A Low-Power 12-Bit 20 MS/s Asynchronously Controlled SAR ADC for WAVE ITS Sensor Based Applications

A low power 12-bit, 20 MS/s asynchronously controlled successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to be used in wireless access for vehicular environment (WAVE) intelligent transportation system (ITS) sensor based application is presented in this paper. To optimize the architecture with respect to power consumption and performance, several techniques are proposed. A switching method which employs the common mode charge recovery (CMCR) switching process is presented for capacitive digital-to-analog converter (CDAC) part to lower the switching energy. The switching technique proposed in our work consumes 56.3% less energy in comparison with conventional CMCR switching method. For high speed operation with low power consumption and to overcome the kick back issue in the comparator part, a mutated dynamic-latch comparator with cascode is implemented. In addition, to optimize the flexibility relating to the performance of logic part, an asynchronous topology is employed. The structure is fabricated in 65 nm CMOS process technology with an active area of 0.14 mm2. With a sampling frequency of 20 MS/s, the proposed architecture attains signal-to-noise distortion ratio (SNDR) of 65.44 dB at Nyquist frequency while consuming only 472.2 µW with 1 V power supply.

Jak zmierzyć demokrację? Skale pomiaru demokracji politycznej stosowane w politologii porównawczej

The author reviews and characterizes the most important scales for measuring the democracy of political systems, applied in Western, mainly Anglo-Saxon, comparative political science. He refers to his article published in a back issue of Przegl¹d Polityczny, where the fundamental theoretical and methodological issues of democracy measuring were presented, and tries to indicate how these issues are dealt with by various researchers whose scales and data bases are most common and most frequently referred to in research into political comparative studies. The paper describes S. Huntington’s analyses, the Freedom House scale, the IDEA assessment of the quality of democracy, the EIU democracy index, Bollen’s scale, the Political Regimes Project, the Polity Project, T. Vanhanen’s democracy index and the scale of polyarchy by Coppedge and Reinicke. As the author analyzes one scale and database after another, he tries to identify their strengths and weaknesses, determine the most characteristic properties of each proposal, and assess their applicability in comparative analyses, pointing to their potential benefits and the threats of using them. In conclusion, he recommends caution in the selection of a scale to become a foundation for potential analyses, while he acknowledges that this theoretical and methodological tool is highly useful.

A New Economy of Knowledge

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, April 2016 (Volume 67, Number 11)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-11-2016-04/">buy this issue</a></div>The March/April 2016 issue of <em>Foreign Affairs</em>, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, is devoted in large part to the topic of economic stagnation. The editorial by Jonathan Tepperman, the journal's managing editor, declares: "Today, with China slumping, energy prices collapsing, and nervous consumers sitting on their hands, growth has ground to a halt almost everywhere, and economists, investors, and ordinary citizens are starting to confront a grim new reality: the world is stuck in the slow lane and nobody seems to know what to do about it." This is followed by eight articles on stagnation, only one of which, however&mdash;"The Age of Secular Stagnation" by Lawrence H. Summers&mdash;is, in our opinion, of any real importance.&hellip; Summers heavily criticizes those like Robert J. Gordon, in <em>The Rise and Fall of American Growth</em> (2016), who attribute stagnation to supply-side "headwinds"&hellip;blocking productivity growth.&hellip; Likewise Summers dispatches those like Kenneth Rogoff who see stagnation as merely the product of a debt supercycle associated with periodic financial crises.&hellip; Despite such sharp criticisms of other mainstream interpretations of stagnation, Summers's own analysis can be faulted for being superficial and vague, lacking historical concreteness.&hellip; In fact, the current mainstream debate on secular stagnation is so superficial and circumspect that one cannot help but wonder whether the main protagonists&mdash;figures like Summers, Gordon, Paul Krugman, and Tyler Cowen&mdash;are not deliberately tiptoeing around the matter, worried that if they get too close or make too much noise they might awaken some sleeping giant (the working class?) as in the days of the Great Depression and the New Deal.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-11" title="Vol. 67, No. 11: April 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Notes from the Editors, April 2016

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, April 2016 (Volume 67, Number 11)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-11-2016-04/">buy this issue</a></div>The March/April 2016 issue of <em>Foreign Affairs</em>, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, is devoted in large part to the topic of economic stagnation.&hellip; [Of the] eight articles on stagnation, only one&hellip;&mdash;"The Age of Secular Stagnation" by Lawrence H. Summers&mdash;is, in our opinion, of any real importance.&hellip; Summers heavily criticizes those like Robert J. Gordon, in <em>The Rise and Fall of American Growth</em> (2016), who attribute stagnation to supply-side "headwinds"&hellip;blocking productivity growth.&hellip; Likewise Summers dispatches those like Kenneth Rogoff who see stagnation as merely the product of a debt supercycle associated with periodic financial crises.&hellip; Despite such sharp criticisms of other mainstream interpretations of stagnation, Summers's own analysis can be faulted for being superficial and vague, lacking historical concreteness.&hellip; In fact, the current mainstream debate on secular stagnation is so superficial and circumspect that one cannot help but wonder whether the main protagonists&mdash;figures like Summers, Gordon, Paul Krugman, and Tyler Cowen&mdash;are not deliberately tiptoeing around the matter, worried that if they get too close or make too much noise they might awaken some sleeping giant (the working class?) as in the days of the Great Depression and the New Deal.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-11" title="Vol. 67, No. 11: April 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Notes from the Editors, March 2016

