POLICY ANALYSIS AS ARGUMENT

Numerous authors have attested to the incompleteness of most policy arguments. Until now, however, the machinery has not been available for dealing with complex and open-ended policy arguments. This paper synthesizes and extends recent developments in the logic of argumentation and symbolic logic to create a methodology for treating complex arguments.     

《湖北鄂州汀祖南宋吕文显墓发掘简报》录文校补

《湖北鄂州汀祖南宋吕文显墓发掘简报》一文，公布了买地券拓片，随文附有释文。本文校补了释文部分的商榷之处，并一一分析误因，就教于方家，以便更有效利用这份宝贵材料，避免以讹传讹。     

Early history of Chinese domestic sheep indicated by ancient DNA analysis of Bronze Age individuals

China has a long history of sheep husbandry, and has several indigenous sheep breeds. However, the exact geographic origin of Chinese domestic sheep remains unclear. To provide valuable genetic information for origin of Chinese domestic sheep, we performed an ancient DNA study on 22 sheep excavated from four Bronze Age archaeological sites in Northern China. Two lineages (A and B) were observed in ancient Chinese sheep, of which lineage A was predominant reaching a frequency of 95.5%. Furthermore, phylogenetic network showed that the most frequent haplotype in ancient sheep was the founder of lineage A. These results suggest that Lineage A may hold the key to understanding the origin of Chinese domestic sheep. Sequence sharing and principal component analysis showed that the ancient Chinese sheep had a close affinity to modern Chinese sheep. However, there was no significant breed structure among three modern Chinese sheep groups, making it difficult to determine their relationship to ancient Chinese sheep. Lastly, our results imply that ancient DNA analysis could provide a new way to investigate prehistoric East-West contact.