Narrative and Belonging: The Politics of Ambiguity, The Jewish State, and the Thought of Edward Said and Hannah Arendt

At the core of this thesis, I examine the difficulties of giving an account of oneself in modern associational life. By integrating the theory and political activism of both Edward Said and Hannah Arendt, I follow the Zionist response to European antisemitism and the Palestinian responses to Jewish settler colonialism. Both parties struggle against their ambiguous presence within local and regional hegemonic social taxonomy, and within the world order. Contemporarily, this struggle takes place in the protracted conflict between Israeli and local Arab groups, which has been managed through violence and objectification, as opposed to allowing the dynamism and reconfiguration of political subjectivities. In their later writings, Arendt and Said respond to the violence and resentment that arises from the form of the nation-state by prescribing, and arguably practicing, an understanding of politics where the “other” is constitutive of the “self.” By seeing this relation of alternity as the contemporary heir to diasporic Judaism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, I argue that this project holds the historical traction to reinvigorate the future beyond static and growing violence and dispossession

Decision trees, monotone functions, and semimatroids

We define decision trees for monotone functions on a simplicial complex. We define homology decidability of monotone functions, and show that various monotone functions related to semimatroids are homology decidable. Homology decidability is a generalization of semi-nonevasiveness, a notion due to Jonsson. The motivating example is the complex of bipartite graphs, whose Betti numbers are unknown in general. We show that these monotone functions have optimum decision trees, from which we can compute relative Betti numbers of related pairs of simplicial complexes. Moreover, these relative Betti numbers are coefficients of evaluations of the Tutte polynomial, and every semimatroid collapses onto its broken circuit complex.Comment: 16 page

The coordination of economic policies

Foreign exchange rates

An extended gravity model with substitution applied to international trade

The traditional gravity model has been applied many times to international trade flows, especially in order to analyze trade creation and trade diversion. However, there are two fundamental objections to the model: it cannot describe substitutions between flows and it lacks a cogent theoretical foundation. A newly developed model, the Extended Gravity Model (EGM), overcomes these objections. The model shares characteristics of the models of Bergstrand (1985), Andersen and Van Wincoop (2003), and Redding and Scott (2003). An empirical test on a world-wide sample of 19 thousand 2005 trade flows strongly rejects the gravity model in favour of the EGM. The empirical analysis also shows that the gravity model widely overestimates the influence of the determinants of international trade, which is due to strong substitution between trade flows, reducing the initial (gravity model) effects. Substitution determines both trade creation and trade diversion. The EGM encompasses several models originating in regional economics and can be applied usefully to a wide set of subjects.bilateral trade, imports, exports, spatial allocation, trade creation, trade diversion, distance, market access, supplier access, multilateral resistance terms, remoteness indices

Survey of Tribal Court Effectiveness Studies

This article examines empirical studies that have been conducted on the effectiveness of tribal courts, both in terms of reduction in recidivism and participant attitudes, and a look at some of the challenges to implementing a tribal court effectiveness study in Alaska.[Introduction] / Alaska at a Glance / Studies of Effectiveness of Tribal Courts / Studies Conducted Throughout the Contiguous United States / Studies Conducted in Alaska / Additional Studies of Tribal Courts / The Need for More Research and Identified Obstacles to Overcome / Tribal Court Jurisdiction / Alaska’s Challenging Geography / Minor Consuming Alcohol as a Quantitative Measure / Conclusion / [SIDEBAR:] Tribal Court Studies — ReferencesYe