Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Identifying Document Genre To Improve Web Search Effectiveness. The Bulletin Of The American Society For Information Science And Technology, Barbara H. Kwasnik, K. Crowston, Mike Nilan, D. Roussinov

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Antidepressent Treatment For Depression: Total Charges And Therapy Duration, Deborah G. Dobrez, Catherine A. Melfi, Thomas W. Croghan, Thomas J. Kniesner, Robert L. Obenchain

Center for Policy Research

Background: The economic costs of depression are significant, both the direct medical costs of care and the indirect costs of lost productivity. Empirical studies of antidepressant costeffectiveness suggest that the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) may be no more costly than tricyclic antidepressants (TCA), will improve tolerability, and is associated with longer therapy duration. However the success of depression care usually involves multiple factors, including source of care, type of care, and patient characteristics, in addition to drug choice. The cost-effective mix of antidepressant therapy components is unclear.

Aims of the Study: Our study evaluates cost and antidepressant-continuity …

November 2000, Syracuse Department Of Economics

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Workplace Safety Policy: Past, Present, And Future, Thomas J. Kniesner, John D. Leeth

Economics - All Scholarship

With an annual budget of about $400 million, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is about 5 percent the size of the Environmental Protection Agency, another federal agency created by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970, the "Year of the Environment." Nearly all workers in the United States come under OSHA's juridction, with some notable exceptions, including miners, transportation workers, many public employees, and people who are self-employed. OSHA is currently responsible for ptoecting over 100 million workers at 6 million work sites with the help of only about 2,000 workplace health and safety inspectors. Nevertheless, suppoers of OSHA …

Comparison Of Municipal Department Head Compensation In Onondaga County, Syracuse University. Maxwell School. Community Benchmarks Program

Community Benchmarks Program

This study provides information about department head compensation in 28 of the 35

municipalities in Onondaga County. The study was conducted by the Community

Benchmarks Program (CBP) at The Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

Data for this report were primarily collected through surveys distributed via fax to 35

municipalities in Onondaga County during the month of October 2000. Twenty-eight

municipalities returned the survey. The surveys requested information about

compensation and benefits of department heads. Background information about each

municipality was obtained from the League of Women Voters. Population information

was obtained from the Bureau of the Census. Parcel information was …

Quality Of The Business Environment Versus Quality Of Life In A Dynamic Model Of Urban Composition And Growth Do Firms And Households Like The Same Cities?, Stuart S. Rosenthal, Stuart A. Gabriel

Economics - All Scholarship

Appropriately constructed measures of the quality of life and the quality of the business environment should be important determinants of the growth and composition of population across urban areas. This paper examines that question by extending theoretical measures of household quality of life to construct the first ever measure of the quality of the business environment? the value that firms place on the basket of amenities in a metropolitan area. An annual panel of quality of life and quality of business environment values for 37 cities in the United States is then constructed for the 1977 to 1995 period.

A …

Chasing The Elderly: Can State And Local Governments Attract Recent Retirees?, William Duncombe, Mark Robbins, Douglas A. Wolf

Center for Policy Research

Recruiting recent retirees to relocate from elsewhere has become an important economic development strategy in an increasing number of states. State governments have planned or enacted a variety of tax and fee incentives to lure retirees. The objective of this paper is to determine whether states can, in fact, influence the retirement destination of elder households using fiscal tools. To estimate the determinants of retiree location decisions we have developed an extensive data set on county attributes, and a methodology for estimating an individual-level discrete-choice model for a very large number of potential locations. Using 1990 county-to-county migration data, we …

Chronic Illness And Health Insurance-Related Job Lock, Eleaonr D. Kinney, Thomas J. Kniesner, Kevin Stroupe

Economics - All Scholarship

We examine job duration patterns for evidence of health insurance-related job lock among chronically ill workers or workers with a chronically ill family member. Using Cox proportional hazard models, we allow for more general insurance effects than in the existing literature to indicate the impact of health insurance and health status on workers' job durations. We use data for workers in Indiana predating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to examine the potential impact of HIPAA on job mobility. Chronic illness reduced job mobility by about 40 percent among the workers in our sample who relied on their …

