Security After 9/11: Strategy Choices and Budget Tradeoffs

The White House issued a National Security Strategy document in 2002 that stated the nation's new foreign policy and national security policy goals. Are the choices it identifies the right choices, and how best should resources be allocated to reach those or alternative goals? This briefing book includes data and analysis of these topics by analysts from several research organizations, intended to help expand and deepen public debate on these issues

Beyond Personalization: Research Directions in Multistakeholder Recommendation

Recommender systems are personalized information access applications; they are ubiquitous in today's online environment, and effective at finding items that meet user needs and tastes. As the reach of recommender systems has extended, it has become apparent that the single-minded focus on the user common to academic research has obscured other important aspects of recommendation outcomes. Properties such as fairness, balance, profitability, and reciprocity are not captured by typical metrics for recommender system evaluation. The concept of multistakeholder recommendation has emerged as a unifying framework for describing and understanding recommendation settings where the end user is not the sole focus. This article describes the origins of multistakeholder recommendation, and the landscape of system designs. It provides illustrative examples of current research, as well as outlining open questions and research directions for the field.Comment: 64 page

Intrasexual competition among women : the influence of same-sex rivals on women's purchasing and risk-taking behavior across the ovulatory cycle

textThe following will explore the operation of evolved mechanisms connected with cycling fertility. I first address strategic shifts in women’s behavior near ovulation and hypothesize that certain behavioral shifts at high fertility reflect an increase in women’s intrasexual competition tactics when conception is most probable. A simulated, online shopping program was designed to track women’s spending patterns (at varying budgets) on clothing, undergarments, shoes, jewelry, and other fashion accessories – items that likely enhance a woman’s ability to attract a high quality mate and effectively compete with same-sex rivals. Additionally, a laboratory task was created to assess women’s likelihood of incurring a risk to appear more attractive and have access to more resources than same-sex peers. Studies 1-3 will explore the effect of fertility on women’s consumer behavior and the influence of same-sex peers on fertility-induced motivation to appear more attractive. Study 4 will further examine fertility-induced shifts in women’s intrasexual competitiveness by measuring context-specific risks women take to gain a positional advantage over same-sex peers. The current studies present new data that provide novel insights into human adaptations to cycling fertility and highlight important decision-making processes that guide women’s social competition within a variety of domains.Psycholog

Market women’s skills, constraints, and agency in supplying affordable, safe, and high-quality fish in Ghana

In Ghana, the role of female informal traders (“market women”) in making low-cost smoked and dried fish available in urban and rural marketplaces is the key to explaining the high consumption of fish in the country. However, market women’s contribution to food security and nutrition (FSN), as well as to fish quality and safety is underrated and poorly understood. Fish marketing requires proficient distribution and preservation skills, economic and sociocultural competence, and a high degree of mobility. Fish traders face numerous constraints related to fish supplies, credit access, hygiene, storage facilities, transport, and market governance, all of which affect their incomes and may affect the quality and safety of fish. The article, which is based on semi-structured interviews with fish traders and fish consumers in coastal and inland markets in Ghana, documents how traders operate and exhibit agency to deal with constraints by activating a range of skills in their profit-making and their fish quality and safety enhancement strategies. The authors argue that policies grounded in knowledge about fish traders’ activities, skills, and working conditions, with budgets that prioritize investment in public infrastructure that caters for market women’s professional and personal needs, can further enhance their ability to supply affordable, safe, and high-quality fish to Ghana’s population.publishedVersio

Machine learning for targeted display advertising: Transfer learning in action

This paper presents a detailed discussion of problem formulation and data representation issues in the design, deployment, and operation of a massive-scale machine learning system for targeted display advertising. Notably, the machine learning system itself is deployed and has been in continual use for years, for thousands of advertising campaigns (in contrast to simply having the models from the system be deployed). In this application, acquiring sufficient data for training from the ideal sampling distribution is prohibitively expensive. Instead, data are drawn from surrogate domains and learning tasks, and then transferred to the target task. We present the design of this multistage transfer learning system, highlighting the problem formulation aspects. We then present a detailed experimental evaluation, showing that the different transfer stages indeed each add value. We next present production results across a variety of advertising clients from a variety of industries, illustrating the performance of the system in use. We close the paper with a collection of lessons learned from the work over half a decade on this complex, deployed, and broadly used machine learning system.Statistics Working Papers Serie

The unification bonus (malus) in postwall Eastern Germany

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person?s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical continuation of economic life in a static GDR. The two main issues tackled in this study are the construction of valid deflators for a comparison of real incomes during the transition from a centralized to a market economy and the estimation of plausible counterfactual income streams. Our central result is that 19 percent of East Germans received a present value malus and so can be regarded as unification losers but that the aggregate bonus is ten times the size of the aggregate malus of the sample. --Real income comparison,income distribution and mobility,economies in transition