Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Boys And Girls Club / Dr. King After School Program: Data Collection And Program Recommendations, Syracuse University. Maxwell School. Community Benchmarks Program

Community Benchmarks Program

This report recommends organizational and methodical changes for the Boys & Girls Club of Syracuse (B&G Club) after school program held at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Magnet School (Dr. King) in Syracuse, New York. The recommendations focus on improvements to the program’s data collection and measurement system as a continuous improvement tool.

Southwest Community Center : Syracuse Department Of Parks, Recreation, And Youth Programs, Syracuse University. Maxwell School. Community Benchmarks Program.

Community Benchmarks Program

This report presents observations and recommendations for the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Youth Programs at Southwest Community Center at 401 South Ave. in Syracuse, New York. The report is a description of the current registration and attendance practices of Southwest Community Center and suggestions for improvement.

Does Fund Size Erode Performance? Liquidity, Organizational Diseconomies And Active Money Management, Joseph S. Chen, Harrison Hong, Ming Huang, Jeffrey D. Kubik

Economics - All Scholarship

We investigate the effect of fund size on performance among active mutual funds. We first document that fund returns, both before and after management fees, decline with fund size, even after adjusting performance by various benchmarks and controlling for other fund characteristics such as turnover and age. We then explore a number of potential explanations for this relationship. We find that the effect of fund size on fund returns is most pronounced among funds that play small cap stocks. Interestingly, performance only depends on fund size and does not decline with family size. Finally, small funds are better than large …

Educational Investments In A Spatially Varied Economy, Andrew G. Mude, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak, Cheryl R. Doss

Economics - All Scholarship

This paper presents a simple two-period, dual economy model in which migration options may affect the informal financing of educational investments. When credit contracts are universally available and perfectly enforceable, spatially varied returns to human capital have no effect on educational investment patterns. But when financial markets are incomplete and informal mechanisms subject to imperfect contract enforcement must fill the breach, spatial inequality in infrastructure or other attributes that affect the returns to education create spatial differentiation in educational lending and consequently, in educational attainment. Although migration options can increase the returns to education, they can also choke off the …

Technical Efficiency Of Australian Wool Production: Point And Confidence Interval Estimates, William C. Horrace

Economics - All Scholarship

A balanced panel of data is used to estimate technical efficiency, employing a fixed-effects stochastic frontier specification for wool producers in Australia. Both point estimates and confidence intervals for technical efficiency are reported. The confidence intervals are constructed using the multiple comparisons with the best (MCB) procedure of Horrace and Schmidt (1996, 2000). The confidence intervals make explicit the precision of the technical efficiency estimates and underscore the dangers of drawing inferences based solely on point estimates. Additionally, they allow identification of wool producers that are statistically efficient and those that are statistically inefficient. The data reveal at the 95% …

Data Mining Mining Data: Msha Enforcement Efforts, Underground Coal Mine Safety, And New Health Policy Implications, Thomas J. Kniesner, John D. Leeth

Economics - All Scholarship

Studies of industrial safety regulations, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in particular, often find little effect on worker safety. Critics of the regulatory approach argue that safety standards have little to do with industrial injuries, and defenders of the regulatory approach cite infrequent inspections and low fines for violating safety standards. We use recently assembled data from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) concerning underground coal mine production, safety inspections, and workplace injuries to shed new light on the regulatory approach to workplace safety. Because all underground coal mines are inspected at least once per quarter, MSHA regulations …

Thy Neighbor's Portfolio: Word-Of-Mouth Effects In The Holdings And Trades Of Money Managers, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Harrison Hong, Jeremy Stein

Economics - All Scholarship

A mutual-fund manager is more likely to hold (or buy, or sell) a particular stock in any quarter if other managers in the same city are holding (or buying, or selling) that same stock. This pattern shows up even when controlling for the distance between the fund manager and the stock in question, so it is distinct from a local-preference effect. It is also robust to a variety of controls for investment styles. These results can be interpreted in terms of an epidemic model in which investors spread information about stocks to one another by word of mouth.

Can Policy Changes Be Treated As Natural Experiments? Evidence From Cigarette Excise Taxes, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran

Economics - All Scholarship

An important issue in public policy analysis is the potential endogeneity of the policies under study. We examine the extent to which such political endogeneity biases estimates of behavioral parameters by identifying the elasticity of demand for cigarettes using the timing of state legislative elections as an instrument for changes in cigarette excise taxes. We find sizable differences between our estimates and those cited in Chaloupka and Warner (2000), which treat cigarette taxes as exogenous. Our results add to a growing body of evidence that policy changes may be codetermined with the outcomes they are thought to influence.

