In this paper, we construct a new indexmeasuring the strength of intellectual property (IP) protection for plant varieties in 69 countries over the period 1961–2011. We examine the statistical properties of the index and compare it with other indicators of IP protection. We conclude that the index provides a reasonable synthetic assessment of the relative strength of IP protection in plant vari...

HOSE WHO WISH to determine why banks fail typically focus on the characteristics of banks and their local markets that make them vulnerable to losses.1 A key factor often overlooked, however, is capital injections by shareholders. A bank whose losses exceed its capital need not fail, if its shareholders (existing or new) inject sufficient additional funds to restore its capital ratio to a level...

When environmentalists talk about pesticide exposure, they are usually referring to possible residue in our food. In fact, food is only one of many potential sources of pesticide residue in our environment. Both farmers and consumers, especially parents with small children, will benefit from the "risk cup" assessment of pesticide levels in our daily lives from ALL sources — not just agriculture...

Since Marbury v. Madison (1803) 1 , the role of the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the meaning of the U.S. Constitution has been largely accepted by both mass and elite publics. However, on occasion those interpretations have been the subject of heated dispute, often with the states, the executive, or the legislative branch. The Court's 5–4 decision in Texas v. Johnson (1989) 2 raised su...

We present a dialog act annotation for German Twitter conversations. In this paper, we describe our annotation effort of a corpus of German Twitter conversations using a full schema of 57 dialog acts, with a moderate inter-annotator agreement of multi-π = 0.56 for three untrained annotators. This translates to an agreement of 0.76 for a minimal set of 10 broad dialog acts, comparable to previou...

P right to use physical force (e.g., smacking) as a child discipline strategy is a highly contentious issue around the world, particularly when legislative bans of the physical discipline of children are on a country’s political agenda. This has been the case in New Zealand over the past two decades, as increasing national and international pressure have been placed on the government to impleme...

We study the task of automatic labeling dialogues with the proper speech acts, relying on empirical methods and simply exploiting lexical semantics of the utterances. We investigate the relationship between affective factors and linguistic realization of dialogue acts: we present some preliminary results about the role that affect plays in dialogue act disambiguation and we propose a discussion...

The benefit provisions and legislative history of the 1951 amendments to the Railroad Retirement Act were summarized in the February Bulletin. In this issue the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration discusses the financial and actuarial implications of the amended law, with special emphasis on the provisions coordinating in some measure the railroad program with old-age and surviv...