Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Product Recalls, Imperfect Information, and Spillover Effects: Lessons from the Consumer Response to the 2007 Toy Recalls

Abstract In 2007, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued 212 recalls of toys and other children's products, a sizable increase from previous years. We investigate changes in toy sales following these recalls. We find that for manufacturers that had recalls, unit sales of the types of toys involved in the recall fell relative to their sales of toys in other categories. We do not find evidence of within-manufacturer spillovers to dissimilar toys. We do, however, find large industry-wide spillovers in the form of sales losses to manufacturers that did not experience any recalls. Our results shed light on how consumers may draw inferences from information about product safety.
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

we have collaborated ever since. When I first met Martha she had just completed a project in which she interviewed a number of clairvoyants in order to give conscious shape to the concept of an angel—something that for most academics sat between kitsch and fantasy. However, in this work she gave such intellectual substance to the discussions of those who spoke with her that their visions had dignity and authority. In the same way she captured the concept of the technological imaginary at Transtechnology Research at Plymouth University in ways that attracted the minds of researchers who were looking for new paradigms, and through that group worked on dozens of projects, including Leonardo Reviews and L|R|Q. We published joint papers and shared a large research grant that allowed us to work with people that she valued at the EYE Film Institute, the Institute for Sound and Vision and the Angewandte in Vienna. She also worked independently on projects, such as the anthology Light Image and Imagination, in collaboration with Gustave Deutsch and Hannah Schimek. At the time of her death we were working with a large group of researchers from the cognitive sciences, the arts and the humanities on creativity and cognitive innovation. We also set up a small laboratory project to revisit the psychological experiments that were important to media in the late 19th century, and we were working with hospitals and the Dental School at Plymouth to build a new center dealing with health and creativity. We also established a network of researchers from across many disciplines, including Roger Malina, to work on methodological issues—in particular those that involve questions about transdisciplinarity and academic collaboration. It seems today as I write this that the answers to many of our questions about academic collaboration were hidden in plain sight. Martha was a natural collaborator—or perhaps, more precisely, she made it very easy for others to collaborate with her. At this distance it is clear to me that this was not simply a consequence of her intellectual qualities and her natural compassion for the world around her, but rather was the legacy of her refusal to acknowledge the dichotomy between matter and spirit as an irrefutable given. For her this refusal was a gift of personal freedom and intellectual grace; the irrevocable continuity of time, memory and perception In MeMorIaM: Martha BlassnIgg, 08 septeMBer 1969– 27 septeMBer 2015
DRS2014: Design's Big Debates: Design Research Society's Seventh Biennial International Conference, Umeå, Sweden, June 16–19, 2014 (conference review)

This article reviews the Design Research Society’s (DRS’s) 2014 conference and looks ahead to the upcoming DRS2016 conference. One theme characterizing DRS2014, the seventh biennial conference, was its openness: It was open by design. This character was expressed in two new formats that I review here. The second, related theme that became apparent is articulation. The conference raised questions of how design researchers and designers articulate their contribution and value in relation to societal issues. Because sessions in which academic papers are presented are at the core of DRS conferences, I offer some observations first about the sessions and then review the new, open formats introduced at DRS2014.
Determining the Number of Factors from Empirical Distribution of Eigenvalues

We develop a new estimator of the number of factors in the approximate factor models. The estimator works well even when the idiosyncratic terms are substantially correlated. It is based on the fact, established in the paper, that any finite number of the largest idiosyncratic eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix cluster around a single point. In contrast, all the systematic eigenvalues, the number of which equals the number of factors, diverge to infinity. The estimator consistently separates the diverging eigenvalues from the cluster and counts the number of the separated eigenvalues. We consider a macroeconomic and a financial application.
The unconscious colossus: limits of (& alternatives to) American empire

First and foremost, a very great power that has left its mark on the international relations of an era . a polity that rules over wide territories and many peoples, since the management of space and multiethnicity is one of the great perennial dilemmas of empire . An empire is by definition . not a polity ruled with the explicit consent of its peoples . [But] by a process of assimilation of peoples and democratization of institutions empires can transform themselves into multinational federations or even nation states.1
Stereoscopic Synergy: Twin-Relief Sculpture and Painting

