Ralph Linton in Madagascar (1926-1927).

Based on archival records and other writing of the period, the author traces in detail the Ralph Linton Expedition to the Island of Madagascar, 1926-1927. Liliana Mosca also comments on the nature and extent of the American Anthropologists collecting for the Field Museum of Natural History and his encounters while touring the different regions of Madagascar in various locales that would help unravel the web that bedeviled students of Malagasy culture

The Original Understanding of the New Hampshire Constitution’s Education Clause

[Excerpt] “In 1993, the New Hampshire Supreme Court held that “part II, article 83 [of the state constitution] imposes a duty on the State to provide a constitutionally adequate education to every educable child in the public schools in New Hampshire and to guarantee adequate funding,” and that this duty is enforceable by the judiciary. This decision, known as Claremont I, was the wellspring of a line of decisions that has radically changed both the manner in which public education is funded in New Hampshire and the respective roles of the judicial branch and the representative branches in formulating education policy. Since the adoption of the state constitution in 1784, public education in New Hampshire had been funded primarily with local taxes. The Claremont decisions flatly rejected this long tradition of local control of the funding of public education: “Whatever the State identifies as comprising constitutional adequacy it must pay for. None of that financial obligation can be shifted to local school districts, regardless of their relative wealth or need.”

New Hampshire’s Claremont Case and the Separation of Powers

[Excerpt] Court decisions involving the adequacy of public education raise some obvious separation of powers problems. These include the institutional competency of courts to determine what level of education is adequate and how much funding is necessary to reach that level, and the authority of courts to enforce such judgments. This article will examine these problems through New Hampshire’s serial education funding litigation, the Claremont case. [. . .] I will start by briefly reviewing the history of education funding litigation because this context is essential to understanding the Claremont case. I will then undertake a limited review of the Claremont case. Finally, I will consider Claremont from the standpoint of the separation of powers. I begin by examining the text and structure of the State Constitution and then consider whether there are judicially discoverable and manageable standards for determining what level of education is adequate and how much funding is necessary to reach that level. Because there is a textually demonstrable commitment of education funding and education policy to the legislative branch, and because what an adequate education comprises and costs are quintessentially political questions, Claremont represents a clear trespass on legislative powers and should be overruled.

Spatial language in spoken Italian dialogues. A cognitive linguistics perspectives

La tesi studia le costruzioni in italiano parlato relative agli eventi di movimento introdotti ed elaborati da Talmy (1985, 2000). Il primo capitolo tratta la teoria dell’evento di movimento ed i vari sistemi di reperimento spaziale quali ad esempio il FRAME OF REFERENCE di Levinson (1996, 2003). Il secondo capitolo analizza i problemi teorici relativi alle costruzioni in italiano, cercando di chiarire la nozione di satellite. Il terzo capitolo illustra il corpus utilizzato: il map task corpus e un corpus di indicazioni stradali e il loro trattamento computazionale. Il quarto capitolo fornisce un’analisi qualitativa; si propongono nuove categorie di classificazione a livello sintattico-lessicale e a livello di semantica cognitiva. Il quinto capitolo fornisce un’analisi statistica: per misurare la ricchezza lessicale è stata usata la formula della frequenza media e della deviazione standard. Le conclusioni: aver trovato un continuum che va da verbi più specifici a verbi meno specifici

Chasing graduate jobs?

This paper examines empirically the relationship between under-employment and migration amongst five cohorts of graduates of Scottish higher education institutions with micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency. The data indicate that there is a strong positive relationship between migration and graduate employment—those graduates who move after graduation from Scotland to the rest of the UK or abroad have a much higher rate of graduate employment. Versions of probit regression are used to estimate migration and graduate employment equations in order to explore the nature of this relationship further. These equations confirm that there is a strong positive relationship between the probability of migrating and the probability of being in graduate employment even after other factors are controlled for. Instrumental variables estimation is used to examine the causal nature of the relationship by attempting to deal with the potential endogeneity of migration decisions. Overall the analysis is consistent with the hypotheses that a sizeable fraction of higher education graduates are leaving Scotland for employment reasons. In turn this finding suggests the over-education/under-employment nexus is a serious problem in Scotland

Maximum Weight Independent Sets in Odd-Hole-Free Graphs Without Dart or Without Bull

The Maximum Weight Independent Set (MWIS) Problem on graphs with vertex weights asks for a set of pairwise nonadjacent vertices of maximum total weight. Being one of the most investigated and most important problems on graphs, it is well known to be NP-complete and hard to approximate. The complexity of MWIS is open for hole-free graphs (i.e., graphs without induced subgraphs isomorphic to a chordless cycle of length at least five). By applying clique separator decomposition as well as modular decomposition, we obtain polynomial time solutions of MWIS for odd-hole- and dart-free graphs as well as for odd-hole- and bull-free graphs (dart and bull have five vertices, say $a,b,c,d,e$, and dart has edges $ab,ac,ad,bd,cd,de$, while bull has edges $ab,bc,cd,be,ce$). If the graphs are hole-free instead of odd-hole-free then stronger structural results and better time bounds are obtained