Political Institutions, Technology and Growth: a dynamic panel approach

This paper investigates whether the effect of political institutions on sectoral economic performance is determined by the level of technological development of industries. Building on previous studies on the linkages among political institutions, technology and economic growth, we employ the dynamic panel Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator for a sample of 4,134 country-industries from 61 industries and 89 countries over the 1990-2010 period. Our main findings suggest that changes of political institutions towards higher levels of democracy, political rights and civil liberties enhance economic growth in technologically developed industries. On the contrary, the same institutional changes might retard economic growth of those industries that are below a technological development threshold. Overall, these results give evidence of a technologically conditioned nature of political institutions to be growth-promoting.

La enseñanza del euskera en Argentina durante el 'Renacimiento Vasco': el 'Curso primero del idioma basko en dialecto guipuzkuano' (1912) de Soloeta-Dima

Buena parte de lo expuesto en este artículo fue presentado por el autor en las IV Jornadas de Lingüística Vasco-Románica (Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, 29 de noviembre de 2013)

Discriminating languages in bilingual contexts: the impact of orthographic markedness

Does language-specific orthography help language detection and lexical access in naturalistic bilingual contexts? This study investigates how L2 orthotactic properties influence bilingual language detection in bilingual societies and the extent to which it modulates lexical access and single word processing. Language specificity of naturalistically learnt L2 words was manipulated by including bigram combinations that could be either L2 language-specific or common in the two languages known by bilinguals. A group of balanced bilinguals and a group of highly proficient but unbalanced bilinguals who grew up in a bilingual society were tested, together with a group of monolinguals (for control purposes). All the participants completed a speeded language detection task and a progressive demasking task. Results showed that the use of the information of orthotactic rules across languages depends on the task demands at hand, and on participants' proficiency in the second language. The influence of language orthotactic rules during language detection, lexical access and word identification are discussed according to the most prominent models of bilingual word recognition.

Abeje Dayo: um ensaio epistemológico-político sobre a democracia na escola pública estadual

O presente trabalho de pesquisa trata da democracia na escola pública estadual do Rio de Janeiro. Dentro de tema tão vasto, prioriza experiências de participação política e controle do Estado pelo cidadão dentro do ambiente escolar e, especialmente, de democracia cognitiva em sala de aula. Esta dissertação é resultado da observação participante em distintas escolas públicas onde o autor lecionou. Nesses espaços, onde a atuação de professor e pesquisador coexistiram, recolheu casos e experiências significativas relacionadas à democracia ou a sua negação pelo autoritarismo, nos dois recortes acima mencionados. Aqui estão cinco destes casos. Dentre eles, em maior destaque, está uma experiência com o uso das linguagens artísticas e seus resultados na democratização da construção do conhecimento em sala de aula. Influenciado pela força deste caso e pelo potencial percebido nas decorrentes pesquisas e reflexões teóricas a seu respeito, o autor opta por empreender uma pesquisa exploratória de linguagem, conduzindo-o a experimentar uma escrita alternativa ao padrão corrente de redação científica. Com claro ímpeto ensaístico, o trabalho é desenvolvido em um diálogo entre professoras-pesquisadoras da escola pública, pretendo ao formato teatral. Para o seu enfrentamento e embasamento teórico, a pesquisa está estruturada principalmente em torno de cinco autores: Inês Barbosa de Oliveira para os estudos da metodologia do campo do cotidiano escolar; Marilena Chauí para os estudos da cultura política brasileira; Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal e Boaventura de Sousa Santos para os estudos de democracia e epistemologia

Getúlio Damado e Roger Mello: conexões entre o campo da arte e o universo lúdico infantil

A ideia central da pesquisa foi promover uma aproximação das narrativas visuais de Getúlio Damado e Roger Mello e a partir daí evidenciar os processos cognitivos e as estratégias que envolveram a estruturação de suas identidades sociais e linguagens artísticas contemporâneas, bem como destacar o ludismo e o acesso ao universo da infância e a cultura popular que ambos ressignificam em suas obras. Além disso, buscou-se comentar e avaliar momentos específicos de desprestígio e repúdio versus consagração ocorridos com os artistas. Para tal, essas produções foram contextualizadas como produções culturais em constante processo de mutação, do qual participam tanto eventos históricos como de inovação tecnológica, em contínua construção. Essas linguagens estão submetidas a uma grande velocidade e a superposição de influências. Outro ponto destacado nas analises foi o caráter de subjetividade dessas produções, identificadas como práticas estéticas promotoras de transformação política; de mobilização; ou também por sua capacidade de operar com o uso simbólico dos brinquedos e livros infantojuvenis recuperando-lhes o uso original. Os devaneios, o ludismo infantil e a cultura popular presentes nos objetos feitos de sucata e livros ilustrados foram confrontados com práticas consoantes, ou de discursos abrangentes, correntes no mundo da arte ou outras vezes aproximados de enfoques locais. Além da possibilidade de convergência entre as produções foram destacadas também muitas diferenças, e, sobretudo evidenciadas as potencialidades que podem advir da cultura popular como campo exploratório de pesquisa, bem como de sua ressignificação

