Showing 191 - 200 of 733 Items
Framing ICT Usage in the Real Estate Industry
Date: 2013-04-12
Creator: Steven Jones
Access: Open access
- The real estate industry, like many, is one based on a competitive consumer culture in which professionals vie for the business and, ultimately, the loyalty of customers. In this case, those customers are purchasing what, for most, is a significant investment, requiring them to navigate various legal and regulatory processes that might be impossible without the assistance of a knowledgeable, seasoned agent. It is the presence of agency that renders real estate unique from retail and other industries where goods and services trade hands. Furthermore, the rise of various information and communication technologies (ICT) over the course of the past 25 years may have led to new challenges for real estate agents and allied professionals. Some scholars surmise that the increased prevalence of ICTs in various industries can become disruptive to those industries, causing individuals and organizations working within them to either adapt accordingly or become obsolete (Bower and Christensen 1995; Markus, et al. 2006).
Interest group issue appeals: Evidence of issue convergence in senate and presidential elections, 2008-2014
Date: 2000-05-01
Creator: Michael M. Franz
Access: Open access
- Interest groups now play a prominent role in the air war. Their collective investment in election campaigns has skyrocketed in the aftermath of Citizens United. Yet questions remain about whether interest group advertising affects the content of the specific issues being discussed. Do groups enter campaigns and engage voters on the same issues as their candidate allies? Or does the presence of more advertisers introduce competitive issue streams? This paper examines ad buys in Senate elections between 2008 and 2014 and the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012. A primary goal of the paper is to uncover the effect of high and low levels of "issue convergence" on election outcomes. Strategists often express concern that too many voices on behalf of a candidate can weaken the impact of ads. One might expect that as convergence between a candidate and his or her allies goes up (meaning the issue content of the ad buys overlaps across advertisers), the impact of ads on votes will increase. Ad effects should be weaker when a candidate's ads discuss different issues from allied groups and party committees. The results, however, suggest that high rates of issue convergence are only weakly related to election outcomes (and not always in consistent ways).
How Did Exchange Rates Affect Employment in US Cities?
Date: 2013-05-07
Creator: Yao Tang, Haifang Huang
Access: Open access
- We estimate the effects of real exchange rate movements on employment in US cities between 2003 and 2010. We explore the differences in the composition of local industries to construct city-specific changes in exchange rates and estimate their effects on local employment in manufacturing industries and in nonmanufacturing industries. Controlling for year and city fixed effects, we find that a depreciation of the US dollar increased local employment in the manufacturing industries, our proxy for the tradable sector. The depreciation also increased employment in the nonmanufacturing industries, the nontradable sector. Furthermore, the effects on nonmanufacturing employment were stronger in cities that had a higher fraction of manufacturing employment, indicating the exchange rate movements’ indirect effects through the manufacturing industries. We also consider an alternative definition of the tradable sector that is broadened to include five service industries. The findings are similar.
The organization (re)invented by its blogs
Date: 2013-04-12
Creator: Alex Primo
Access: Open access
- This article discusses how interactions in organizational blogs participate in the emergence of the organization itself. Based on the principles of The Montreal School of organizational communication, the paper reflects on how the recursive relationship between texts and conversations in blogs, according to their affordances, mobilizes the organization and contributes to its continuing creation. In order to conduct this argument, the concept of social media, uses of organizational blogs and the main contributions of The Montreal School are analyzed. Finally, this article demonstrates how blogs contribute to the definition of the organization. Beyond their promotional potential, the blog’ role as co-creator of the organization is highlighted.
The citizens united election? or same as it ever was?
Date: 2010-12-01
Creator: Michael M. Franz
Access: Open access
- In January 2010, the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC overturned long-standing regulations governing the role of unions and corporations in sponsoring pro-candidate advocacy. Many predicted a deleterious effect on the electoral process. In the aftermath of the midterm elections, a number of questions deserve consideration. Was the observed level of outside spending abnormally high in 2010? What can we say about the potential effect of outside spending on the outcomes of House and Senate races? Moreover, what has the decision done to the power of parties and, most especially, their ability to compete with special interests in backing federal candidates? This paper investigates these questions using data from the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracked political ads in 2010. The initial evidence suggests that while interest groups were aggressive players in the air war, their impact may not have been as negative or as large as initially predicted. © 2011 Berkeley Electronic Press.
The H.C. Carey School of U.S. Currency Doctors: A "Subtle Principle" and its Progeny
Date: 2024-02-20
Creator: Stephen Meardon
Access: Open access
- Henry C. Carey led a school of post-Civil War U.S. currency doctors prescribing an “elastic currency,” expanding and contracting according to commercial needs. The problem for the Careyites was reconciling elasticity, which implied inconvertibility with gold, with the related aim of decentralized financial power. Careyite currency doctors included, among others, Wallace P. Groom, editor of the New York Mercantile Journal, and Henry Carey Baird, Carey’s own nephew and inheritor of his mantle. Their prescribed reform of the banking system featured a financial innovation that would remove superfluous currency from circulation while supplying what was needed. The innovation was an “interconvertible bond,” a debt instrument of the U.S. Treasury that was to be issued upon demand and redeemable for currency at the option of the holder. Its function was supposed to be like the mechanical governor of a steam engine, operating by a “subtle principle” that obviated human governing power and discretion. The Carey school’s prescription and its rationale remained salient up to the advent of the Federal Reserve System.
