Truths and euphemisms: How euphemisms are used in the political arena

Politicians are notorious for their employment of words in a disguised fashion through the usage of euphemisms. Consequently, their message becomes a recurrent theme of conspicuous deception. Elected government representatives deliberately engage in grandiloquent expression conscious of its subversive capacity. The deviancy of euphemisms is guided by social norms that politicians are permitted to exercise in order to safeguard their images. When politicians envelop seemingly good intentions with conscious deception, people are harmed in the process. Those in power transgress justice and commit crimes with their overwhelming command of euphemisms. In fact, euphemisms are utilized as masks, hiding truths under the protective tones of a speaker with a genuine, worthwhile goal. Selective vocabulary is employed to arouse, rationalize and justify. To achieve this end, politicians misrepresent the facts of various political situations by using terms that completely transform or falsify them. Euphemisms are used simplistically in daily conversations. However, where they are used and misused more frequently is in the political arena, in such cases as “soft targets” or “peace keepers” or “collateral damage.” These expressions are heard frequently, while past ones are forgotten and new ones primed in their place as transgressions continue. In this paper, I will make use of Jurgen Habermas’ public sphere theory, a critical theory that demonstrates how the audience’s outlook affects political action. This article will demonstrate the deliberate use of euphemisms in political language both as a cultural element and as one that is constantly changing to suit the ever-changing political arena

Introduction to Special Issue on Radiation Effects

[Excerpt] How dangerous is radiation? How much radiation does it take to give us cancer? Are we wasting money on overly restrictive regulations, or are we not being sufficiently protective of our radiation workers and the public? How much clean-up is necessary on our Department of Energy facilities? What about Yucca Mountain and nuclear reactor plants – can they be made safe? These are only a few of the questions that have been asked, and will continue to be asked, about radiation. Unfortunately, these all come down, in part or in whole, to the question “What is the shape of the radiation dose-response curve at low levels of radiation exposure?” In other words, is all radiation dangerous, or is there a threshold below which radiation exposure is harmless? Not “low-risk,” but “no-risk.” This is the crux of the issue, and we still do not know the answer

When Migrant Remittances Are Not Everlasting, How Can Morocco Make Up?

In this paper, I run a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Moroccan economy to investigate the transmission channels through which remittances affect households and sectors. I give a particular attention to the investment of remittances in the real estate sector, by allowing a segmentation of the savings market. To begin with, I assess the negative impact of immigration restrictive policies and permanent migration on the future evolution of remittances. Then I ask what would be the appropriate policies to take the maximum profit from current flows. It turns out that channelling investment from real estate to productive sectors is unexpectedly harmful in terms of growth and welfare. Positive effects stem only from government ability to attract investors through an improvement in the country risk premium, and private efforts to reduce international transfer costs.Sequential Dynamics; Computable General Equilibrium Model; Migration; Remittances.

Act to Save Groundwater in Punjab: Its Impact on Water Table, Electricity Subsidy and Environment

The fall in water table in Punjab has been a serious issue. One of the main reasons for it has been the early transplanting of rice (before mid-June), which means severe withdrawal of groundwater, as the monsoon is still far away, temperatures are very high and evapo-transpiration rate (ETR) is maximum. On the initiative of the Punjab State Farmers Commission, “The Punjab Preservation of Sub Soil Water Act†(not to sow paddy nursery before May 10 and not to transplant paddy before June 10) was promulgated as an Ordinance in 2008 and encouraged by the response, it has been changed into an Act in March 2009. The time series and experimental data on transplanting pattern, water requirements rice, rainfall, monsoon recharge, groundwater behaviour and rice area have been used and it is estimated that the fall in water table can be checked by about 30 cm, which is about 65 per cent of the long-term falling rate, by delaying the transplanting with the effective implementation of the Act. The water table during 2008, which also had better monsoon rainfall of 51 cm, has risen as per estimated by about 80-100 cm, which is close to the provisional releases. To maintain the water balance in the long-run, about 47-50 cm of water (as equivalence of monsoon rain) is required, of which 40 cm is the long-run average rain and about 5 cm gets compensated by the Act in its present form. The delay in transplanting to 15 June would maintain the balance but it cuts down the transplanting period further; thus intensifying the efforts to improving the water-use efficiency and some substitution by low-water requiring crops are recommended. The savings in electricity due to the Act have been estimated at 276 million units, which means the savings to the State exchequer of about Rs 122 crore per year, split as savings of the government including its extra tax earnings as Rs 77 crore and the additional net earnings of the State Electricity Board as Rs 45 crore. The other long-term benefits include reprieve from the relative humidity by about 15-16 per cent point, which might help reducing the harmful pests and bacteria vulnerable to high and dry temperatures, saving the farmers from frequent deepening and ultimately installing the submersible tubewells, saving and even restoring the rural drinking water supply sources of hand-pumps, acting as a catalyst to fine tune the paddy-transplanters, mandating the breeders to evolve the rice varieties that yield better when transplanted after mid-June, giving more crucial time to the farmers for reinvigourating the research-extension-farmer linkage and, delayed harvesting and marketing causing less pollution due to the increase in dew-factor and encouraging the adoption of happy seeder type innovations for timely wheat sowing without burning the rice straw.Agricultural and Food Policy,