Two accelerated-relief sculp-tures depicting the same scene from slightly different viewpoints can serve as sculpted stereo-scopic half-imagesor twin-reliefs. Unlike traditional relief sculpture, which compresses sculptural space, twin-reliefs expand it, creating lifelike illusionistic depths. Viewed binocularly in a large Wheat-stone stereoscope, the twin-relief's virtual world appears colorful, atmospheric and life-size even infinitely deep. Furthermore, unlike flat-picture stereoscopy, which allows just one undistorted, perspectively robust view, twin-reliefs provide infinitely many such views because, being sculptural, they adapt to the observer's movement. Twin-reliefs syner-gistically combine essential physical attributes previously separated between the domains of painting, sculpture and traditional flat-picture stereoscopy.
Design and the Construction of Publics

In his 1927 book The Public and Its Problems,1 John Dewey sought to address the possibilities and inhibitors of collective political action in then contemporary times. Characteristic of his pragmatic thought, Dewey was interested in addressing the question of how a public is constituted, and how the constitution of a public is thwarted, in order to expound a set of propositions delineating the potentialities and conditions of collective political action. For Dewey, the philosophical investigation of the public could not be divorced from the “facts” of everyday life, or the need and desire to accomplish change in the civic arena. His treatment of the public as a philosophical subject thus was grounded in the concrete situations, experiences, and materiality of everyday life. As such, The Public and Its Problems stood as a robust inquiry that countered abstract discussions of “the state,” and articulated the opportunities and challenges of participatory democratic practices. Indeed, although The Public and Its Problems is nearly a century old, it is still relevant and productive today, particularly in the context of design studies. It is relevant because it links with contemporary world conditions through its pluralistic stance, endorsing a public that is broad, inclusive, and multiple. It is productive because it provides numerous points of intersection with both design theory and professional design activity that suggest novel courses for thinking about and doing design. Specifically, within The Public and Its Problems are leads to investigating and understanding the ways in which the products and processes of design intersect with publics. Of these leads, the notion that publics are “constructed” is perhaps most salient to contemporary design because it prompts a consideration of the means by which publics are assembled; begging the question: “How does, or might, design contribute to the construction of publics? ” Beyond academic inquisitiveness, this question is significant with regard to the renewed interest in the intersection of technology, aesthetics, engineering, and politics; which surfaces “design” and “the public” as fundamental topics requiring address. Since the late 1990s, there has been a proliferation of projects that examine and experiment with the capability and role of design (broadly construed) in increasing societal awareness, and motivating and enabling political action. This is evident in a diversity of endeavors, ranging from comprehensive exhibits such as Massive Change2 to the 1 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press Books, Henry Holt & Company, 1927). 2 The documentation for the exhibition Massive Change can be found online at www.massivechange. com, last referenced on November 26, 2007. A book, also entitled Massive Change, accompanied the exhibition. See, Bruce Mau and Jennifer Leonard, Massive Change (London: Phaidon Press, 2004). © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
15 seconds of fame

15 seconds of fame is an interactive installation that every 15 seconds generates a new pop-art portrait of a randomly selected viewer. The installation was inspired by Andy Warhol's ironical statement that in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. The installation detects human faces and crops them from the wide-angle view of people standing before the installation. Pop-art portraits are then generated by applying randomly selected filters to a randomly chosen face from the audience. These portraits are then shown in 15-second intervals on the flat-panel computer monitor, which is framed as a painting.
Is There a Nativity Gap? New Evidence on the Academic Performance of Immigrant Students

Public schools across the United States are educating an increasing number and diversity of immigrant students. Unfortunately, little is known about their performance relative to native-born students and the extent to which the nativity gap might be explained by school and demographic characteristics. This article takes a step toward filling that void using data from New York City where 17 percent of elementary and middle school students are immigrants. We explore disparities in performance between foreign-born and native-born students on reading and math tests in three waysusing levels (unadjusted scores), value-added scores (adjusted for prior performance), and an education production function. While unadjusted levels and value-added measures often indicate superior performance among immigrants, disparities are substantially explained by student and school characteristics. Further, while the nativity gap differs for students from different world regions, disparities are considerably diminished in fully specified models. We conclude with implications for urban schools in the United States.
Complex Landscapes and Oil Curse Research