Hedgehog signaling regulates dental papilla formation and tooth size during zebrafish odontogenesis
Date: 2015-04-01
Creator: Jeffrey C. Yu, Zachary D. Fox, James L. Crimp, Hana E. Littleford, Andrea L., Jowdry, William R. Jackman
Access: Open access
- Intercellular communication by the hedgehog cell signaling pathway is necessary for tooth development throughout the vertebrates, but it remains unclear which specific developmental signals control cell behavior at different stages of odontogenesis. To address this issue, we have manipulated hedgehog activity during zebrafish tooth development and visualized the results using confocal microscopy. Results: We first established that reporter lines for dlx2b, fli1, NF-κB, and prdm1a are markers for specific subsets of tooth germ tissues. We then blocked hedgehog signaling with cyclopamine and observed a reduction or elimination of the cranial neural crest derived dental papilla, which normally contains the cells that later give rise to dentin-producing odontoblasts. Upon further investigation, we observed that the dental papilla begins to form and then regresses in the absence of hedgehog signaling, through a mechanism unrelated to cell proliferation or apoptosis. We also found evidence of an isometric reduction in tooth size that correlates with the time of earliest hedgehog inhibition. Conclusions: We hypothesize that these results reveal a previously uncharacterized function of hedgehog signaling during tooth morphogenesis, regulating the number of cells in the dental papilla and thereby controlling tooth size.
Vertical Trade, Exchange Rate Pass-Through, and Exchange Rate Regime
Date: 2012-09-01
Creator: Yao Tang, Ke Pang
Access: Open access
- We compare the welfare of different combinations of monetary and currency policies in an open-economy macroeconomic model that incorporates two important features of many small economies: a high level of vertical international trade and a prevalent use of a large trade partner's currency as the invoicing currency for both imports and exports. In this environment, a small economy prefers a fixed exchange rate regime over a flexible regime, while the larger economy prefers a flexible exchange rate regime. There are two main causes underlying our results. First, in the presence of sticky prices, relative prices adjust through changes in the exchange rate. Multiple stages of production and trade make it more difficult for one exchange rate to balance the whole economy by adjusting several relative prices throughout the vertical chain of production and trade. Namely, there is a trade-off between delivering an efficient relative price between home and foreign final goods and delivering an efficient relative price between home and foreign intermediate goods. Second, because the small economy uses the larger economy's currency in trade, it faces a high degree of exchange rate pass-through under a flexible regime and hence suffers from the lack of efficient relative prices in vertical trade. The larger economy, however, does not face this problem because its level of exchange rate pass-through is low.
The moment of inertia of the binary pulsar J0737-3039A: Constraining the nuclear equation of state
Date: 2004-01-01
Creator: I.A. Morrison, T.W. Baumgarte, S.L. Shapiro, V.R. Pandharipande
Access: Open access
Haplotype mapping of a diploid non-meiotic organism using existing and induced aneuploidies
Date: 2008-01-01
Creator: Melanie Legrand, Anja Forche, Anna Selmecki, Christine Chan, David T., Kirkpatrick, Judith Berman
Access: Open access
- Haplotype maps (HapMaps) reveal underlying sequence variation and facilitate the study of recombination and genetic diversity. In general, HapMaps are produced by analysis of Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) segregation in large numbers of meiotic progeny. Candida albicans, the most common human fungal pathogen, is an obligate diploid that does not appear to undergo meiosis. Thus, standard methods for haplotype mapping cannot be used. We exploited naturally occurring aneuploid strains to determine the haplotypes of the eight chromosome pairs in the C. albicans laboratory strain SC5314 and in a clinical isolate. Comparison of the maps revealed that the clinical strain had undergone a significant amount of genome rearrangement, consisting primarily of crossover or gene conversion recombination events. SNP map haplotyping revealed that insertion and activation of the UAU1 cassette in essential and non-essential genes can result in whole chromosome aneuploidy. UAU1 is often used to construct homozygous deletions of targeted genes in C. albicans; the exact mechanism (trisomy followed by chromosome loss versus gene conversion) has not been determined. UAU1 insertion into the essential ORC1 gene resulted in a large proportion of trisomic strains, while gene conversion events predominated when UAU1 was inserted into the non-essential LRO1 gene. Therefore, induced aneuploidies can be used to generate HapMaps, which are essential for analyzing genome alterations and mitotic recombination events in this clonal organism. © 2008 Legrand et al.