31,654 research outputs found
Introducing Tony Hall's cunning plan: The BB(&A)C
Tony Hall’s scheme for the BBC’s future has been widely disdained as a willful desire to put the clock back to the days of ‘Auntie’ BBC, but Brian Winston argues it is more like a return to the brilliant deal that acquired the Proms in the ’20s
Plenty of Bark, But Not Much Bite: Putting Teeth Back into Historic Preservation Enforcement in D.C.
Washington, D.C. has one of the largest inventories of protected historic buildings of any city in the United States. Over 25,000 structures stand within the city\u27s borders that are either individually landmarked or contributing buildings within a historic district. These buildings are covered by statutory protection designed to prevent alteration or demolition without consultation with the Office of Historic Preservation (HPO) and/or the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB). Enforcement of these protections relies on HPO\u27s inspectors.
While the District currently employs two historic preservation inspectors, recent changes in the structure of HPO and other D.C. bureaucracies brought about a staff reduction in historic preservation enforcement -- hampering the city\u27s best efforts to shepherd the buildings within its charge. In the last several years the number of enforcement actions carried out by HPO has declined precipitously, reflecting inefficiencies symptomatic of the new arrangement. Without significant changes to the current mode of operation, HPO inspectors will be forced to continue enforcement triage while allowing the majority of infractions to escape without consequence. This in turn has a detrimental impact on the number of fines assessed by HPO inspectors, thereby reducing the amount of funds available for historic preservation projects.
This is a policy paper, and as such, will lay out in detail the current structure and practices of the historic preservation regime in Washington D.C., analyze its strengths and weaknesses and provide recommendations for improving the process and its overall efficacy
The revolutionary founding moments of a contra-Grierson tradition [review of: Post-revolution nonfiction film: building the Soviet and Cuban Nations by Joshua Malitsky, 2013]
“The revolutionary founding moments of a contra-Grierson tradition” Joshua Malitsky, Post-revolution nonfiction film: building the Soviet and Cuban Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013)
Let them eat laptops: the limits of technicism
Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Labs 'onlie begeter' and one of digital techonologies most
persuasive salespersons, has a new project. With undeniable logic and unimpreachable intentions he
wishes every Third World child to be given a laptop. His reasoning is that without education, all other
attempts at development are doomed to fail and that since education can be accomplished by computers,
the way to make good its grievous failings in the South is with computers. He has therefore developed
an elegant device of considerable sophistication but great ease of use – a brightly-coloured, plasticencased
clockwork-powered computer which costs (or rather, he promises, will cost) around 100
a machine. Seed money alone -- from the likes of eBay, Google and Norstar, all at 12 million
Agnostic notes on regression adjustments to experimental data: Reexamining Freedman's critique
Freedman [Adv. in Appl. Math. 40 (2008) 180-193; Ann. Appl. Stat. 2 (2008)
176-196] critiqued ordinary least squares regression adjustment of estimated
treatment effects in randomized experiments, using Neyman's model for
randomization inference. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he argued that
adjustment can lead to worsened asymptotic precision, invalid measures of
precision, and small-sample bias. This paper shows that in sufficiently large
samples, those problems are either minor or easily fixed. OLS adjustment cannot
hurt asymptotic precision when a full set of treatment-covariate interactions
is included. Asymptotically valid confidence intervals can be constructed with
the Huber-White sandwich standard error estimator. Checks on the asymptotic
approximations are illustrated with data from Angrist, Lang, and Oreopoulos's
[Am. Econ. J.: Appl. Econ. 1:1 (2009) 136--163] evaluation of strategies to
improve college students' achievement. The strongest reasons to support
Freedman's preference for unadjusted estimates are transparency and the dangers
of specification search.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS583 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Minority Entrepreneurship: How Access to Capital and Strategic Decisions Affect Success
Many researchers have discovered that entrepreneurship is a source of financial freedom that if done successfully will ensure wealth for generations. With that idea in mind, minorities have seized that opportunity in record numbers with hopes that they will become prosperous. However, in addition to the increased success rate of minority-owned businesses, there is a rise in the failure rate of minority-owned businesses specifically in the African-American community. In this thesis, we will conduct a case study of three entrepreneurs at different stages that supports the theory that access to capital and strategic decisions affect the success of minority entrepreneurs. This case study will provide an in-depth and holistic understanding of issues that plague minority entrepreneurs
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