Individual and Collective Performance and the Tenureof British Ministers 1945-1997

We study the effects of individual and collective ministerial performance on the length oftime a minister serves in British government from 1945-97, using the number ofresignation calls for a minister as an individual performance indicator and the cumulativenumber of such calls as an indicator of government performance. Our analysis lendssupport to a 'two-strike rule': ministers facing a second call for their resignation have asignificantly higher hazard than those facing their first, irrespective of the performance ofthe government. A minister's hazard rate is decreasing in the cumulative number ofresignation calls; but conditional on receiving a first resignation call, the hazard rateincreases with the number of calls that all government ministers have faced in the past.Our message is that collective ministerial performance is a key determinant of whether aminister survives his first resignation call.

Interpreting Language in Context in CommandTalk

This paper will focus on how two representations of context are used in CommandTalk to correctly interpret the user's spoken utterances: situational context represents the current state of the simulation, and linguistic context represents the history of the user's linguistic acts

Impact of open de-ionized water thin film laminar immersion on the liquid immersed ablation threshold and ablation rate of features machined by KrF excimer laser ablation of bisphenol A polycarbonate

Debris control and surface quality are potential major benefits of sample liquid immersion when laser micromachining; however, the use of an immersion technique potentially modifies the ablation mechanism when compared to an ambient air interaction. To investigate the machining characteristics, bisphenol A polycarbonate has been laser machined in air and under a controllable open liquid film. To provide quantitative analysis, ablation threshold, ablation rate and the attenuation coefficient of the immersing DI water fluid were measured. In ambient air the threshold fluence was measured to be 37 mJ.cm-2. Thin film immersion displayed two trends: threshold fluences of 58.6 mJcm-2 and 83.9 mJcm-2. The attenuation of DI water was found to be negligible; thus, the change in ablation rate resulted from increased confinement of the vapour plume by the liquid medium, generating higher Bremsstrahlung attenuation of the beam, lowering the laser etch rate. Simultaneously, splashing motivated by the confined ablation plume allowed release of plume pressure before plume etching commenced. This contributed to the loss of total etching efficiency. Two interaction scenarios were obsereved as a result of splashing: (i) intermediate threshold fluence, where splashing occured after every pulse in a mode that interrupted the flow entirely, leaving an ambient air interaction for the following pulse; (ii) high threshold fluence, where splashing occured for every pulse in a mode that allowed the flow to recommence over the image before the next pulse causing every pulse to experience Bremsstrahlung attenuation. Since attenuation of the immersion liquid was negligible, it is the action of the constrained ablation plume within a thin flowing immersion liquid, the resultant Bremsstrahlung attenuation and splashing events that are the critical mechanisms that modify the primary ablation characteristics

Building a robust dialogue system with limited data

We describe robustness techniques used in the CommandTalk system at the recognition level, the parsing level, and th dia6ue level, and how these were influenced by the lack of domain data. We used interviews with subject matter experts (SME's) to develop a single grammar for recognition, understanding, and generation, thus eliminating the need for a robust parser. We broadened the coverage of the recognition grammar by allowing word insertions and deletions, and we implemented clarification and correction subdialogues to increase robustness at tte dialogue level. We discuss the applicability of these techniques to other domains

The length of ministerial tenure in the UK 1945-1997

We analyse the determinants of ministerial hazard rates in the UK from 1945-1997. We focus on three sets of attributes i) personal characteristics of the minister; ii) political characteristics of the minister and iii) characteristics pertaining to the government in which the minister serves. We find that educational background increases ministers’ capacity to survive, that female ministers have lower hazard rates and older ministers have higher hazard rates. Experienced ministers have higher hazard than newly appointed ministers. Ministerial rank increases a ministers’ capacity to survive, with full cabinet members having the lowest hazard rates in our sample. We use different strategies to controls for the characteristics of the government the ministers serve in. Our results are robust to any of these controls

Ambiguity and vagueness in political terminology: on coding and referential imprecision

Analytic political philosophy tries to make our political language more precise. But in doing so it risks departing from our natural language and intuitions. This article examines this tension. We argue that the ambiguity and vagueness of our political language can be overcome with coding decisions. While vagueness is a deeper philosophical problem than ambiguity, there are important conceptual similarities. Gareth Evans has formally proved that there can be conflicting yet equally valid precisifications of vague terms. We show that this is the case for complex terms in political philosophy, where each precisification captures part of the sense of the complex term. Vagueness can be overcome by eliminating the terms in certain contexts of analysis. Versions of the subscript gambit can be used to resolve both ambiguity and vagueness

GEMINI: A Natural Language System for Spoken-Language Understanding

Gemini is a natural language understanding system developed for spoken language applications. The paper describes the architecture of Gemini, paying particular attention to resolving the tension between robustness and overgeneration. Gemini features a broad-coverage unification-based grammar of English, fully interleaved syntactic and semantic processing in an all-paths, bottom-up parser, and an utterance-level parser to find interpretations of sentences that might not be analyzable as complete sentences. Gemini also includes novel components for recognizing and correcting grammatical disfluencies, and for doing parse preferences. This paper presents a component-by-component view of Gemini, providing detailed relevant measurements of size, efficiency, and performance.Comment: 8 pages, postscrip

A perspective from Kazakhstan

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the national university in developing sustainable cultural heritage digital preservation practices. Design/methodology/approach – Using Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan as an example, this paper discusses current development of cultural heritage digital collections, and looks to the university library’s impact on nationwide digital practices development. Findings – While the university and its digital collections are still nascent, NU will likely have a large impact on the creation of sustainable digital cultural heritage preservation practices due to its international visibility and direct connection to stakeholders. Originality/value – Focused on developing nations, this paper will be of special interest to librarians working in countries facing similar challenges, such as other CIS nations