Governors and Higher Education--1983

For the most part, 1983 was a quiet year in the otherwise occasionallytumultuous relationship between higher education and the governorsof the American states. To be sure, there were growing indicationsof serious budget problems on the horizon, exacerbated by droppingenrollments and shifting needs among students, faculty, andsociety. There was also an increasing awareness throughout thecountry of the future significant role that high technologymight play in institutions of higher education; but these prospectsstill need to be worked on and sorted out. The year provides,therefore, a good opportunity to look back at the fundamentalrelationship between governors and higher education and to examinea few specific areas of longstanding concern so that we maybe better prepared for what lies ahead.     

Creating Convergence: Debiasing Biased Litigants

Previous experimental research has found that self-Serving biases are a major cause of negotiation impasses. In this study we show that a simple intervention can mitigate such biases and promote efficient settlement of disputes.     

'A Single Truth': Mill on Harm, Paternalism and Good Samaritanism

On Liberty provides the classic defence of what has come to be known as Mill's harm principle and yet that principle is commonly believed to be at odds with Mill's equally famous discussions of paternalism and good samaritanism. Moreover, the alleged inconsistencies are often said to expose the inadequacies not only of Mill's anti-paternalism and good samaritanism but his harm principle as well. This paper offers a re-interpretation of these three aspects of On Liberty . It attempts to show both the unity of Mill's thought and how the contemporary relevance of his ideas has been misunderstood.     

Artificial Intelligence and Technology in Teaching Negotiation

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), affective computing, and big‐data techniques are improving the ways that humans negotiate and learn to negotiate. These technologies, long deployed in industry and academic research, are now being adopted for educational use. We describe several systems that help human negotiators evaluate and learn from role‐play simulations as well as applications that help human instructors teach negotiators at the individual, team, and organizational levels. AI can enable the personalization of negotiation instruction, taking into consideration factors such as culture and bias. These tools will enable improvements not only in the teaching of negotiation, but also in teaching humans how to program and collaborate with technology‐based negotiation systems, including avatars and computer‐controlled negotiation agents. These advances will provide theoretical and practical insights, require serious consideration of ethical issues, and revolutionize the way we practice and teach negotiation.     

Regional stabilization: a model for policy decision

A policy simulative model with the main purpose of simulating the effects of alternative policy moves and obtaining an accurate read-out of resulting urban-suburban conditions is the focus of this paper. The model deals with the movement of various population groups and the resulting effects on some very broad indicators of city-suburban life, rather than with particular topics like transportation, land use and the like. The level of abstraction is thus intermediate and is directed at providing practical policy suggestions for a particular city—Newark—for which the model is calibrated. The model, however, is general enough in nature so that it can be applied to other urban-suburban complexes and therefore the policy suggestions made on a fairly broad basis. The outputs of the model are graphically represented to show the results of alternative policies which then may be compared. As a side benefit the inputs to the model can also serve as a “social report” on the present status of an area. Policy questions to be answered by the model include: Should a city budget be directed somewhat differently? Should a city ask the state or federal government for funding and for how much? What may be expected from imposing a city sales tax, weighing the revenue benefit against costs of lost sales or citizens? And last, would the federal government not be better off by simply giving money to the poor directly instead of to cities?     

Party identification and party closeness in comparative perspective

The present analysis uses data from 1974 and 1981 U. S. cross sections, which incorporate a panel, to compare the standard NES measure of party identification (ID) with a measure of partisanship derived from a party closeness question widely employed in cross-national research. Important features of the two scales are examined by transforming the closeness measure into a scale of very close, fairly close, not very close, and no preference corresponding to the seven-point ID scale. The scales are highly correlated and are similar in their reliability. More than 75% of the independents in the ID scale choose a party in the closeness version, and over half of these select the fairly close category. Respondents do not volunteer that they are independents when that alternative is not stated in the question.