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This study asks five questions. How does the Constitution define the framework for its governance and the principles under which it must operate? How do the provisions lay out the core public finance matters? How are Islamic religious defined? How could we interpret the provisions in the Constitution? How do Islamic religious revenues affect socioeconomic development? Based on the analysis of these questions, and the Federal Constitution of Malaysia, this study will try to explain the choice of alternative sets of legal-institutional-constitutional rules that constrain the choices and activities of economic and political agents (government). In particular, this study will prove that the Constitution results from both conventional and Islamic scholars' preferences. The constitutional rules lead to the introduction of Islamic religious revenues as the sources of government revenues. Furthermore, in Malaysia, constitutional economics also provides another view that treats Islamic religious revenues as socioeconomic development tools.

Different from the economic approach predominantly adopted in many foreign studies in relation to grey market economy, this research aims at studying the rampant parallel trading activities in the North District of Hong Kong as well as the associated public disorder from criminological perspective. By applying relevant criminological theories, it serves to offer understanding and explanation of the operation of such quasi-criminal activities. Although the illegality of such activities is generally undefined in the existing laws of Hong Kong, its unique social and criminological nature, which has been rarely studied, would be subject to in-depth exploration in this research. Site observation was conducted with a view to obtaining first-hand information on the ground-level operation and social disturbance at selected timings. In-depth interviews with various stakeholders involved in the parallel trading were also conducted to seek better understanding of the couriers' background motive and concerns, at the same time to examine the corresponding policing strategies and practices adopted by different law enforcement agencies (LEAs) such as Police, Customs and Immigration. Not only the drives and process of this kind of grey market operation will be analyzed, the unprecedented and serious social, political and public order impacts associated with the parallel trading in the North District will be investigated as well via the media content analysis, since the issues have been periodically gaining the attention of the general public. The up-to-date development, policy and some proposed implementations by the Hong Kong Government will be touched on so as to establish a more holistic overview of the parallel trading issue as a whole. ; published_or_final_version ; Criminology ; Master ; Master of Social Sciences

The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287 ; We develop a dynamic model in which Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) servicemembers incur a random amount of combat stress during each month of deployement, develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) if their cumulative stress exceeds a servicemember-specific threshold, and then develop symptoms of PTSD after an additional time lag. Using Department of Defense deployment data and Mental Health Advisory Team PTSD data to calibrate the model, we predict -- because of the long time lags and the fact that some surveyed servicemembers expeerience additional combat after being surveyed -- the fraction of Amry soldiers and Marines who eventually suffer from PTSD will be approximately twice as large as in the raw survey data. We cannot put a confidence interval around this estimate, but there is considerable uncertainty (perhaps plus/minus 30%). The estimate PTSD rate translates into approximately 300,000 PTSD cases among all Army soldiers and Marines in OIF, with approximately 20,000 new cases each year the war is prolonged. The heterogeneity of threshold levels among servicemembers suggests that although multiple deployments raise an individual's risk of PTSD, in aggregate, multiple deployments lower the total number of PTSD by approximately 30% relative to a hypothetical case in which the war was fought with many more servicemembers (i.e., a draft) deploying only once. The time lag dynamics suggest that, in aggregate, reserve servicemembers show symptoms aproximately 1-2 years before active servicemembers and predict that greater than 75% of OIF servicemembers who self-reported symptoms during their second deployment were exposed to the PTSD-generating stress during their first deployment. ; Naval Postgraduate School, Department of Operations Research, Monterey, CA; Stanford University, Stanford, CA

In the past several years two academic controversies have migrated from the classrooms and courtyards of college and university campuses to the front pages of national and international newspapers: Alan Sokal's hoax, published in the journal Social Text, and the self-named movement, "Perestroika," that recently emerged within the discipline of political science. Representing radically different analytical perspectives, these two incidents provoked wide controversy precisely because they brought into sharp relief a public crisis in the social sciences today, one that raises troubling questions about the relationship between science and political knowledge, and about the nature of objectivity, truth, and meaningful inquiry in the social sciences. In this provocative and timely book, Keith Topper investigates the key questions raised by these and other interventions in the "social science wars" and offers unique solutions to them. Engaging the work of thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Pierre Bourdieu, Roy Bhaskar, and Hannah Arendt, as well as recent literature in political science and the history and philosophy of science, Topper proposes a pluralist, normative, and broadly pragmatist conception of political inquiry, one that is analytically rigorous yet alive to the notorious vagaries, idiosyncrasies, and messy uncertainties of political life

Employing some of the features of participatory research methodology, a disabled faculty joins a student with mental health diagnosis to examine the factors that hinder or enable success for this group. The theoretical framework or scholarly bearings for the study comes from the critical social model of disability, disability services scholarship in the United States, and education theory literature on "student success". With a particular focus on students with bipolar disorder, the article highlights the gaps in disability scholarship on this specific group while underscoring the oppression experienced by them through the inclusion of an autoethnographic segment by the primary author in this collaborative, scholarly work. The model of access, we propose, moves beyond accommodations—which are often retrofits or after the thought arrangements made by an institution—and asks for environmental support, social and institutional inclusion, and consideration for students with psychiatric health diagnosis. This article not only presents an array of problems in the United States academy but also a set of recommendations for solving these problems. Going beyond the regime of retrofit accommodations, we ask for an overhaul of institutional policies, infrastructures, and curricula so that the academy is inclusive of neurodiverse bodies and appreciates their difference.