We study the nature of regional inequality in Colombia over the past 200 years. The main empirical fact is that regional inequality has been highly persistent despite the large changes that have taken place and the modernization of the society. We show that regional inequality is highly correlated with significant within-country differences in economic and political institutions, which are them...

Xin Liu Submitted for the degree of Dphil International Relations Origins of Peasant Socialism in China The International Relations of China’s Modern Revolution More than six decades after its occurrence, China’s ‘peasant revolution’ of 1949 remains an enigma. According to classical Marxism, peasants are passive ‘objects of history’ who must be transformed into industrial workers before they ca...

Historical documents are mostly accessible to scholars specialized in the period in which the document originated. In order to increase their accessibility to a broader audience and help in the preservation of the cultural heritage, we propose a method to modernized these documents. This method is based in statistical machine translation, and aims at translating historical documents into a mode...

Art design is a kind of culture which is formed and developed on the basis of the material production practice of human beings. It is the combination of the physical and mental culture of a race in a relative period, and can be inherited and shared. The splendid Chinese racial culture and cultural spirit was formed in the longstanding history. The racial cultures haven’t disappeared in the mode...

We analyze convergence across countries over the last half century as a result of globalizing forces. Drawing on theories of modernization, dependency, the world-system, political trade blocs, and the world-society, we consider economic, demographic, knowledge, financial, and political dimensions of convergence. Using a new methodology, we calculate the minimum volume ellipsoid encompassing dif...

Practice can dramatically reduce dual-task interference, but typically does not eliminate interference entirely. Residual interference after practice is especially large with certain non-preferred modality pairings (e.g., auditory-manual and visual-vocal). Does this residual interference imply the existence of a persistent central-processing bottleneck? To address this question, we transferred ...

In this research, the controversial issue of whether the central bottleneck can be bypassed through task automatization was investigated. To examine this issue, participants received six single-task practice sessions with an auditory-vocal task (low vs. high pitch). We then assessed dual-task performance using the analytically tractable psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, in which t...

The authors examined the role of online order control in the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm. In the first 2 experiments, participants switched between color-letter and letter-color orders so that subtask order was isolated as the only element being switched. The results indicated that order switching impaired the 2 PRP responses and modulated the PRP effect. Importantly, these e...