Suchergebnisse

From the Popular science monthly, vol. LXXXVI, no. 3, March, 1915. ; Cover title. ; Astronomy on the Pacific Coast, by Prof. R.T. Crawford.--The biological laboratories of the Pacific Coast, by Prof. W.E. Ritter.--The last wild tribe of California, by Prof. T.T. Waterman.--Extinct faunas of the Mohave Desert, by Prof. J.C. Merriam.--Insects of the Pacific, by Prof. V.L. Kellogg.--The physiological aspects of California for the botanist, by Prof. G.J. Peirce.--Social legislation on the Pacific Coast, by Prof. W.F. Ogburn.--The volcanic activity of Lassen Peak, California, by Prof. R.S. Holway. ; Mode of access: Internet.

We study a model of public decision-making in simple public goods economies with moral hazards and adverse selection. Economic agents must invest resources (or provide effort) to discover their own preferences. We consider direct revelation mechanisms based on sampling. A sample of agents is drawn in the population, and each member of the sample reports a preferences type to a Principal. The determinants of the "representative sample" size are studied. The structure and magnitude of effort and sampling costs affects the optimal number of representatives. If the net social value of the effort is high, first and second best optimality require a maximal sample (or "direct democracy"). If, on the contrary, effort is too costly, the recourse to samples ("representative democracy") is justified as a second best. To obtain the results, we not only take effort and revelation incentives into account, but also restrict decision rules to satisfy an additional property of robustness to opportunistic manipulation by the Principal, which forbids the use of a priori knowledge in public decision procedures.

The thesis deals with Lebanese political parties and their encounters with modernity. The three parties dealt with in this study hold the idea that they are "real" parties that bring about the "real" nation. The objective of the present thesis is to examine what "real" refers to. This study suggests that all three parties are heavily influenced by asymmetrical references to a global normativity. These references are informed by the parties'experience in Lebanonwhere they find themselves positioned within global theoretical abstractions and where both, the normativity as well as their abstractions, are felt even in party members' daily lives.International socio-scientific literature has identified two trends that, as the literature suggests, had evolved since the late twentieth century: First, the nation-state had become less important, and, second, utopian thinking had vanished. The study adds up various panoramas of situations when it became urgent to define one's identity and claims that important constituents of modernity, such as the individual, the nation, progress, and representing the demos, serve for the parties in question as resources of utopian elements. This becomes evident from official texts and personal self-narrations. Most importantly, Lebanese parties are still taking the nation state as their central reference point and aim at bringing the nation state about because to them it is the legitimate form of organization of society. In consequence, this thesis questions if the alleged weakening of modernity and its intellectualprogram can be claimed a universal age. It proposes a stronger emphasis on the enforcing, the "pedagogical" (Bhabha) side of representation by researching political parties to make utopian elements visible.

While demographers have long been concerned with population increases, recent significant declines in fertility also warrant concern. However, most researchers to date have focused on the causes of lower fertility rather than its consequences. Using General Social Survey (GSS) data,
I tested the relationship between sibship size and generalized trust. I found that there is a negative relationship between sibship size and generalized trust among adults who have at least 4 siblings. These findings have implications for researchers who seek to have a better understanding
of the consequences of declining sibship size.