Oil has long been a unique commodity in the global political economy. Nothing else combines its per-unit value, its central role in world commerce, the vast investments tied to its production, transport, processing, and consumption, and the strategic attention it draws from governments. A century later, John Paul Getty’s famous quip about success—“rise early, work hard, strike oil”1—still resonates, in that eight of the world’s eleven largest companies are oil arms.2 Even as the world peers into a future beyond carbon, oil retains the capacity to make (or ruin) fortunes and lives, be it through price shocks, new ands, or the corporate restructuring of the early twenty-arst century (Exxon-Mobil, ChevronTexaco, Conoco-Phillips, TotalFina-Elf, BP-Amoco), which seems intent on reversing the breakup of Standard Oil a century earlier. As the full array of petroleum’s consequences becomes clearer, the idea that its possession is an unmitigated good has been challenged (at least by those who don’t reliably control it). Several of the countries that possess oil and gas in large quantities have struggled with sluggish growth in their non-petroleum sectors, volatile world energy prices, skewed development, autocracy, political violence, and corruption. Oil may fuel commerce and make fortunes, but it can also destabilize economies, lay waste to landscapes and communities, empower adventurist foreign policies, and invite intervention, secession, and insurgency.
Mapping the Modern City: Otto Neurath, the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), and the Politics of Information Design

Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, 1980), 20. Otto Neurath was a social scientist, one of the most formidable, if controversial, intellectuals of the interwar period. A student of turn-of-the-century German sociology? the writings of Georg Simmel, Ferdinand T? nnies, and the Social Policy Association [ Verein f? r Sozialpolitik]? he was a key player in the socialist upris ings in Munich in 1919, as well as Vienna's settlement movement during the early 1920s. In 1925, he gained funding from the Vienna municipality to open the Museum of Society and Economy, which still represents one of the most innovative cultural experiments of the twentieth century. The museum's mission was an unconven tional one? to bring social and economic facts to the masses, raise the self-awareness of the working class, and break down modern capitalism's fetishization of the "object. " It exhibited facts, not arti facts; the reproducible, the transparent, and the everyday rather than the rare, the curious, and the strange. The Museum of Society and Economy was the very inverse of the Baroque "Wunderkammer" or "cabinet of wonder," because it was conceived as a conduit of information, literally a medium for the masses that sought to form as much as it informed the working class public. It offered a means of looking at the world that was rooted in what Neurath termed the "scientific world conception," the philoso phy of scientific empiricism that attempted to dislodge metaphysics from everyday communication. The museum developed a new form of graphic representation known as the "Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics" (later renamed the "International System of Typographic Education," or "ISOTYPE"), which attempted to popularize social and scientific facts through the use of pictorial graphics. It sought to furnish the public with a systematic "picture" or "Bild" of society in a fashion that was easily legible and readily reproducible. For Neurath, "reading" an ISOTYPE chart was as easy as counting, grouping, and measuring: "[R]eading a picture is like making observations with the eye in everyday experience: what we may say about a language picture is very like what we may say about other things seen by the eye. For example: the man has two legs; the picture-sign has two legs; but the word-sign 'man' has not two legs. " ' (figures 1,2)
Cool Rationalities and Hot Air: A Rhetorical Approach to Understanding Debates on Renewable Energy

A key obstacle to the wide-scale development of renewable energy is that public acceptability of wind energy cannot be taken for granted when wind energy moves from abstract support to local implementation. Drawing on a case study of opposition to the siting of a proposed off-shore wind farm in Northern Ireland, we offer a rhetorical analysis of a series of representative documents drawn from government, media, pro- and anti-wind energy sources, which identifies and interprets a number of discourses of objection and support. The analysis indicates that the key issue in terms of the transition to a renewable energy economy has little to do with the technology itself. Understanding the different nuances of pro- and anti-wind energy discourses highlights the importance of thinking about new ways of looking at these conflicts. These include adopting a conflict resolution approach and upstreaming public involvement in the decision-making process and also the counter-productive strategy of assuming that objection is based on ignorance (which can be solved by information) or NIMBY thinking (which can be solved by moral arguments about overcoming free riders).
Torchlight parades for the television age: the presidential debates as political ritual

