402 research outputs found

    Project Vote Smart Bus Plans Dominican Stop

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    The non-partisan Project Vote Smart group has created an archive of searchable information on all the candidates for president, U.S. Congress, governor, and state legislature. The organization is traveling the nation on a 45-foot red and blue motor coach to deliver information on each candidate’s voting record, speeches, campaign finance information, and interest group ratings

    The Grizzly, March 27, 2003

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    America at War: President Bush says Victory is Certain in Iraq • A Day in the Life of a UN Weapons Inspector • Celebrate Women\u27s History Month • A Fine Ursinus Fellow • Project Vote Smart Approves Five Scholarships for Ursinus College Students • Psyched up for Psycho Beach Party • Calling All Talents • Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women • Men\u27s Basketball Falls to Scranton • Howard Earns All-American Honors • Dougherty 11th at NCAA Track Championshipshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1532/thumbnail.jp

    The Partial Evaluation Approach to Information Personalization

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    Information personalization refers to the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to an individual user. By reducing information overload and customizing information access, personalization systems have emerged as an important segment of the Internet economy. This paper presents a systematic modeling methodology - PIPE (`Personalization is Partial Evaluation') - for personalization. Personalization systems are designed and implemented in PIPE by modeling an information-seeking interaction in a programmatic representation. The representation supports the description of information-seeking activities as partial information and their subsequent realization by partial evaluation, a technique for specializing programs. We describe the modeling methodology at a conceptual level and outline representational choices. We present two application case studies that use PIPE for personalizing web sites and describe how PIPE suggests a novel evaluation criterion for information system designs. Finally, we mention several fundamental implications of adopting the PIPE model for personalization and when it is (and is not) applicable.Comment: Comprehensive overview of the PIPE model for personalizatio

    A Time for Action: A New Vision of Participatory Democracy

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    For over eighty years, the League of Women Voters has been a voice for women and men of all backgrounds, rising above partisan disputes to help citizens fully and intelligently exercise their rights -- and their responsibilities -- as participants in the American experiment. The League has earned a reputation for integrity and fairness, and generations have relied upon League resources to help them make the kind of informed decisions that keep policymakers responsive and truly give weight and meaning to the hallowed phrase "consent of the governed."The League has cultivated expertise on electoral behavior and public policy at national, state, and local levels, and has been a leader in identifying and researching political trends. In recent years, one of the most distressing trends has been the ongoing decline of civic participation, in the voting booth and beyond. If one measure of the health of democracy is the rate at which citizens participate in elections, the fitness of the American body politic has been spiraling downward ever since voter turnout peaked in 1960.Recognizing the need for new insights and strategies to attack this problem, the Chicago chapter of the League convened a Task Force of recognized experts and leaders from the community to spearhead an examination of the factors at play. Concerned organizations of many stripes have studied the situation over the years, but there has been no authoritative summary of what we know and what we yet need to learn that can be turned into real steps toward a solution. Why are people dropping out of the political process....and what can be done to draw them back? What creative strategies hold the most promise for capturing Americans' attention, raising their awareness, and inspiring them to participate?The Task Force's findings are often disturbing, yet they also give cause for optimism. Americans may be keeping to themselves in growing numbers, but they do not do so solely from apathy or indifference; and want only to be invited to share their views, to be assured that government will pay attention, to be shown how and why they can make a difference. Young people especially have felt shut out of the process, despite knowing as well as anyone what matters to them and their communities. It's time they were invited back in. In this deeply polarized political moment, it is vitally important that we remind all Americans that civic engagement isn't merely about the often arcane and alienating world of politics -- it's a way to share in something bigger than ourselves, to express our devotion to our country and our community, to assure that (in Abraham Lincoln's timeless phrase) "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."Here in the state that was home to the author of those words, in the city where he was nominated for the presidency, we can take the first steps toward reinvigorating the vision he expressed. It is the hope of the League and the Task Force that this report will point the way toward those steps

    The pronouncements of paranoid politicians

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    This paper models the strategic encounter of two office-motivated candidates who may or may not announce policy. In the case of no announcement, the voters rank the candidates according to prior beliefs. In the case of announcement, the candidates cannot avoid a degree of noise in the voters' interpretation of their announcements. We show that this simple deviation from the standard Downsian setting suffices to overcome previous impossibility results which suggest that not announcing policy can never occur in equilibrium. Also, we extend the model to study the equilibrium when candidates are ambiguity averse. An ambiguity averse candidate is interpreted as being concerned about an ongoing negative campaign against him. This negative campaign would consist in inducing the voters to adopt some interpretation of the candidate's announcement unfavorable to his electoral performance. We show that under ambiguity aversion the candidates opt not to announce position under less stringent conditions than expected utility. Finally, we use data on U.S. Senate elections to test an empirical implication of the model. We find that the relevant coefficient has the sign predicted by the theory and is statistically significant.Voting; Salience; Electoral Ambiguity; Ambiguity Aversion; Media Politics

    Whalesong

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    Project Vote Smart Scholarships available for Alaska students -- The Alaska Native Oratory Society Contest: it's not just about the money -- UAS adding to the menu -- Quit the band and get off the wagon -- Juneau's Public Health Fair is coming! -- Space shuttle Columbia, almost home... -- Get a real job; UAS makes it easy -- Mobile Test Lab delivered to UAS -- Juneau World Affairs Conference a success -- It's a bird, it's a blane... no, it's SuperKent! -- Life in the Matrix -- Preview -- The Best Movie You Never Saw..

    John Kerry’s Political Rhetoric: An Account of the Main Rhetorical Features of His Oral Delivery

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    Decenes Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la FCHS (Any 2004-2005)An accurate use of language is a key factor in achieving personal and public objectives in all spheres of our everyday interaction, but the exploitation of the appropriate linguistic resources becomes crucial for those professionals involved in the field of politics. Obtaining the support of the masses, legitimising political policies, or succeeding in public debates and parliamentary negotiations may depend to a great extent on the kind of language a politician employs and its adequacy to each political event. This paper analyses the oral delivery of senator John F. Kerry –the favourite Democratic Party candidate for the US presidency in the 2004 presidential elections– in four public events (two debates and two speeches) celebrated before the election day. Our study focuses particularly on the analysis of a series of rhetorical patterns and linguistic devices employed by the senator in order to empower his argumentations, namely: three-part statements, contrastive pairs, lexical and syntactic repetition, purposive selection and use of pronouns, addressing formulae, introductory formulae for personal opinion and ideology, and the usage of discourse organisers. The results of this study hint, inter alia, that behind the apparent spontaneity of Kerry’s oral delivery there is a selective use of linguistic devices, which is necessarily the product of prior consideration and thoughtful discourse elaboration

    Do Lawyer-Legislators Protect Their Business? Evidence from Voting Behavior on Tort Reforms

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    Attorneys elected to the US House of Representatives and to US state legislatures are systematically less likely to vote in favor of tort reforms that restrict tort litigation, but more likely to support bills that extend tort law. This finding is based on the analysis of 54 votes at the federal and state level between 1995 and 2012. It holds when controlling for legislators’ ideology and is particularly strong for term-limited lawyer-legislators. The empirical regularity is consistent with the hypothesis that lawyer-legislators, at least in part, pursue their business interests when voting on tort issues. Our results highlight the relevance of legislators’ identities and individual professional interests for economic policy making
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