This book provides an unparalleled insider's look at the factors leading up to the 1997-98 crisis in South Korea and how the crisis unfolded over the next two years. Written by former finance ...minister Kyu-Sung Lee, this book traces the evolving situation across the key sectors and the series of policy and institutional measures the government deployed throughout the crisis. This book is a must-read for policymakers, scholars, students, and any reader interested in understanding the facts and circumstances surrounding the 1997-98 crisis, the policies undertaken at the time, and what the experience implies for preventing future crises.
Water in confined geometries has obvious relevance in biology, geology, and other areas where the material properties are strongly dependent on the amount and behavior of water in these types of ...materials. Another reason to restrict the size of water domains by different types of geometrical confinements has been the possibility to study the structural and dynamical behavior of water in the deeply supercooled regime (e.g., 150–230 K at ambient pressure), where bulk water immediately crystallizes to ice. In this paper we give a short review of studies with this particular goal. However, from these studies it is also clear that the interpretations of the experimental data are far from evident. Therefore, we present three main interpretations to explain the experimental data, and we discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, none of the proposed scenarios is able to predict all the observations for supercooled and glassy bulk water, indicating that either the structural and dynamical alterations of confined water are too severe to make predictions for bulk water or the differences in how the studied water has been prepared (applied cooling rate, resulting density of the water, etc.) are too large for direct and quantitative comparisons.
Didattiche orientate all'intercomprensione tra lingue romanze dimostrano che, incoraggiando specifiche pragmatiche traduttive, è possibile raggiungere un obiettivo: in un circuito di parlanti lingue ...romanze, ogni discente può arrivare a parlare la propria lingua sapendo di essere compreso dagli interlocutori, soprattutto su argomenti di interesse comune. Ispirandoci a queste teorie che valorizzano concetti noti da secoli, riflettiamo su quali pragmatiche, a un tempo traduttive e politico-culturali, Raízes do Brasil abbia incoraggiato nel 1936 prendendo come asse il bilinguismo luso-ispano-americano, per favorire l'intercomprensione su una condividenda idea di América Latina. Altre quattro edizioni di Raízes do Brasil continueranno, con dati aggiornati, a ‘parlare in portoghese’ fino al 1969 sia con lusofoni/ispanofoni sia con una serie di altri teorici interlocutori fra i quali, dagli argomenti evidenziati sin dall'editio princeps, si riconosce l’italofono. Si enunciano pertanto alcuni nuclei di una ricerca sui riscontri che documentano la varietà dei processi inferenziali riconoscibili in due profili di lettori, i lusofoni/ispanofoni e quelli di altri background: lettori invitati a cooperare in quel processo di risemantizzazione del frame América Latina onde evitare che venisse inquinato da ideologie dittatoriali provenienti dall'Europa. Continuando a ‘parlare’ contro le dittature – in un portoghese classico che qualsiasi ispanoamericano e italofono poteva deverbalizzare direttamente nell'atto lettorio – la storia redazionale/editoriale del saggio coinciderà con un tempo sufficientemente lungo affinché la risemantizzazione del frame América Latina basata sui portati culturali veicolati dal bilinguismo luso/ispano-americano si affermasse. Di quell’incessante reframing di América Latina si avrà riscontro nella Constituição del 1988 che restituirà al Brasile la democrazia, ponendo al contempo le basi per il MercoSul/Sur le cui lingue ufficiali saranno ovviamente il portoghese e lo spagnolo.
The people of Myanmar were struck by three major human rights
disasters during the country's period of democratization from 2003
to 2012: the 2007 Saffron Revolution, the aftermath of Cyclone
Nargis ...in 2008, and the 2012 Rakhine riots, which would evolve into
the ongoing Rohingya crisis. These events saw Myanmar's government
categorically labeled as an offender of human rights, and three
powerful Southeast Asian member states-Indonesia, Thailand, and
Malaysia-responded to the violations in very different ways. In
each case, their responses to the crises were explicitly shaped by
norm conflict, which may be understood as a tension between
international and domestic norms. Their reactions were compelled by
a need to address conflicting domestic and international
expectations for norm compliance regarding human rights protection
and non-interference in internal affairs.
In Norms in Conflict: Southeast Asia's Response to
Human Rights Violations in Myanmar, Anchalee Rüland makes
sense of state action that occurs when a governing body is faced
with a circumstance that is at once in line with and contrary to
its own governing policies. She defines five different types of
response strategies to situations of norm conflict and examines the
enabling factors that lead to each strategy. Domestic norms are
known to evolve as a country's values change over time yet Rüland
argues that the old and new norms may also coexist; knowledge of
the underlying political context is crucial for those seeking a
solid understanding of state behavior. Norms in Conflict
challenges the conventional understanding of the logic of
consequences in determining state behavior, advancing
constructivist theory and establishing a provocative new
conversation in international relations discourse.
Mexico since 1980 Haber, Stephen; Klein, Herbert S.; Maurer, Noel ...
07/2008
eBook
This book addresses two questions that are crucial to understanding Mexico's current economic and political challenges. Why did the opening up of the economy to foreign trade and investment not ...result in sustained economic growth? Why has electoral democracy not produced rule of law? The answer to those questions lies in the ways in which Mexico's long history with authoritarian government shaped its judicial, taxation, and property rights institutions. These institutions, the authors argue, cannot be reformed with the stroke of a pen. Moreover, they represent powerful constraints on the ability of the Mexican government to fund welfare-enhancing reforms, on the ability of firms and households to write contracts, and on the ability of citizens to enforce their basic rights.
