the public eye for years, but it was only after a trivial report about Prince William’s knee in 2005 that detectives stumbled on a criminal conspiracy. A five-year cover-up then concealed and muddied the truth. Dial M for Murdoch aims to give the first connected account of the extraordinary lengths to which the News Corporation went to “put the problem in a box” (in James Murdoch’s words), how its efforts to maintain and extend its power were aided by its political and police friends, and how it was all finally exposed. Burcu Baykurt values Watson and Hickman’s extensive illustration the press should not do in a democratic country

Specific capital and vintage effects on the dynamics of unemployment and vacancies

In a reasonably calibrated Mortensen and Pissarides matching model, shocks to average labor productivity can account for only a small portion of the fluctuations in unemployment and vacancies (Shimer (2005a)). In this paper, the author argues that if vintage specific shocks rather than aggregate productivity shocks are the driving force of fluctuations, the model does a better job of accounting for the data. She adds heterogeneity in jobs (matches) with respect to the time the job is created in the form of different embodied technology levels. The author also introduces specific capital that, once adapted for a match, has less value in another match. In the quantitative analysis, she shows that shocks to different vintages of entrants are able to account for fluctuations in unemployment and vacancies and that, in this environment, specific capital is important to decreasing the volatility of the destruction rate of existing matches.Unemployment

"The Myths of Turkish Influence in the European Union". University of Illinois EUC Working Paper Volume 6, No. 2, 2006

Among the many objections to Turkish membership in the European Union lie claims that Turkey will be a powerful actor in the future EU, with a population as large as or larger than Germany. Many also claim that this power will have negative effects on the EU. We examine such claims analytically, influenced strongly by spatial models of EU policy-making. We find that Turkey's preferences lie sufficiently outside the EU mainstream so that it will have little influence in day-to-day policy-making under the assent, codecision, consultation, and cooperation procedures (or the common procedure in the rejected constitutional treaty). Its influence may be more evident in areas such as the CFSP or JHA, where unanimity remains the normal procedure. Still, Turkey's veto power here is no different from that of other, much smaller countries. Furthermore, veto power can only block changes and cannot be used to pull the EU into undesirable new directions. Even this veto power can be avoided if the EU-25 establishes whatever policies they desire prior to Turkish membership, forcing Turkey to accept a fait accompli. Despite these limitations to its power, Turkey may have some influence in purely intergovernmental settings such as negotiations over new treaties that might occur some decades hence

Aggregate Shocks, Idiosyncratic Risk, and Durable Goods Purchases: Evidence from Turkeys 1994 Financial Crisis

uncertainty, durable goods spending, unemployment, financial crisis

Functional classification of G-Protein coupled receptors, based on their specific ligand coupling patterns

Functional identification of G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) is one of the current focus areas of pharmaceutical research. Although thousands of GPCR sequences are known, many of them re- main as orphan sequences (the activating ligand is unknown). Therefore, classification methods for automated characterization of orphan GPCRs are imperative. In this study, for predicting Level 2 subfamilies of Amine GPCRs, a novel method for obtaining fixed-length feature vectors, based on the existence of activating ligand specific patterns, has been developed and utilized for a Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based classification. Exploiting the fact that there is a non-promiscuous relationship between the specific binding of GPCRs into their ligands and their functional classification, our method classifies Level 2 subfamilies of Amine GPCRs with a high predictive accuracy of 97.02% in a ten-fold cross validation test. The presented machine learning approach, bridges the gulf between the excess amount of GPCR sequence data and their poor functional characterization

Paracompositionality, MWEs and Argument Substitution

Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the expression. Radically lexicalized theories of grammar that avoid string-, term-, logical form-, and tree-writing, and categorial grammars that avoid wrap operation, make predictions about the categories involved in verb-particles and phrasal idioms. They may require singleton types, which can only substitute for one value, not just for one kind of value. These types are asymmetric: they can be arguments only. They also narrowly constrain the kind of semantic value that can correspond to such syntactic categories. Idiomatically combining phrases do not subcategorize for singleton types, and they exploit another locally computable and compositional property of a correspondence, that every syntactic expression can project its head word. Such MWEs can be seen as empirically realized categorial possibilities, rather than lacuna in a theory of lexicalizable syntactic categories.Comment: accepted version (pre-final) for 23rd Formal Grammar Conference, August 2018, Sofi