Suchergebnisse

Reseña de Jacob A. Zumoff, The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929, Leiden, Brill (Historical Materialism book series, 82), 2014, 443 pgs.

Review of: Farewell Colonialism: The New Zealand International Exhibition, Christchurch, 1906-07. John Mansfield Thomson (ed), The Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1998, $39.95

Introduction: New Histories of Latin America at the League of Nations / Yannick Wehrli -- Part One. Sovereignty and Conflict Resolution -- Anti-Imperialism and the Failure of the League of Nations / Alan McPherson -- A Dangerous League of Nations : The Abyssinian War and Latin American Proposals for the Regionalization of Collective Security / Yannick Wehrli -- Mexico and its "Defense" of Ethiopia at the League of Nations / Fabián Herrera León -- Non-Intervention through Intervention : Mexican Diplomacy in the League of Nations during the Spanish Civil War / Abdiel Oñate -- Part Two. Labor -- Europe-Geneva-America : The First International Conference of American States Affiliated to the International Labour Organization / Norberto Osvaldo Ferreras -- "To Raise Awareness of Difficulties and to Assert their Opinion" : The International Labour Office and the Regionalization of International Cooperation in the 1930s / Véronique Plata-Stenger -- Beyond Social Legislation : Worker Unity in Latin America and its Links to the International Labour Organization, 1936-1939 / Patricio Herrera González -- Part Three. Intellectual and Scientific Cooperation -- "The Spirit of Harmony" and the Politics of (Latin American) History at the League of Nations / Corinne Pernet -- Latin America at the Crossroads : The Inter-American Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, the League of Nations, and the Pan-American Union / Juliette Dumont -- Between National and International Science and Education : Miguel Ozório de Almeida and the League of Nations's Intellectual Cooperation Project / Letícia Pumar -- Rudolf Kraus, South America, and the League of Nations's Permanent Commission on Biological Standardization / Juliana Manzoni -- Part Four. Economic and Social Activities -- Discovering Underdevelopment : Argentina and Double Taxation at the League of Nations / José Antonio Sánchez Román -- Latin America and International Nutrition : Integrative Channels in the Interwar Period / Maria Leticia Galluzzi Bizzo -- Separating the Political from the Technical : The 1938 League of Nations Mission to Latin America / Amelia Kiddle -- Conclusion: The Distinct Integration of Latin America / Alan McPherson

International development cooperation and political risks for transnational business are two topics which have always drawn attention from specialists in international political economy. Each of these topics is studied by a dedicated subdiscipline with a specific terminology, strong analytical centers and influential peer-reviewed journals. Despite political risks had initially been associated with developing countries (and transition economies — after the Cold War), two distinctive research clusters have developed separately from one another — quite inexplicably. Drawing on the idea of immanent proximity of international development studies and political risk analysis, this paper develops the logic of blending their research agendas.The first two sections formulate key presumptions meant to justify the conjugation of two topics. The first presumption is an acknowledgement of an engrained commercial motivation in any modality of development cooperation and the latter's ability to serve as a tool to promote foreign economic interests. The second presumption emphasizes the existence of an indissoluble link between political risks for business with socio-economic and political development disbalances within and between countries. The final section identifies concrete dimensions of conjugation of two research agendas, such as: 1) conducting political risk assessments in the course of programming and implementing development projects; 2) examining the impact of political risk manifestations on provider countries' ability to mobilize financial resources for international development; studying the practices of using different development cooperation tools to mitigate political risks for foreign economic activity — both through a direct and deliberate reduction of risk perceived by business and through an indirect impact on the environment where political risks are formed; 4) exploring the logic of emergence of new risk factors (of various types) in the course of implementing development cooperation policies. The conclusion argues for focusing on the reverse impact of new trends in international development cooperation on the parameters of political risks for international business from the Western and non-Western countries amidst the global turbulence, using all available sources of statistical data — conventional and unconventional. It also draws a step-by-step research plan and assesses the theoretical and policy relevance of obtaining anticipated results.

Within search-on-speech, Spoken Term Detection (STD) aims to retrieve data from a speech repository given a textual representation of a search term. This paper presents an international open evaluation for search-on-speech based on STD in Spanish and an analysis of the results. The evaluation has been designed carefully so that several analyses of the main results can be carried out. The evaluation consists in retrieving the speech files that contain the search terms, providing their start and end times, and a score value that reflects the confidence given to the detection. Two different Spanish speech databases have been employed in the evaluation: MAVIR database, which comprises a set of talks from workshops, and EPIC database, which comprises a set of European Parliament sessions in Spanish. We present the evaluation itself, both databases, the evaluation metric, the systems submitted to the evaluation, the results, and a detailed discussion. Five different research groups took part in the evaluation, and ten different systems were submitted in total. We compare the systems submitted to the evaluation and make a deep analysis based on some search term properties (term length, within-vocabulary/out-of-vocabulary terms, single-word/multi-word terms, and native (Spanish)/foreign terms).