An enduring problem in electoral systems is that of "disproportionality," i.e., the mismatch between a party's percentage of the popular vote and its percentage of legislative seats. Such disproportionality is quite common and extreme cases are easy to find in the real word. To give just one example, the Liberal Party in Britain polled 13.8% of the national vote in 1979 but was rewarded with on...

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This paper addresses a special problem with historical document images where handwritten characters from the reverse side appear as noise on the front side and even interfere with the front side characters. A novel method to extract clear textual images from interfering and overlapping areas of text is presented here. The proposed algorithm is interesting in that, with an observation that the e...

The Master of Liberal Arts provides the chance to practice the methods of interdisciplinary inquiry that are the hallmark of a rigorous liberal arts education. As a student in the program, one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...

Comprehensive analysis of 15 previously published regional databases incorporating more than 100 sources leads to a newly revised historical tsunami database for the northeastern (NE) region of the South China Sea (SCS) including Taiwan. The validity of each reported historical tsunami event listed in our database is assessed by comparing and contrasting the information and descriptions provide...

We describe ongoing work aiming at deriving a multilingual controlled vocabulary (German, French, Italian) from the combined subject indices from 22 volumes of a large-scale critical edition of historical documents. The controlled vocabulary is intended to support editors in assigning descriptors to new documents and to support users in retrieving documents of interest regardless of the spellin...

Although contemporary historical novels share a number of features with the traditional historical novel, as analysed by Lukács (1981), they display a fundamental change in the perception of history, evident in the disappearance of the omniscient narrator, in their choice of significant and representative figures, and scepticism regarding teleology of history or the world-historical role of war...

Using the location of baroque opera houses as a natural experiment, Falck et al. (2011) claim to document a positive causal eff ect of the supply of cultural goods on today’s regional distribution of talents. This paper raises serious doubts on the validity of the identifi cation strategy underlying these estimates, though. While we are able to replicate the original results, we proceed to show...

This paper reports preliminary findings from the National Hospital Rate-Setting Study regarding the effects of State prospective reimbursement (PR) programs on measures of payroll costs and employment in hospitals. PR effects were estimated through reduced-form equations, using American Hospital Association Annual Survey data on over 2,700 hospitals from 1969 through 1978. These tests suggest t...