Lobbyists confront US budget crunch

Facing budget crunch, BC restructures health system.

Policy Punctuations : US Budget

Lobbyists, Relationships, and Legislators’ Votes

For lobbyists, success is about who you know rather than what you know. Forming and maintaining relationships with legislators is key to public policy success for interest groups and lobbyists. In this paper, I examine how to operationalize the relationship between a legislator and a lobbyist. Disclosure forms on gifts may be a way to operationalize the relationships between legislators and lob...

Black Crunch

We study the growth of fluctuations in collapsing cosmologies, extending old work of Lifschitz and Khalatnikov. As examples of systems where the fluctuations have a different composition than the background we study scalar fields with general improvement terms. Fluctuations always grow, and often dominate the homogeneous background. We argue that even for very dilute fluctuations, scattering pr...

Biodiversity crunch

One of the major efforts of researchers in recent years has been to determine the economic value of natural resources in an effort to persuade policymakers that these resources are important in decisions about development. But many species in particular environments are being lost so quickly that their value may be undervalued, according to a new report. And Clive Hambler and colleagues at the ...