When Migrant Remittances Are Not Everlasting, How Can Morocco Make Up ?

In this paper, I run a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Moroccan economy to investigate the transmission channels through which remittances affect households and sectors. I give a particular attention to the investment of remittances in the real estate sector, by allowing a segmentation of the savings market. To begin with, I assess the negative impact of immigration restrictive policies and permanent migration on the future evolution of remittances. Then I ask what would be the appropriate policies to take the maximum profit from current flows. It turns out that channelling investment from real estate to productive sectors is unexpectedly harmful in terms of growth and welfare. Positive effects stem only from government ability to attract investors through an improvement in the country risk premium, and private efforts to reduce international transfer costs.Sequential dynamics, computable general equilibrium model, migration, remittances.

Full Reference Objective Quality Assessment for Reconstructed Background Images

With an increased interest in applications that require a clean background image, such as video surveillance, object tracking, street view imaging and location-based services on web-based maps, multiple algorithms have been developed to reconstruct a background image from cluttered scenes. Traditionally, statistical measures and existing image quality techniques have been applied for evaluating the quality of the reconstructed background images. Though these quality assessment methods have been widely used in the past, their performance in evaluating the perceived quality of the reconstructed background image has not been verified. In this work, we discuss the shortcomings in existing metrics and propose a full reference Reconstructed Background image Quality Index (RBQI) that combines color and structural information at multiple scales using a probability summation model to predict the perceived quality in the reconstructed background image given a reference image. To compare the performance of the proposed quality index with existing image quality assessment measures, we construct two different datasets consisting of reconstructed background images and corresponding subjective scores. The quality assessment measures are evaluated by correlating their objective scores with human subjective ratings. The correlation results show that the proposed RBQI outperforms all the existing approaches. Additionally, the constructed datasets and the corresponding subjective scores provide a benchmark to evaluate the performance of future metrics that are developed to evaluate the perceived quality of reconstructed background images.Comment: Associated source code: https://github.com/ashrotre/RBQI, Associated Database: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bg8YRPIBcxpKIF9BIPisULPBPcA5x-Bk?usp=sharing (Email for permissions at: ashrotreasuedu

Judicial review, reasons and technology: a glance at constitutionalism and democracy

Judicial review reflects the level of commitment between constitutionalism and democracy in contemporary States. Yet democracy as the sovereign government of the people implies a tension with constitutionalism as the rule of law. That is, people ruling themselves or the government by the people – majority government - is limited by the law of law making, the constitution. In Brazil, the improvement of judicial review is nowadays related to increase the number of decisions given by the Brazilian Supreme Court or rather to the capability of this latter in deciding a large number of constitutional lawsuits no matter the form and content of its arguments. For, the Court is nowadays driven by numbers and to accomplish its goals in terms of numbers (of decisions) it applies to technological solutions such as the digitalization of legal proceedings. It means that as many decision as Supreme Court issues -with the help of technology- the better it is. Relating the numbers of decisions issued by the Court to the improvement of Brazilian judicial review or Brazilian constitutionalism and democracy is a great mistake and a false statement as far as it does not face the main problem of the system, which is the lack of reasons of Supreme Court’s decision. The point is that, in this case, technology is just a tool –among others- in order to render legal proceedings faster yet not a qualitative sign of Supreme Court’s decisions