Clinical trials of the PET amyloid imaging agent F-18-flutemetamol have used visual assessment to classify PET scans as negative or positive for brain amyloid. However, quantification provides ...additional information about regional and global tracer uptake and may have utility for image assessment over time and across different centers. Using postmortem brain neuritic plaque density data as a truth standard to derive a standardized uptake value ratio (SUVR) threshold, we assessed a fully automated quantification method comparing visual and quantitative scan categorizations. We also compared the histopathology-derived SUVR threshold with one derived from healthy controls. Methods: Data from 345 consenting subjects enrolled in 8 prior clinical trials of F-18-flutemetamol injection were used. We grouped subjects into 3 cohorts: an autopsy cohort (n = 68) comprising terminally ill patients with postmortem confirmation of brain amyloid status; a test cohort (n = 172) comprising 33 patients with clinically probable Alzheimer disease, 80 patients with mild cognitive impairment, and 59 healthy volunteers; and a healthy cohort of 105 volunteers, used to define a reference range for SUVR. Visual image categorizations for comparison were from a previous study. A fully automated PET-only quantification method was used to compute regional neocortical SUVRs that were combined into a single composite SUVR. An SUVR threshold for classifying scans as positive or negative was derived by ranking the PET scans from the autopsy cohort based on their composite SUVR and comparing data with the standard of truth based on postmortem brain amyloid status for subjects in the autopsy cohort. The derived threshold was used to categorize the 172 scans in the test cohort as negative or positive, and results were compared with categorization using visual assessment. Different reference and composite region definitions were assessed. Threshold levels were also compared with corresponding thresholds derived from the healthy group. Results: Automated quantification (using pons as the reference region) demonstrated 91% sensitivity and 88% specificity and gave 3 false-positive and 4 false-negative scans. All 3 false-positive cases were either borderline-normal by standard of truth or had moderate to heavy cortical diffuse plaque burden. In the test cohort, the concordance between quantitative and visual read categorization ranged from 97.1% to 99.4% depending on the selection of reference and composite regions. The threshold derived from the healthy group was close to the histopathology-derived threshold. Conclusion: Categorization of F-18-flutemetamol amyloid imaging data using an automated PET-only quantification method showed good agreement with histopathologic classification of neuritic plaque density and a strong concordance with visual read results.
Since the mid-1980s, a dramatic opening in Mexico’s political and electoral processes, combined with the growth of a new civic culture, has created unprecedented opportunities for women and other ...previously repressed or ignored groups to participate in the political life of the nation. In this book, Victoria Rodríguez offers the first comprehensive analysis of how Mexican women have taken advantage of new opportunities to participate in the political process through elected and appointed office, nongovernmental organizations, and grassroots activism. Drawing on scores of interviews with politically active women conducted since 1994, Rodríguez looks at Mexican women’s political participation from a variety of angles. She analyzes the factors that have increased women’s political activity: from the women’s movement, to the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s, to increasing democratization, to the victory of Vicente Fox in the 2000 presidential election. She maps out the pathways that women have used to gain access to public life and also the roadblocks that continue to limit women’s participation in politics, especially at higher levels of government. And she offers hopeful, yet realistic predictions for women’s future participation in the political life of Mexico.
This study focuses on the validation and applicability of a recently modified semi-empirical technique (MSET) to integrate site effects. The improvement of MSET by considering site effects has been ...verified by the data of the 1988 Indo-Burma earthquake (
M
w
7.2), which happened in the North Eastern Region (NER) in India. This technique is also used to model a future scenario earthquake (
M
w
8.2) in the NER. The required site effects are estimated using Nakamura’s horizontal-to-vertical (
H
/
V
) ratio technique for 89 waveform records. The obtained site effects are further used to modify an existing semi-empirical technique. To validate this modification, the strong-motion records of the 1988 Indo-Burma earthquake are simulated for bedrock and surface conditions. Afterwards, the root mean square error (RMSE) of these records is compared with surface records obtained by 14 seismic stations. The records simulated at the surface are well validated well with observed ones as compared to the records simulated at bedrock and hence confirm the reliability of the MSET. The improved performance of the MSET after incorporation of site effects validates the approach of the present work and will prove to be significant for simulation of earthquake surface conditions in any region. Further, this improved MSET is used to simulate strong-motion records of a future scenario earthquake (
M
w
8.2) with the same epicentral location. The iso-acceleration maps are prepared from simulated records for both cases (
M
w
7.2 and 8.2), which provide peak ground acceleration (PGA) values of more than 500 and 1000, respectively, for near-field regions. The obtained results are of significant interest for seismic hazard assessment of NE India.
We present an improved panel database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5%, having declined by approximately 2 Gini points. China ...graduated from the bottom ranks, changing a twin-peaked global income distribution to a single-peaked one and creating an important global “median” class. 90% of the fastest growing country-deciles are from Asia, while almost 90% of the worst performers are from mature economies. Another “winner” was the global top 1%. Hence the global growth incidence curve has a distinct supine S shape, with gains highest around the median and top.
Investigates state involvement in war crimes surrounding activists on the island of Bougainville, who struggled to close a Rio Tinto owned copper mine.
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