How long do constitutional systems persist and what explains their demise? This paper introduces a new set of data on the chronology and content of constitutions that facilitates a test of expectations about constitutional mortality and its associated risk factors. We develop a theory of constitutional longevity, in which executive ambition poses a principal threat to the constitutional order. ...

Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to disclose regularities, correlations, patterns, and structural properties of language streams, using techniques borrowed from statistics and information theory. Over...

A n off-line hand-written Chinese character recognizer based on Contextual Vector Quantization (CVQ) supporting a vocabulary of 4,616 Chinese characters, alphanumerics and punctuation symbols has been reported. Trained with a sample for each character from each of 100 writers and tested on texts of 160,000 characters written b y another 200 writers, the average recognition rate is 77.2%. Two st...