The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin. By ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN. [New York: Crown Publishers, 2005. 688 pp.+two 16-page photo inserts. $35.00. ISBN 1-4000-5474-5.]

2005 ◽  
Vol 181 ◽  
pp. 169-171
Author(s):  
Bruce Gilley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Real World ◽  
World Politics ◽  
James Bond ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Investment Banker ◽  
Jiang Zemin ◽  
The Many ◽  
Party Chief

Robert Kuhn's lengthy biography of Jiang Zemin sets out to tell the inside story of this unlikely leader of China from 1989 to 2004. An American investment banker and television producer with business interests in China, Kuhn was given access to many of Jiang's closest friends, aides and political allies. Yet the long-anticipated result is short of expectations. Much of the book is a dry rehashing of Jiang's official schedule from year to year, with Trollopian chapter subtitles like “How could I not know?” The occasional glimpses into the inner political and personal world of the man are so fleeting as to leave the reader more frustrated than gratified.To be sure, the careful reader will turn up a host of interesting facts here that enhance our understanding of Jiang: for example, he began his life as an anti-drugs protestor not aware that the protests he joined were organized by the CCP. There is also a vivid James Bond-like scene of Jiang speeding a friend to safety in Shanghai at the wheel of an American jeep in 1948. And there are glimpses of real world politics. Jiang's chief mentor, Wang Daohan, commented candidly to Jiang in 1989 on the “many complications and contradictions” of politics in Beijing “especially all the subtle conflicts between different interest groups.” His sister notes of his elevation to Party chief: “We certainly didn't celebrate. His appointment wasn't worth celebrating.” Later, Jiang's wife, Wang Yeping, is quoted as saying she was always dismayed by the files on her husband's desk that suggested a daily crisis of governance. “Explosions here, rioting there. Murders, corruption, terrorism – little that was nice.” Unfortunately, these factional conflicts and governance crises are nowhere to be found in the narrative, which offers instead a steady diet of Jiang's meetings with foreign leaders and “important” speeches.

scholarly journals AN INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY FISCHER

2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
OLIVIER BLANCHARD
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Real World ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
Macroeconomic Theory ◽  
Central Park ◽  
The Real ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Imf

This interview was completed in May 2004, well before Stan Fischer had any idea he would become Governor of the Bank of Israel, a position he took up in May 2005. The interview took place in April 2004 in my office at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, where I was spending a sabbatical year. We completed it while running together in Central Park during the following weeks.Our meeting at Russell Sage was just like the many meetings we have had over the years. I was not sitting with a Master of the Universe, a world VIP, but with the same Stan Fischer I had first met in 1973 when he was a young associate professor, freshly imported from Chicago. There was the same ability to listen carefully, the same ability to talk and to explain simply and straightforwardly. In addition, there was the accumulated wisdom of a professional life spent developing and applying macroeconomics to the very real world.When I arrived as a PhD student at MIT in 1973, it was clear that Stan would quickly play a central role in the department. Within a few years, he was one of the most popular teachers, and one of the most popular thesis advisers. We flocked to his office, and I suspect that the only time for research he had was during the night. What we admired most were his technical skills (he knew how to use stochastic calculus)—, and his ability to take on big questions and to simplify them to the point where the answer, ex post, looked obvious. When Rudi Dornbusch joined him in 1975, macro and international quickly became the most exciting fields at MIT. Imitation is the sincerest form of admiration, and this is very much what we all did.When I came back to MIT in 1982, this time as a faculty member, Stan had acquired near-guru status. Teaching the advanced macro courses with him, and writing “Lectures on Macroeconomics,” which we finished in 1988, was one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of my life. We both felt that there was a new macroeconomics, more micro-founded and full of promises and that we understood its architecture and its usefulness. Although we had not thought of it as a textbook, it quickly became one, and it is nice to know that it still sells surprisingly well today.As the years had passed, Stan had taken more and more interest in applying theory to the real world, working with Rudi on hyperinflation, being involved in the economics of peace with George Shultz in the Middle East. In 1988, he decided to jump from academia to the real world, and became Chief Economist of the World Bank. After a brief return to MIT, he then returned to Washington in 1994 to become First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, where he remained until 2001. That part of his life has been well documented in newspapers and magazines: While at the IMF, he was on the front lines during the Mexican crisis, the Russian crisis, the Asian crises, and many others. From the peeks I got of him during those times, what strikes me most is how he remained the same as he had been at MIT: calm, careful about the facts, analytical, using macroeconomic theory even in the middle of the most intense fires. Many thought and hoped that he would become the managing director of the IMF. Antiquated rules and country politics prevented it from happening. The IMF's loss turned out to be the private sector's gain. In 2002, Stan joined Citigroup, where he is the President of Citigroup International. He is still active in macro policy debates and remains one of the wise men of our profession.

A Practical Project for Introductory American Politics Classes

1990 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-18
Author(s):  
Neil Berch
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Real World ◽  
Group Process ◽  
American Politics ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Group Project ◽  
Introductory Course ◽  
Practical Project

Many political scientists find that they have difficulty generating enthusiasm (from both themselves and their students) when they teach the introductory course in American politics. The material can be very dry and basic, students are often required to take the course, and many believe they know the material from high school civics classes. In short, motivation can be a major problem, and the instructor must find a way to get students involved with the course. This is especially important, because this course often serves as the gateway to other offerings in American politics. If students are not excited about the Intro class, they may not go any farther in political science.I believe the key to motivation in this class lies in getting students to actually participate in the interest group process. This allows them to test the theoretical constructs presented in the course in the laboratory of real world politics. Therefore, I have designed an introductory course in American politics that is centered around a small group project that requires students to try to get a government (local, state, or national) to do something substantial that the group proposes.In many respects, my course is a fairly traditional introduction to American politics. We cover the Constitution, federalism, interest groups, civil rights, elections, theories of power,and the institutions. The reading is reduced a bit to allow time for students to work on the projects. After describing the project, I will explain how it fits into the framework of the course.