Measuring The Career Concerns Of Security Analysts: Job Separations, Stock Coverage Assignments And Brokerage House Status, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Harrison Hong

Economics - All Scholarship

This paper examines the career concerns of security analysts using long histories of their earnings forecasts, job separations and stock coverage assignments. Our findings include the following. Relatively good (accurate) past forecast performance increases the probability that an analyst moves from a low status to a high status (large, prestigious) brokerage house, while relatively poor past forecast performance leads to movements down the brokerage house hierarchy. High status brokerage houses are more likely to discharge an analyst for poor past forecast performance than other houses. In addition, analysts with poor past forecast performances but who do not change employers are …

The Virtual Factory: Discontinuous Work In A Virtual Organization, Kevin Crowston

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The Virtual Factory is an organized network for regional cooperation in the manufacturing industry in the region around Lake Constance, on the border between Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The network was developed through a collaborative action research project started by the Institute for Technology Management, University of St. Gallen2. Project leadership (the core partners) came from entrepreneurs and senior managers from companies in the region and four researchers from the Institute.

"Classification Structures In The Changing Environment Of Active Commercial Websites: The Case Of Ebay.Com". In Beeghtol, Clare, Howarth Lynne C., And Williamson, Nancy J. (Eds.) Dynamism And Stability In Knowledge Organization., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Xiaoyong Liu

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper reports on a portion of a larger ongoing project. We address the issues of information organization and retrieval in large, active commercial websites. More specifically, we address the use of classification for providing access to the contents of such sites. We approach this analysis by describing the functionality and structure of the classification scheme of one such representative, large, active, commercial websites: eBay.com, a web-based auction site for millions of users and items. We compare eBay’s classification scheme with the Art & Architecture thesaurus, which is a tool for describing and providing access to material culture.

Generational Conflict, Human Capital Accumulation, And Economic Growth, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Mary Lovely, Mehmet S. Tosun

Economics - All Scholarship

Worldwide, dependency ratios are forecast to increase dramatically in the next 50 years. A great deal of attention has been devoted to understanding the changes in fiscal policies that "must" take place to accommodate these changes. In contrast, less effort has been concentrated on studying the fiscal shifts that will endogenously result from demographic pressures. An example of particular interest is the degree to which a more elderly population will support public spending for education. We use an overlapping-generations model to investigate the effect of this demographic transition on the endogenous determination of public spending for education. A demographic transition …

Association Between Body Size And Mortality In Later Life, Christine L. Himes

Center for Policy Research

The rising prevalence of obesity in the United States has focused attention on the health consequences of excess weight. Obesity is linked to many of the major causes of death in the United States, including heart disease, some types of cancer, strokes, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. However, the effects of body size on mortality and health among the elderly are much less clear. This paper extends our current understanding of the relationship between body size and mortality by using two nationally representative, longitudinal datasets of individuals at older ages. These analyses indicate that obesity may not contribute greatly to increased mortality …

April 2000, Syracuse Department Of Economics

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Comparison Of Salaries And Benefits Of Elected Municipal Officials In Onondaga County. (Executive Summary), Syracuse University. Maxwell School. Community Benchmarks Program

Community Benchmarks Program

This study provides a comparison of the salaries and benefits of elected officials in 35 municipalities throughout Onondaga County. This research project is part of an ongoing effort by the Community Benchmarks Program (CBP) at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Does Chronic Illness Affect The Adequacy Of Health Insurance Coverage?, Eleanor D. Kinney, Thomas J. Kniesner, Kevin Stroupe

Economics - All Scholarship

Although chronically ill individuals need protection against high medical expenses, they often have difficulty obtaining adequate insurance coverage due to medical underwriting practices used to classify and price risks and to define and limit coverage for individuals and groups. Using data from healthy and chronically ill individuals in Indiana, we found that illness decreased the probability of having adequate insurance, particularly among single individuals. Chronic illness decreased the probability of having adequate coverage by about 10 percentage points among all individuals and by about 25 percentage points among single individuals. Preexisting condition exclusions were a major source of inadequate insurance. …