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, March 2016 (Volume 67, Number 10)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-10-2016-03/">buy this issue</a></div>Ellen Meiksins Wood, who died on January 14, was coeditor of <em>Monthly Review</em> with Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy from 1997 to 2000, and a major contributor to historical materialist thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Her parents were socialist refugees, members of the Jewish Labor Bund who came to the United States in 1941, after fleeing Latvia in the 1930s, when indigenous fascists came to power. Her mother worked for the Jewish Labor Committee in New York and her father for the United Nations. Ellen obtained her B.A. in Slavic languages at the University of California at Berkeley and went on to do graduate studies in political science at Berkeley, where she met and married Neal Wood, a professor in the department. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, she taught political theory in the political science department at York University in Toronto.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-10" title="Vol. 67, No. 10: March 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Notes from the Editors, February 2016

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, February 2016 (Volume 67, Number 9)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-09-2016-02/">buy this issue</a></div>From mainstream news reports, one might easily conclude that the Paris climate agreement, presented to the world on December 12, 2015, was a complete triumph. <em>The Guardian</em> headlined it as "<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/13/paris-climate-deal-cop-diplomacy-developing-united-nations" target="_blank">The World's Greatest Diplomatic Success</a>." However, by any meaningful criteria, the Paris climate change agreement was fraudulent, based on a fabric of illusion. Moreover, the distorted media coverage of the climate deal, presenting it as a historical agreement virtually without shortcomings, was made possible in large part by the French government's banning of the mass climate protests, following the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. With radical protestors silenced and their demands marginalized, the global power elite could make virtually any public claims it wished, without acknowledging any other public voice or alternative view.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-9" title="Vol. 67, No. 9: February 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Notes from the Editors, January 2016

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, January 2016 (Volume 67, Number 8)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-08-2016-01/">buy this issue</a></div>Prabhat Patnaik's Review of the Month in this issue addresses problems of economic stagnation and imperialism in the context of explaining the current global crisis. Patnaik is part of a broad tradition of Marxian thought and heterodox economic analysis more generally that has long focused on issues of economic stagnation under monopoly capitalism. Such questions are now finally being taken up even by orthodox economists, but in ways that systematically ignore decades of contributions in this regard made by heterodox theorists. Ever since Larry Summers raised the issue of secular stagnation (referring back to Alvin Hansen's theory of the 1930s and '40s) at an IMF meeting in 2013, the question of stagnation has become part of a worldwide economic debate, moving issues that were once on the margins to center stage. This has resulted in a proliferation of mainstream economic treatments of the history of the secular stagnation concept in the 1930&ndash;1950s period, after which mainstream economists had essentially declared the issue dead.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-8" title="Vol. 67, No. 8: January 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Notes from the Editors, December 2015

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, December 2015 (Volume 67, Number 7)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-07-2015-11/">buy this issue</a></div>In this issue we feature two articles on the 1965&ndash;1966 mass killings and imprisonments in Indonesia. The army-led bloodbath was aimed at the near-total extermination of members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), then a highly successful electoral party with a membership in the millions.&hellip; In all, an estimated 500,000 to a million (or more) people were murdered. Another 750,000 to a million-and-a-half people were imprisoned, many of whom were tortured. Untold thousands died in prison. Only around 800 people were given a trial&mdash;most brought before military tribunals that summarily condemned them to death.&hellip; The United States&hellip;was involved clandestinely in nearly every part of this mass extermination: compiling lists of individuals to be killed; dispatching military equipment specifically designated to aid the known perpetrators of the bloodletting; offering organizational and logistical help; sending covert operatives to aid in the "cleansing"; and providing political backing to the killers.&hellip; [T]he mass killings&hellip;[were carried out with the active] complicity of the U.S. media.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-7" title="Vol. 67, No. 7: December 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Notes from the Editors, November 2015

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, November 2015 (Volume 67, Number 6)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-06-2015-10/">buy this issue</a></div>To understand why the Middle East is now in shambles, with the United States currently involved simultaneously in wars against both the Assad government in Syria and the Islamic State in Iraq, generating the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War, it is necessary to go back almost a quarter-century to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The Gulf War, unleashed by the United States in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, was made possible by the growing disorder in the USSR followed by its demise later that same year. The USSR's disappearance from the world stage allowed the United States to shift to a naked imperialist stance&mdash;though justified in the manner of the colonial empires of old as "anti-terrorism" and "humanitarian intervention"&mdash;not only in the Middle East, but also along the entire great arc that had constituted the perimeter of the former Soviet Union.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-6" title="Vol. 67, No. 6: November 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Notes from the Editors, October 2015

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, October 2015 (Volume 67, Number 5)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-05-2015-09/">buy this issue</a></div>Fifty years ago this month, beginning in early October 1965 and extending for months afterwards, the United States helped engineer a violent end to the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). Between 500,000 and a million Indonesians were killed by conservative factions of the military led by General Suharto and by right-wing Muslim youth&mdash;all with the direct involvement of the CIA, the close cooperation of the U.S. Embassy and State Department, and the guidance of the Johnson administration's National Security Council.&hellip; In forthcoming issues of <em>Monthly Review </em>we are planning to publish work on the Indonesian genocide, which, alongside the Vietnam War, constitutes a major turning point in the history of Southeast Asia in the period, and one of the most brutal acts of mass carnage inflicted by imperialism in the twentieth century. The dire implications of this carry down to the present day.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-5" title="Vol. 67, No. 5: October 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>