The mission was designed in part as a follow-up and in part as a complement to Professor Philip D. Curtin's research liaison visit to western Africa in 1965 on behalf of the Association. Senegal, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Tchad, and Cameroun were revisited. The previously unvisited Central African Republic, Dahomey, Niger, and Upper Volta were added to the itinerary. Difficulties in flight scheduling and unexpected delays during the trip ruled out the planned visits to Gabon and Togo.

The goals of the mission were as follows: (1) to establish or renew contacts with universities, research institutes, appropriate government authorities, African and expatriate researchers, and American scholars currently engaged in research in Africa; (2) to make known the existence of the Research Liaison Committee (and sometimes, as it turned out, of the ASA as well) as a two-way clearing house for Africanist research information; (3) to establish more regular means of exchanging information with institutions in Africa on current and planned research, so as to make possible some informal coordination of research plans among scholars; (4) to determine the existing formal procedures (if any) for researchers from abroad; and (5) to convey back to the Africanist community in the United States some of the feelings, attitudes, and suggestions from these countries.

The United States Department of Commerce is the largest data collecting organization in the world. Its Bureau of the Census has the monumental job every ten years of conducting a population census; its Office of Business Economics has the important task of measuring the national income and computing the balance of international payments and is also nationally known for a family of publications including the scholarly monthly SURVEY OF CURRENT BUSINESS.

These data are intended primarily to provide statistical guidelines relative to the course of the domestic economy. However, a different kind of data collection activity is carried on regularly by the Department in the Bureau of International Programs and the Bureau of International Business Operations. These two bureaus have primary responsibility within the department for the promotion of United States foreign commerce and private international investments. Both are new organizational units created as of August 8, 1961 to replace the former Bureau of Foreign Commerce, and both are under the supervision of the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for International Affairs who is, in turn, responsible directly to the Secretary of Commerce. In announcing this reorganization in the department's international affairs' responsibilities, Secretary Hodges stated that the Commerce Department must “fulfill our role in formulating U.S. foreign economic policy especially as it affects the American business community. … We want to be in a position to advise both business and government on the imminent changes in world trade and investment resulting from regional economic integration, from the threat of the Sino Soviet Bloc, and from our own economic growth. We need better methods to evaluate and set upon developments abroad which have an impact on the U.S. foreign and domestic trade.”

Almost 50 years have passed since Sartori introduced to the world one of the most famous innovations in the history of political science: a new party systems typology. Despite many criticisms and refinements since then, Sartori's typology still constitutes, as stated by Peter Mair in 1990, “the most effective and exhaustive framework within which to contrast the properties of different party systems”. In the current research note, and taking into consideration that previous typologies have not yet been that successful, we propose a new classification of party systems – which not only embeds the notion of polarization into the typology, but also allows us to populate the “polarized pluralist” type beyond Sartori’s “centre-based” (Italian) model – in Asia, a continent almost completely ignored by Sartori in his seminal work. Using an original dataset that includes the most important characteristics of party systems in the region and building on Sartori's original conceptualization, we examine to what extent party systems in Asian democracies, both contemporary (Bhutan, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Taiwan) and historical (Bangladesh 1991–2006, Kyrgyzstan 2010–2020, Myanmar 2015–2020 and Thailand 1992–2013), have changed. Our discussion of a new party system typology is particularly relevant and important to Asia, as its many new democracies still need to shift from plurality electoral rules adopted during the early post-independence periods to more mature, power-dispersing political institutions that accommodate their rich ethnic and religious diversity, as it happened in Europe after the World Wars.

This paper studies the probability of active navigational error events for use in ship–bridge allision risk analysis. To estimate the probability of these kinds of events, accident databases, incident reports and AIS data were studied; the case studies herein cover 6 years and 15 bridges in Scandinavia. The main findings of this paper show that there is great variation in the probability of ship–bridge allision due to active navigational errors, and it is not recommended to use the currently common practice of 2% uniform distribution of the number of ship passages on all bridges. Another important finding is that the probability of a ship striking a bridge due to the error type Wrong Course at a Turning point is not uniform along the length of the bridge, but is only likely to occur in a cone formation from the last turning point.

Recent scholarship on conservative constitutionalism in the United States focuses near-exclusively on the development of originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation. Before conservatives turned to originalism to counter the perceived threats of an activist judiciary in the 1980s, however, this article demonstrates that conservatives employed a very different interpretive philosophy to counter a very different perceived threat. To do so, this article reconstructs the history of a conservative legal movement that predated “the” conservative legal movement. Indeed, this article uncovers how conservatives employed natural law philosophy to respond to the elite legal academy’s seemingly morally foundationless positivism during the Cold War. The network of natural lawyers that sustained this earlier movement was deeply indebted to the Natural Law Institute (NLI), an academic initiative of the University of Notre Dame established in 1947. By framing the founding fathers’ natural law philosophy as a bulwark of individual liberty against the encroachments of legal realists, World War II-era totalitarians, and Cold War communists, the NLI created what the political scientist Amanda Hollis-Brusky has termed a “political epistemic network.” In concluding, this article suggests that recovering the history of the NLI’s epistemic network reveals the importance of natural law to the making of conservative constitutionalism during the Cold War.

We in this paper employ a penalized moment selection procedure to identify valid and relevant moments for estimating and testing forecast rationality within the flexible loss framework proposed by Elliott et al. (2005). We motivate the selection of moments in a high-dimensional setting, outlining the fundamental mechanism of the penalized moment selection procedure and demonstrating its implementation in the context of forecast rationality, particularly in the presence of potentially invalid moment conditions. The selection consistency and asymptotic normality are established under conditions specifically tailored to economic forecasting. Through a series of Monte Carlo simulations, we evaluate the finite sample performance of penalized moment estimation in utilizing available instrument information effectively within both estimation and testing procedures. Additionally, we present an empirical analysis using data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia to illustrate the practical utility of the suggested methodology. The results indicate that the proposed post-selection estimator for forecaster’s attitude performs comparably to the oracle estimator by efficiently incorporating available information. The power of rationality and symmetry tests leveraging penalized moment estimation is substantially enhanced by minimizing the impact of uninformative instruments. For practitioners assessing the rationality of externally generated forecasts, such as those in the Greenbook, the proposed penalized moment selection procedure could offer a robust approach to achieve more efficient estimation outcomes.

Our goal is to show that both the fast and slow versions of the triangle map (a type of multi-dimensional continued fraction algorithm) in dimension n are ergodic, resolving a conjecture of Messaoudi, Noguiera, and Schweiger [Ergodic properties of triangle partitions. Monatsh. Math. 157 (2009), 283–299]. This particular type of higher dimensional multi-dimensional continued fraction algorithm has recently been linked to the study of partition numbers, with the result that the underlying dynamics has combinatorial implications.