Abstract The United Nations treaty bodies were established to monitor the implementation of human rights by states parties. Through ‘General Comments’ – legally non-binding clarifications obligations they have also influenced development international law for example, on right life and climate impacts. We address this phenomenon establishing a twofold argument. First, we argue that General Comm...

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The present study aimed at providing a typology of Iranian supervisors’ written feedback on L2 graduate students’ theses/dissertations and examining the way different speech functions are employed to put the supervisors’ thoughts and feelings into words. In so doing, a corpus of comments, including 15,198 comments provided on 87 TEFL theses and dissertations by 30 supervisors were analyzed. We ...

From the report of the experts who served on the SSI Modernization Project, we are reprinting the “Summary of Options Preferred by the Majority of Experts” for each of the issues they identified followed by a table giving the cost estimates. We also have summarized the additional views submitted by several of the experts. For copies of the full report, contact the SSI Modernization Project Staf...

This paper proposes a new approach for mining novel patterns from textual databases which considers both the mining process itself, the evaluation of this knowledge, and the human assessment. This is achieved by integrating Information Extraction technology and Genetic Algorithms to produce high-level explanatory novel hypotheses. Experimental results using the model are discussed and the asses...

As part of an evaluation process for their grant decision, the Open Philanthropy Project had twelve anonymous reviewers (four technical advisers internal to the Open Philanthropy Project, plus eight external reviewers with relevant expertise) assess recent papers by MIRI researchers. The result is a very valuable record of experts’ responses to a sampling of our recent papers. I provide comment...

BACKGROUND Social media can act as an important platform for debating, discussing, and disseminating information about vaccines. Our objectives were to map and describe the roles played by web-based mainstream media and social media as platforms for vaccination-related public debates and discussions during the Polio crisis in Israel in 2013: where and how did the public debate and discuss the i...

Media critics have expressed concern that journalistic "false balance" can distort the public's perceptions of what ought to be noncontroversial subjects (e.g., climate change). I report several experiments testing the influence of presenting conflicting comments from 2 experts who disagree on an issue (balance condition) in addition to a complete count of the number of experts on a panel who f...