The Syracuse University Library Radius Project: Development Of A Non-Destructive Playback System For Cylinder Recordings, William A. Penn, Martha J. Hanson

Librarian Publications

Syracuse University Library's Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive (Belfer) holds nearly 20,000 cylinder recordings produced during the 'cylinder era' of 1895-1929. Many cylinders have become deteriorated over the past one hundred years and cannot be played without suffering serious physical damage inflicted by the sharp styli (needles) of traditional mechanical playback machines. In some cases, even one pass of a stylus may irrevocably damage a cylinder. In response to the playback challenges of cylinder recordings, Syracuse University Library developed the Radius Project: Development of a Non-Destructive Playback System for Cylinder Recordings, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. …

April 2003, Syracuse Department Of Economics

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Spring 2003, School Of Information Studies

iSchool Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Low-Fired Earthenwares In The African Diaspora: Problems And Prospects, Mark W. Hauser, Christopher R. Decorse

Anthropology - All Scholarship

Local earthenware associated with enslaved African populations in the Americas, variously called “Colono-Ware,” “Afro-CaribbeanWare.” “Yabbas,” and “Criollo ware,” has received considerable attention from researchers. What unifies this disparate group of ceramics is not method of manufacture, design and decoration, or even form and function but the association or potential association with African diaspora populations. The ceramics incorporate some skills and techniques possibly brought by African potters to the Americas, as well as skills reflecting European and Native American traditions, and local adaptations in form, function, and manufacture.Analogies linking African ceramic traditions to American industries have at times been employed uncritically …

Visual Resource Reference: Collaboration Between Digital Museums And Digital Libraries, Abby A. Goodrum

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The Information Institute of Syracuse at Syracuse University is engaged in a project designed to build collaborative digital museum and digital library reference services. To that end, the project team is currently developing, testing, and evaluating procedures and mechanisms that will enable museums and libraries to work together in providing reference assistance over the Web to support patrons' image information needs. The user-centered project is based upon a successful model for digital reference that has been widely embraced in the digital library community. This approach is expected to yield new insight into users' image seeking behavior that will help museums …

Question Negotiation And The Technological Environment, Joseph Janes, Joanne Silverstein

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The information world is a very different place in 2003 than it was a few years ago. It is possible, for example, to find information more quickly and easily than ever before, using new tools, and drawing on sources of information unavailable or even nonexistent not so very long ago. People seeking answers or providing them now have many more options for "question negotiation", in the broadest Tayloresque sense [1]. Consulting an information professional continues to be one of those options. In fact, such professionals can now be much more accessible via these new tools and technologies.

Beads In The Straits Settlements: Trade And Domestic Demand, 1827-1937, Hwei-Fe'n Cheah

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Beads have long been a part of the exchange of goods in Southeast. Indo-Pacific beads were traded in Southeast Asia and colored beads from China were exchanged for spices and forest products from the Indonesian archipelago. The Straits Settlements, comprising the ports of Singapore, Malacca, and Penang, was formed in 1826, to consolidate the trading position of the British in Southeast Asia. Singapore, in particular, developed into a major entrepot of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Research by the late Peter Francis, Jr., drew attention to its role as a channel for a part of the Southeast Asian bead …

Table Of Contents (V. 15, 2003)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

Two Centuries Of Iroquois Beadwork, Dolores N. Elliott

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

To the 16th-century Iroquois living in what is now central New York state, European glass trade beads were something special; they were believed to have had magical and spiritual meaning. To this day, the Iroquois have a special relationship with glass beads. Iroquois artists began creating three-dimensional beaded items in the late 18th century. The first beaded pincushions and wall pockets were small, but they increased in size and quantity during the 19th century. Two centers of beadwork making arose: one around Niagara Falls in western New York and southern Ontario, and the other around Montreal in southern Quebec and …

Captions And Color Plates (V. 15, 2003)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

Reviews And End Matter

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Beadwork: A World Guide, by Caroline Crabtree and Pam Stallebrass (2002), reviewed by Margret Carey

A Bead Timeline. Volume I: Prehistory to 1200 CE, by James W. Lankton (2003), reviewed by Marilee Wood

Amber in Archaeology, Curt W. Beck, Ilze B. Loze, and Joan M. Todd (eds.) (2003), reviewed by Karlis Karklins.

