Plateau vegetation on sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island

The plateau of sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island supports an open short herb, feldmark vegetation that is markedly affected by the prevailing strong westerly winds. This paper reports on a line transect survey carried out in 1980 which documents variation then apparent in species composition in this vegetation. Sixty-two species were recorded, with plant occurrences along 16 transects ranging from 16.7–99.5%. The cushion plant Azorella macquariensis Orchard was an important component of the plateau vegetation: it occurred at 14 of the 16 sites surveyed, with occurrences up to 50%. The dieback reported in Azorella macquariensis in 2008 was, by 2012, regarded as extensive and severe throughout its range. The data presented here well precede the first records of the dieback, and contribute to early descriptive data against which future developments in the plateau vegetation of Macquarie Island can be evaluated

The Effect of Independent Expenditures on Congressional Elections following Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010)

Independent expenditures can greatly influence campaigns and the outcome of elections, a phenomenon that many expect will become more evident following the U.S. Supreme Court\u27s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC (2010). Corporations first had the chance to flex their free speech muscle in the 2010 elections, as as expected, spending on campaigns appears to have increased. What patterns are emerging? How has increased spending influenced electoral results? In this paper I will examine this increase and the subsequent effects of corporate independent expenditures on all 2010 House races. Using multivariate analysis, I will show that corporate independent expenditures substantially increased following Citizens United (2010) and how this monetary surge affected increased outcomes in the 2010 Congressional election

Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “discourse-new”

New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992), and that a G-feature marks discourse-given constituents (Féry-Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discourse-new is unmarked. A crucial argument for G-marking comes from second occurrence focus (SOF) prosody, which arguably derives from a syntactic representation where SOF is both F-marked and G-marked. This analysis relies on a new G-Marking Condition specifying that a contrastive focus may be G-marked only if the focus semantic value of its scope is discourse-given, i.e., only if the contrast itself is given