Anticipated impacts of recent political changes on fisheries management in South Africa

South Africa's marine resources are essentially fully exploited and in some cases over exploited. The Government of National Unity has embarked on the ambitious Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) to: meet the basic needs; develop the country's human resources; build economy; and democratize the state and society. Although fisheries can only be expected to play a minor role in contributing to RDP, the Programme have a role to play in managing South Africa's living marine resources. The role of RDP in fisheries management is presented together with fisheries management approaches to help achieve the aims of the RDP.

On equations for regular languages, finite automata, and sequential networks

We consider systems of equations of the form where A is the underlying alphabet, the Xi are variables, the Pi,a are boolean functions in the variables Xi, and each δi is either the empty word or the empty set. The symbols υ and denote concatenation and union of languages over A. We show that any such system has a unique solution which, moreover, is regular. These equations correspond to a type of automation, called boolean automation, which is a generalization of a nondeterministic automation. The equations are then used to determine the language accepted by a sequential network; they are obtainable directly from the network.

practical type checking of functions defined on context-free languages

A type checking method for the functional language LFC is presented. A distinct feature of LFC is that it uses Context-Free (CF) languages as data types to represent compound data structures. This makes LFC a dynamically typed language. To improve efficiency, a practical type checking method is presented, which consists of both static and dynamic type checking. Although the inclusion relation of CF.languages is not decidable,a special subset of the relation is decidable, i.e., the sentential form relation, which can be statically checked.Moreover, most of the expressions in actual LFC programs appear to satisfy this relation according to the statistic data of experiments. So, despite that the static type checking is not complete, it undertakes most of the type checking task. Consequently the run-time efficiency is effectively improved. Another feature of the type checking is that it converts the expressions with implicit structures to structured representation. Structure reconstruction technique is presented.

pattern matching compilation of functions defined in context-free languages

LFC is a functional language based on recursive functions defined in context-free languages. In this paper, a new pattern matching algorithm for LFC is presented, which can represent a sequence of patterns as an integer by an encoding method. It is a rather simple method and produces efficient case-expressions for pattern matching definitions of LFC. The algorithm can also be used for other functional languages, but for nested patterns it may become complicated and further studies are needed.

facilitating formal specification acquisition by using recursive functions on context-free languages

Although formal specification techniques are very useful in software development, the acquisition of formal specifications is a difficult task. This paper presents the formal specification language LFC, which is designed to facilitate the acquisition and validation of formal specifications. LFC uses context-free languages for syntactic aspect and relies on a new kind of recursive functions, i.e. recursive functions on context-free languages, for semantic aspect of specifications. Construction and validation of LFC specifications are machine-aided. The basic ideas behind LFC, the main aspects of LFC, and the use of LFC and illustrative examples are described.

on string languages generated by spiking neural p systems

We continue the study of spiking neural P systems by considering these computing devices as binary string generators: the set of spike trains of halting computations of a given system constitutes the language generated by that system. Although the "direct" generative capacity of spiking neural P systems is rather restricted (some very simple languages cannot be generated in this framework), regular languages are inverse-morphic images of languages of finite spiking neural P systems, and recursively enumerable languages are projections of inverse-morphic images of languages generated by spiking neural P systems.

A Note of Zipf's Law, Natural Languages, and Noncoding DNA Regions

In Phys. Rev. Letters (73:2), Mantegna et al. conclude on the basis of Zipf rank frequency data that noncoding DNA sequence regions are more like natural languages than coding regions. We argue on the contrary that an empirical fit to Zipf"s "law" cannot be used as a criterion for similarity to natural languages. Although DNA is a presumably "organized system of signs" in Mandelbrot"s (1961) sense, and observation of statistical featurs of the sort presented in the Mantegna et al. paper does not shed light on the similarity between DNA's "gramar" and natural language grammars, just as the observation of exact Zipf-like behavior cannot distinguish between the underlying processes of tossing an M-sided die or a finite-state branching process.

Supporting Dynamic Languages on the Java Virtual Machine

In this note, I propose two extensions to the Java virtual machine (or VM) to allow dynamic languages such as Dylan, Scheme and Smalltalk to be efficiently implemented on the VM. These extensions do not affect the performance of pure Java programs on the machine. The first extension allows for efficient encoding of dynamic data; the second allows for efficient encoding of language-specific computational elements.