Dædalus Spring 2009 During the 2008 vice presidential debate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was pressed by her Democratic rival, Delaware Senator Joe Biden, and moderator Gwen I1⁄2ll to reply to a question she had previously ignored. The chipper Palin, who thrived on the perception of being persecuted, demurred. “I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear,” she parried, “but I’m going to talk straight to the American people. ”1 For this statement, Palin suffered not only rebuke, but ridicule. Flaunting her intent to duck a question amounted to a failure of manners. Part of the performance of a presidential (or vice presidential) debate, after all, consists of following certain conventions. One is that candidates are supposed to act as if they are there to report to the public their ticket’s positions on prominent policy issues, thereby helping voters 1⁄2gure out which party better matches their own preferences. According to this logic, Palin’s sin lay not in her evasion of the question–a common enough occurrence in the debates–but in her unabashed admission of the evasion. If a gaffe, in the journalist Michael Kinsley’s formulation, is when a politician tells the truth, Palin told the truth without even the customary inadvertence.2 Kinsley’s axiom, quoted often during the gaffe-ridden 2008 campaign, remains in currency because it highlights the power of the unspoken and sometimes unrecognized assumptions that underpin our politics. These assumptions aren’t always true or even justi1⁄2able. But the public, particularly those in the news media who shape our discourse, has a stake in maintaining them. They serve a useful purpose. An underlying premise of the discourse about the presidential debates is that they exist to inform viewers, who watch them with open minds to learn about the candidates and decide how to vote. In other words, grandiose as it may sound, our culture assigns the debates a vital democratic role: democratic theory holds that effective selfgovernment depends on an informed citizenry, and the debates, more than any other vehicle, are supposed to teach voters what they still need to know about the candidates in the fall of a presidential election season. Accordingly, we eagerly anticipate these contests as potential turning points for the campaigns, the only scheduled events that might by design win or lose votes for one candidate or the other overnight. David Greenberg
Beer Taxes, Workers' Compensation, and Industrial Injury

The apparent effects of beer taxes, workers' compensation rules, and other factors on reported rates of lost work-days due to injury are estimated. The data used are for injury rates for two-digit SIC industries at the state-level pooled over 197585. The results indicate that higher beer tax rates are associated with lower rates of injury lost work-days. More generous workers' compensation payments generally are associated with higher reported injury lost work-days.
Unscheduled School Closings and Student Performance

Do students perform better on statewide assessments in years in which they have more school days to prepare? We explore this question using data on math and reading assessments taken by students in the third, fifth, and eighth grades since 1994 in Maryland. Our identification strategy is rooted in the fact that tests are administered on the same day(s) statewide in late winter or early spring, so any unscheduled closings due to snow reduce instruction time and are not made up until after the exams are over. We estimate that in academic years with an average number of unscheduled closures (five), the number of third graders performing satisfactorily on state reading and math assessments within a school is nearly 3 percent lower than in years with no school closings. The impacts of closure are smaller for students in fifth and eighth grades. Combining our estimates with actual patterns of unscheduled closings in the last three years, we find that more than half of schools failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in third-grade math or reading, required under No Child Left Behind, would have met AYP if schools had been open on all scheduled days.
Exploring the Human Microbiome: The Potential Future Role of Next-Generation Sequencing in Disease Diagnosis and Treatment

The interaction between the human microbiome and immune system has an effect on several human metabolic functions and impacts our well-being. Additionally, the interaction between humans and microbes can also play a key role in determining the wellness or disease status of the human body. Dysbiosis is related to a plethora of diseases, including skin, inflammatory, metabolic, and neurological disorders. A better understanding of the host-microbe interaction is essential for determining the diagnosis and appropriate treatment of these ailments. The significance of the microbiome on host health has led to the emergence of new therapeutic approaches focused on the prescribed manipulation of the host microbiome, either by removing harmful taxa or reinstating missing beneficial taxa and the functional roles they perform. Culturing large numbers of microbial taxa in the laboratory is problematic at best, if not impossible. Consequently, this makes it very difficult to comprehensively catalog the individual members comprising a specific microbiome, as well as understanding how microbial communities function and influence host-pathogen interactions. Recent advances in sequencing technologies and computational tools have allowed an increasing number of metagenomic studies to be performed. These studies have provided key insights into the human microbiome and a host of other microbial communities in other environments. In the present review, the role of the microbiome as a therapeutic agent and its significance in human health and disease is discussed. Advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies for surveying host-microbe interactions are also discussed. Additionally, the correlation between the composition of the microbiome and infectious diseases as described in previously reported studies is covered as well. Lastly, recent advances in state-of-the-art bioinformatics software, workflows, and applications for analysing metagenomic data are summarized.