Patterns Of Time Use Of People Age 55 To 64 Years Old: Some Cross-National Comparisons, Anne H. Gauthier, Timothy M. Smeeding

Center for Policy Research

Objectives. This paper examines the patterns of time use of adults age 55 to 64 years old in six countries: Austria, Canada, Finland, Italy, Sweden, and the United States. It examines the discontinuity in daily activities by employment status and gender. Methods. The paper uses nationally representative samples from time use surveys carried out in each country. We compute aggregate patterns of time use by employment status and gender for seven categories of activities: personal activities, paid work, unpaid work, housework, social leisure, active leisure, and passive leisure. We also compute dissimilarity indices to measure the degree of discontinuity in …

Table Of Contents (V. 12-13, 2000-2001)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

Multiple Comparisons With The Best, With Economic Applications, William C. Horrace, Peter Schmidt

Economics - All Scholarship

In this paper we discuss a statistical method called multiple comparisons with the best, or MCB. Suppose that we have N populations, and population i has parameter value θ_i. Let $\theta _{(N)}={\rm max}_{i=1,\ldots ,N}\theta _{i}$\nopagenumbers\end, the parameter value for the ‘best’ population. Then MCB constructs joint confidence intervals for the differences $[\theta _{(N)}-\theta _{1},\theta _{(N)}-\theta _{2},\ldots ,\theta _{(N)}-\theta _{N}]$\nopagenumbers\end. It is not assumed that it is known which population is best, and part of the problem is to say whether any population is so identified, at the given confidence level. This paper is meant to introduce MCB …

What Is Free Trade? The Real Issue Lurking Behind The Trade And Environment Debate, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that a fundamental question, "What is free trade?," lurks behind the ongoing debate about the relationship between international trade law and competing legal regimes. It also lurks behind much of the confusion in the Supreme Court's dormant commerce clause jurisprudence under the United States constitution, sometimes mentioned as a model for international trade law. Yet, the literature has remarkably little to say about free trade's definition, although it contains volumes about the reasons for free trade.

This article explores three possible concepts of free trade, trade free from discrimination against foreign companies, trade free from coercion, and …

Soziale Arbeit Und Ökonomie : Politische Ökonomie - Arbeitsmärkte - Sozialpolitik Grenzen Der Ökonomisierung - Soziale Ökonomie Gemeinwesenentwicklung - Bürgergesellschaft, Susanne Elsen, Dietrich Lange, Isidor Wallimann

Books

Globalization has seen the removal of borders and increased global flows of capital and goods and services, changing the employment landscape, pressuring revenues and social-welfare spending of modern welfare states. This collection of essays brings together perspectives from different disciplines to discuss the role globalization has had on social policies of the modern welfare state and the changing relationship between social policy, social work and the economy, describes its consequences and presents innovative approaches for action.

Representation And Organization Of Information In The Web Space: From Marc To Xml, Jian Qin

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Representing and organizing information in libraries has a long tradition of using rules and standards. As the very first standard encoding format for bibliographic data in libraries, MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format is being joined by a large number of new formats since the late 1980s. The new formats, mostly SGML/HTML based, are actively taking a role in representing and organizing networked information resources. This article briefly describes the historical connection between MARC and the newer formats for representing information and the current development in XML applications that will benefit information/knowledge management in the new environment.

Question Answering: Cnlp At The Trec-9 Question Answering Track, Anne R. Diekema, Xiaoyong Liu, Jiangping Chen, Hudong Wang, Nancy Mccracken

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes a question answering system that automatically finds answers to questions in a large collection of documents. The prototype CNLP question answering system was developed for participation in the TREC-9 question answering track. The system uses a two-stage retrieval approach to answer finding based on keyword and named entity matching. Results indicate that the system ranks correct answers high (mostly rank 1), provided that an answer to the question was found. Performance figures and further analyses are included.