Beads: Journal Of The Society Of Bead Researchers - Volume 15 (Complete)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

New Wine In Old Bottles: A Sequential Estimation Technique For The Lpm, William C. Horrace, Ronald L. Oaxaca

Economics - All Scholarship

The conditions under which ordinary least squares (OLS) is an unbiased and consistent estimator of the linear probability model (LPM) are unlikely to hold in many instances. Yet the LPM still may be the correct model or a good approximation to the probability generating process. A sequential least squares (SLS) estimation procedure is introduced that may outperform OLS in terms of finite sample bias and yields a consistent estimator. Monte Carlo simulations reveal that SLS outperforms OLS, probit and logit in terms of mean squared error of the predicted probabilities.

The Functions Of Transaction Costs: Rethinking Transaction Cost Minimization In A World Of Friction, David M. Driesen, Shubha Ghosh

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article critically examines the goal of minimizing transaction costs, including the costs of legal decision-making. This goal permeates the law and economics literature and has profoundly influenced public policy. While most transaction cost scholarship has focused upon private law, this influence has been especially pervasive in public law, where it has contributed to a variety of legal changes aimed at reducing public transaction costs, often through privatization.

We argue that transaction costs perform useful functions. They frequently enable those engaging in transactions to obtain information needed to correct for information asymmetries or inadequate information. They facilitate efficient transactions, allow …

Stretching Conceptual Structures In Classifications Across Languages And Cultures., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Victoria L. Rubin

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The authors describe the difficulties of translating classifications from a source language and culture to another language and culture. To demonstrate these problems, kinship terms and concepts from native speakers of fourteen languages were collected and analyzed to find differences between their terms and structures and those used in English. Using the representations of kinship terms in the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) and the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as examples, the authors identified the source of possible lack of mapping between the domain of kinship in the fourteen languages studied and the LCC and DDC. Finally, some preliminary suggestions …

The Social Structure Of Open Source Software Development Teams, Kevin Crowston, James Howison

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Open Source Software development teams provide an interesting and convenient setting for studying distributed work. We begin by answering perhaps the most basic question: what is the social structure of these teams? Based on a social network analysis of interactions represented in 62,110 bug reports from 122 large and active projects, we find that some OSS teams are highly centralized, but contrary to expectation, others are not. Furthermore, we find that the level of centralization is negatively correlated with project size, suggesting that larger projects become more modular. The paper makes a further methodological contribution by identifying appropriate analysis approaches …

Translation Events In Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Lexical Ambiguity, Lexical Holes, Vocabulary Mismatch, And Correct Translations, Anne Roel Diekema

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) systems enable users to formulate queries in their native language to retrieve documents in foreign languages. Because queries and documents in CLIR do not necessarily share the same language, translation is needed before matching can take place. This translation step tends to cause a reduction in the retrieval performance of CLIR as compared to monolingual information retrieval. The prevailing CLIR approach and the focus of this study is query translation. The translation of queries is inherently difficult due to the lack of a one-to-one mapping of a lexical item and its meaning, which creates lexical ambiguity. …

What Do You Mean? Finding Answers To Complex Questions, Anne R. Diekema, Ozgur Yilmazel, Jiangping Chen, Sarah Harwell, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Lan He

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper illustrates ongoing research and issues faced when dealing with real-time questions in the domain of Reusable Launch Vehicles (aerospace engineering). The question- answering system described in this paper is used in a collaborative learning environment with real users and live questions. The paper describes an analysis of these more complex questions as well as research to include the user in the question-answering process by implementing a question negotiation module based on the traditional reference interview.

Das Zeitalter Der Knappheit – Ressourcen, Konflikte, Lebenschancen, Isidor Wallimann, Michael Dobkowski

Books

Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann establish a disturbing but realistic scenario of the disastrous future that awaits humankind as surplus populations collide with dwindling resources. Authors consider a number of cause-and-effect situations on industrialization, biophysical limits, exponential population growth, and genocide, to name a few. This volume is a critical contribution to the field and will serve as an ideal introduction to courses in the environment, population, resources, genocide, and social conflict.

2003 Program, University At Albany, State University Of New York

Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

Bohemian Faceted-Spheroidal Mold-Pressed Glass Bead Attributes: Hypothesized Terminus Post Quem Dates For The 19th Century, Lester A. Ross

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Faceted-spheroidal mold-pressed beads have been manufactured in Bohemia since the 18th century. Evolution of manufacturing technology has resulted in the creation of bead attributes that can readily be observed on beads from archaeological contexts. Many North American archaeological sites contain examples of this bead type; but few reports have identified the attributes, much less recognized these beads as mold-pressed. Enough evidence now exists to suggest that some of these attributes have temporal significance for dating archaeological bead assemblages. Terminus post quem dates for faceted-spheroidal mold-pressed bead attributes are hypothesized, and a strategy for future research is suggested so that a …