Essays from Scotland

Essays from Its Heartland

From Critical Theory: Selected Essays

principles and the analysis of basic concepts by an armchair scholar, which are typical, for example, of one sector of German sociology. Yet these divergences do not signify a structural difference in ways of thinking. In recent periods of contemporary society the so-called human studies Geisteswissen-scMften) have had but a fluctuating market value and must try to imitate the more prosperous n...

Essays on Building Growth From Ideas

In my dissertation, I study the interplay between innovation and economic growth with an emphasis on the misallocation of ideas and talent. The first chapter focuses on the allocation of the innovations themselves, considering the optimal allocation of ideas across firms, and how it can be achieved via a market for ideas. This is done by first creating an operational measure of technological pr...

Extracting PDTB Discourse Relations from Student Essays

We investigate the manual and automatic annotation of PDTB discourse relations in student essays, a novel domain that is not only learning-based and argumentative, but also noisy with surface errors and deeper coherency issues. We discuss methodological complexities it poses for the task. We present descriptive statistics and compare relation distributions in related corpora. We compare automat...

Coping with suicide: a perspective from Scotland

Procedures following suicide differ in Scotland from elsewhere in the UK and we describe the investigation of deaths by procurators fiscal and fatal accident inquiries that may ensue. Higher Scottish suicide rates, and possible reasons for these, are mentioned. Suicide risk cannot be accurately quantified in individual patients but psychiatrists should take the view that good management can col...