How Do Information And Communication Technologies Reshape Work? Evidence Form The Residential Real Estate Industry, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Rolf Wigand, Marcel Allbritton

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We are exploring how ICT use affects the work lives of real estate agents, the process of selling/buying houses and the overall structure of the residential real estate industry. Earlier stages of our work involved intensive field research on how real estate agents use ICT. In this paper, we report on the design and analysis of a pilot survey of 868 agents intended to investigate their ICT use more generally. Analysis of the 153 responses to this survey sheds light on how ICT use supports information control, enables process support, and helps agents to extend and maintain their social capital.

The Effects Of Market-Enabling Internet Agents On Competition And Prices, Kevin Crowston, Ian Macinnes

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The Internet offers a vision of ubiquitous electronic commerce. A particularly useful feature is the ability to automate the search for price or other information across multiple vendors by using an "agent" to retrieve relevant information. The use of agents has the potential to dramatically reduce buyers ' search costs. We develop a framework that suggests that vendors who sell products with many differentiating factors beyond price will tend to accept agents, while vendors of commodities or branded goods will tend to resist them unless they have lower costs than their competitors. Empirically, we found that agents seem to be …

Processes As Theory In Information Systems Research, Kevin Crowston

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Many researchers have searched for evidence of organizational improvements from the huge sums invested in ICT. Unfortunately, evidence for such a pay back is spotty at best (e.g., Brynjolfsson, 1994; Meyer and Gupta, 1994; Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 1998). On the other hand, at the individual level, computing and communication technologies are increasingly merging into work in ways that make it impossible to separate the two (Gasser, 1986; Zuboff, 1988; Bridges, 1995). This problem—usually referred to as the productivity paradox—is an example of a more pervasive issue—linking phenomena and theories from different levels of analysis. Organizational processes provide a bridge between …

Searching And Search Engines: When Is Current Research Going To Lead To Major Progress?, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

For many years, users of commercial search engines have been hearing how the latest in information and computer science research is going to improve the quality of the engines they rely on for fulfilling their daily information needs. However, despite what is heard, these promises have not been fulfilled. While the Internet has dramatically increased the amount of information to which users now have access, the key issue appears to be unresolved – the results for substantive queries are not improving. However, the past need not predict the future because sophisticated advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have, in fact, …

Cross-Language Information Retrieval Using Dutch Query Translation, Anne R. Diekema, Wen-Yuan Hsiao

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes an elementary bilingual information retrieval experiment. The experiment takes Dutch topics to retrieve relevant English documents using Microsoft SQL Server version 7.0. In order to cross the language barrier between query and document, the researchers use query translation by means of a machine-readable dictionary. The Dutch run was void of the typical natural language processing techniques such as parsing, stemming, or part of speech tagging. A monolingual run was carried out for comparison purposes. Due to limitations in time, retrieval system, translation method, and test collection, there is only a preliminary analysis of the results.

Question Answering: Cnlp At The Trec-10 Question Answering Track, Jiangping Chen, Anne R. Diekema, Mary D. Taffet, Nancy Mccracken, Necati Ercan Ozgencil

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes the retrieval experiments for the main task and list task of the TREC-10 question answering track. The question answering system described automatically finds answers to questions in a large document collection. The system uses a two-stage retrieval approach to answer finding based on matching of named entities, linguistic patterns, and keywords. In answering a question, the system carries out a detailed query analysis that produces a logical query representation, an indication of the question focus, and answer clue words.

Identifying Sources Of Prehistoric Turquoise In North America: Problems And Implications For Interpreting Social Organization, Frances Joan Mathien

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Well-made turquoise beads are rare in North American archaeological sites, and the prehistoric sources of turquoise are limited. Mining the turquoise, manufacturing the bead, and using it as part of a bracelet or necklace involve numerous human interactions to transport the raw material from its source to the place where it is finally found in an archaeological context. Accurate identification of turquoise sources affects our interpretation of prehistoric behavior and is the focus of this paper.