Working Papers as Federal Records: The Need for New Legislation to Preserve the History of National Policy

This article deals with policy records at the front end of their lives; that is, preserving them from destruction by federal agencies in the decades immediately after their creation. It does not deal with the destruction of archived documents by Archives officials themselves. It discusses only in passing the related question of how long a policy record should be sealed off from public inspection; the literature includes a variety of opinions on that subject. The author is content to leave to others the problem of just where to draw the balance between making historical documentation available soon enough so that it can offer relevant lessons to citizens, but not so soon as to discourage officials from putting their candid thoughts and recommendations on paper or disk, for fear of public exposure and pressure. He focuses, instead, on the preservation of governmental records, and particularly of drafts, comments, and other working papers. Of course the issues of preservation and access are intimately linked: if records are routinely destroyed as soon as they are no longer needed by their creators, public access-even much delayed public access-becomes altogether impossible

Semi-Inclusive DIS and Transversity

A review is presented of some aspects of semi-inclusive deeply inelastic scattering and transversity. In particular, the role of $k_T$-dependent and higher-twist (or multi-parton) distributions in generating single-spin asymmetries is discussed.Comment: 8 pages, uses aipproc.cls, feynmp, psfrag, and some personal packages (included); invited talk presented at HiX 2004, Marseille, 26-28 July 200

Single-Spin Asymmetries and Transversity

A pedagogical introduction to single-spin asymmetries (SSA's) and transversity is presented. Discussion in some detail is made of certain aspects of (SSA's) in lepton-nucleon and in hadron-hadron scattering and the role of pQCD and evolution in the context of transversity.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, presented at the XV International Symposium on High-Energy Spin Physics (Brookhaven, 9-14 Aug. 2002

The Summary Affirmance Proposal of the Board of Immigration Appeals

The Board of Immigration Appeals is on the verge of making a tragic mistake, trading away a key element of fair adjudication--the written opinion--for the sake of what it hopes will be greater administrative efficiency. The cost of eliminating written adjudication is too great, and the Board has given no indication that it has sufficiently canvassed less drastic alternatives. The Board of Immigration Appeals (the Board ) is the primary appellate body for immigration law. The staple of its work is to decide appeals from decisions of Immigration Judges in removal proceedings, though it also hears appeals in several other categories, such as decisions of Immigration Judges on petitions for approval of preferred immigration status by virtue of close relationship to a United States citizen or permanent alien

Collaboration on reference to objects that are not mutually known

In conversation, a person sometimes has to refer to an object that is not previously known to the other participant. We present a plan-based model of how agents collaborate on reference of this sort. In making a reference, an agent uses the most salient attributes of the referent. In understanding a reference, an agent determines his confidence in its adequacy as a means of identifying the referent. To collaborate, the agents use judgment, suggestion, and elaboration moves to refashion an inadequate referring expression.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in proceedings of COLING-94, LaTeX (now uses fullname.sty, fullname.bst

Don’t Gut Political Asylum

For many years, the United States has granted political asylum to victims of persecution who come to our country and seek our protection. Now, however, Congress is on the verge of abolishing the right of political asylum. Congress is not proposing to repeal the asylum provisions of the Refugee Act of 1980. An outright repeal would probably never pass, because many in Congress, recalling America\u27s sorry treatment of refugees during the Holocaust, accept the humanitarian premises underlying asylum. Rather, the abolition is in the form of a new, apparently innocuous procedural requirement. The House Judiciary Committee recently adopted, as an amendment to this year\u27s immigration reform act, a proviso that denies asylum to any person who applies for it more than thirty days after arriving in the United States. A Senate subcommittee has approved a similar proposal