The Maguindanao Massacre, critical elections and armed conflict in the Philippines

The Maguindanao Massacre has sent shock waves through the Philippines and beyond. A convoy of cars was caught in an armed ambush on Monday 23 November, leaving at least 57 persons dead, with mutilated bodies and crushed vehicles found buried in large pits. The convoy was destined for the Commission of Elections office in Shariff Aguak town, Magindanao Province in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). The purpose was to file local vice mayor Esmael Mangudadatu’s certificate of candidacy to run for the governorship of Maguindanao province in the May 2010 Philippine elections. Among the victims of the massacre were at least 30 journalists, more than 20 women, including the wife and two sisters of Mangudadatu

Returns to Inventors

A key input to inventive activity is human capital. Hence it is important to understand the monetary incentives of inventors. We estimate the effect of patented inventions on individual earnings by linking data on U.S. patents and their inventors to Finnish employer-employee data. Returns are heterogeneous: Inventors get a temporary reward of 3% of annual earnings for a patent grant and for highly-cited patents a longer-lasting premium of 30% in earnings three years later. Similar medium-term premia accrue to inventors who initially hold the patent rights, although they forego earnings at the time of the grant

Education and invention.

Modern growth theory puts invention on the center stage. Inventions are created by individuals, raising the question: can we increase number of inventors? To answer this question, we study the causal effect of M.Sc. engineering education on invention, using data on U.S. patents’ Finnish inventors and the distance to the nearest technical university as an instrument. We find a positive effect of engineering education on the propensity to patent, and a negative OLS bias. Our counterfactual calculation suggests that establishing 3 new technical universities resulted in a 20% increase in the number of USPTO patents by Finnish inventors.ability bias; citations; education; engineers; growth; innovation; invention; inventors; patents;

Returns to Inventors

A key input to inventive activity is human capital. Hence it is important to understand the monetary incentives of inventors. We estimate the effect of patented inventions on individual earnings by linking data on U.S. patents and their inventors to Finnish employer-employee data. Returns are heterogeneous: Inventors get a temporary reward of 3% of annual earnings for a patent grant and for highly-cited patents a longer-lasting premium of 30% in earnings three years later. Similar medium-term premia accrue to inventors who initially hold the patent rights, although they forego earnings at the time of the grant.citations; effort; incentives; inventors; intellectual property; patents; performance pay; return; wages

Sociology and Classical Liberalism

We advocate the development of a classical-liberal character within professional sociology. The American Sociological Association (ASA) is taken as representative of professional sociology in the United States. We review the ASA’s activities and organizational statements, to show the association’s leftist character. Internal criticism is often very uneasy about leftist domination of the field. We present survey results establishing that, in voting and in policy views, the ASA membership is mostly left-wing and devoid of classical liberalism. We sketch some ideas showing that sociology needs classical liberalism, and classical liberalism needs sociology.sociology; American Sociological Association; ideology; policy views; classical liberalism

Two-phased knowledge formalisation for hydrometallurgical gold ore process recommendation and validation

This paper describes an approach to externalising and formalising expert knowledge involved in the design and evaluation of hydrometallurgical process chains for gold ore treatment. The objective was to create a case-based reasoning application for recommending and validating a treatment process of gold ores. We describe a twofold approach. Formalising human expert knowledge about gold mining situations enables the retrieval of similar mining contexts and respective process chains, based on prospection data gathered from a potential gold mining site. Secondly, empirical knowledge on hydrometallurgical treatments is formalised. This enabled us to evaluate and, where needed, redesign the process chain that was recommended by the first aspect of our approach. The main problems with formalisation of knowledge in the domain of gold ore refinement are the diversity and the amount of parameters used in literature and by experts to describe a mining context. We demonstrate how similarity knowledge was used to formalise literature knowledge. The evaluation of data gathered from experiments with an initial prototype workflow recommender, Auric Adviser, provides promising results

A one-dimensional model with water-like anomalies and two phase transitions

We investigate a one-dimensional model that shows several properties of water. The model combines the long-range attraction of the van der Waals model with the nearest-neighbor interaction potential by Ben-Naim, which is a step potential that includes a hard core and a potential well. Starting from the analytical expression for the partition function, we determine numerically the Gibbs energy and other thermodynamic quantities. The model shows two phase transitions, which can be interpreted as the liquid-gas transition and a transition between a high-density and a low-density liquid. At zero temperature, the low-density liquid goes into the crystalline phase. Furthermore, we find several anomalies that are considered characteristic for water. We explore a wide range of pressure and temperature values and the dependence of the results on the depth and width of the potential well