Since Marbury v. Madison (1803) 1 , the role of the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the meaning of the U.S. Constitution has been largely accepted by both mass and elite publics. However, on occasion those interpretations have been the subject of heated dispute, often with the states, the executive, or the legislative branch. The Court's 5–4 decision in Texas v. Johnson (1989) 2 raised su...

We present a dialog act annotation for German Twitter conversations. In this paper, we describe our annotation effort of a corpus of German Twitter conversations using a full schema of 57 dialog acts, with a moderate inter-annotator agreement of multi-π = 0.56 for three untrained annotators. This translates to an agreement of 0.76 for a minimal set of 10 broad dialog acts, comparable to previou...

P right to use physical force (e.g., smacking) as a child discipline strategy is a highly contentious issue around the world, particularly when legislative bans of the physical discipline of children are on a country’s political agenda. This has been the case in New Zealand over the past two decades, as increasing national and international pressure have been placed on the government to impleme...

We study the task of automatic labeling dialogues with the proper speech acts, relying on empirical methods and simply exploiting lexical semantics of the utterances. We investigate the relationship between affective factors and linguistic realization of dialogue acts: we present some preliminary results about the role that affect plays in dialogue act disambiguation and we propose a discussion...

The benefit provisions and legislative history of the 1951 amendments to the Railroad Retirement Act were summarized in the February Bulletin. In this issue the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration discusses the financial and actuarial implications of the amended law, with special emphasis on the provisions coordinating in some measure the railroad program with old-age and surviv...

The study sought to reveal and analyze the causes for lack of advancement black talent in Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE)-listed companies, including how they can be dealt with. research further examined impact leadership development on acceleration at executive levels within JSE-listed companies South Africa. A qualitative approach was employed. This an exploratory study. paradigm considered...

_______________ 1 For example, states have vastly increased responsibility for welfare legislation. A key provision of the 1996 federal welfare overhaul (The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) requires each state to provide an annual current estimate of its child poverty rate by May 31st, starting in 1998. If that rate exceeds the previous year’s rate by more than ...

While the impacts of the Affordable Care Act will vary across the states given their different circumstances, Massachusetts’ 2006 reform initiative, the template for national reform, provides a preview of the potential gains in insurance coverage, access to and use of care, and health care affordability for the rest of the nation. Under reform, uninsurance in Massachusetts dropped by more than ...