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Salvation Army ◽  
Public Meeting ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sunday Evening

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

Generals, Statesmen, and International Politics in Europe, 1898-1945The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933-1940 by Martin S. Alexander. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992. xiv, 573 pp. $94.95 U.S.Churchill, edited by Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis. New York, W.W. Norton, 1993. xv, 579 pp. $46.99.Louis Loucheur and the Shaping of Modem France, 1916-1931 by Stephen D. Carls. Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. xv, 330 pp.Churchill: The End of Glory, A Political Biography by John Charmley. Toronto, MacFarlane Walter and Ross, 1993. viii, 742 pp. $45.00.The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War, 1898-1914 by M. B. Hayne. Don Mills, Ontario, Clarendon Press, 1993. 328 pp. $78.95.When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics by Jon S. Jacobson. Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1994. xi, 388 pp. $18.00 U.S.Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War by R.A.C. Parker. London, Macmillan, 1993. 388 pp. £12.99.Dilemmas of Appeasement: British Deterrence and Defense, 1934-1937 by Gaines Post, Jr. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1993. xiii, 363 pp. $48.50 U.S.

1995 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Jabara Carley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World Politics ◽  
State University ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Biography ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Louisiana State University ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Foreign Office

scholarly journals Inferring Long-Term Demand of Newly Established Stations for Expansion Areas in Bike Sharing System

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 6748
Author(s):  
Hsun-Ping Hsieh ◽  
Fandel Lin ◽  
Jiawei Jiang ◽  
Tzu-Ying Kuo ◽  
Yu-En Chang
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Feature Extraction ◽  
Real World ◽  
Extraction Methods ◽  
Real World Data ◽  
Urban Dynamics ◽  
Bike Sharing ◽  
The Government ◽  
Short Time

Research on flourishing public bike-sharing systems has been widely discussed in recent years. In these studies, many existing works focus on accurately predicting individual stations in a short time. This work, therefore, aims to predict long-term bike rental/drop-off demands at given bike station locations in the expansion areas. The real-world bike stations are mainly built-in batches for expansion areas. To address the problem, we propose LDA (Long-Term Demand Advisor), a framework to estimate the long-term characteristics of newly established stations. In LDA, several engineering strategies are proposed to extract discriminative and representative features for long-term demands. Moreover, for original and newly established stations, we propose several feature extraction methods and an algorithm to model the correlations between urban dynamics and long-term demands. Our work is the first to address the long-term demand of new stations, providing the government with a tool to pre-evaluate the bike flow of new stations before deployment; this can avoid wasting resources such as personnel expense or budget. We evaluate real-world data from New York City’s bike-sharing system, and show that our LDA framework outperforms baseline approaches.

Influence of Task and Situational Variables on the Applicability of Vigilance Data to Physical Security

1980 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 606-607
Author(s):  
Ben B. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Human Performance ◽  
Clear Trend ◽  
General Belief ◽  
Situational Variables ◽  
Performance Requirements ◽  
Limited Applicability ◽  
Machine Systems ◽  
Inspection Tasks ◽  
The Many

Vigilance is one of the most thoroughly researched areas of human performance. Volumes have been written concerning vigilance performance in both laboratory and real-world settings, and there is a clear trend in the literature toward an increasing emphasis on the study of operational task behavior under environmental conditions that are common to real world jobs. Although a great deal of this research has been designed to test various aspects of the many theories of vigilance, there is a general belief that vigilance research is relevant and applicable to the performances required in real-world monitoring and inspection tasks. Indeed, many of the reported studies are justified on the basis of their apparent relevance to vigilance requirements in modern man-machine systems, industrial inspection tasks, and military jobs. There is a growing body of literature, however, which suggests that many vigilance studies are of limited applicability to operational task performance. For example, Kibler (1965) has argued that technological changes have altered job performance requirements to the extent that laboratory vigilance studies are no longer applicable to real-world jobs. Many others have simply been unable to reproduce the typical “vigilance decrement” in field situations. This has led Teichner (1974) to conclude that “the decremental function itself is more presumed than established.”

Review article: Reclaiming the rebellion: 1798 in 1998

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (123) ◽  
pp. 395-410
Author(s):  
Ian McBride
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
Celtic Tiger ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
International Dimension ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The North ◽  
The Many

Few Irish men and women can have escaped the mighty wave of anniversary fever which broke over the island in the spring of 1998. As if atoning for the failed rebellion itself, the bicentenary of 1798 was neither ill-coordinated nor localised, but a genuinely national phenomenon produced by years of planning and organisation. Emissaries were dispatched from Dublin and Belfast to remote rural communities, and the resonant names of Bartlett, Whelan, Keogh and Graham were heard throughout the land; indeed, the commemoration possessed an international dimension which stretched to Boston, New York, Toronto, Liverpool, London and Glasgow. In bicentenary Wexford — complete with ’98 Heritage Trail and ’98 Village — the values of democracy and pluralism were triumphantly proclaimed. When the time came, the north did not hesitate, but participated enthusiastically. Even the French arrived on cue, this time on bicycle. Just as the 1898 centenary, which contributed to the revitalisation of physical-force nationalism, has now become an established subject in its own right, future historians will surely scrutinise this mother of all anniversaries for evidence concerning the national pulse in the era of the Celtic Tiger and the Good Friday Agreement. In the meantime a survey of some of the many essay collections and monographs published during the bicentenary will permit us to hazard a few generalisations about the current direction of what might now be termed ‘Ninety-Eight Studies’.

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