Cognitive Ability and Career Attainment: The Moderating Effects of Early Career Success

Three explanations regarding the prediction that early career success will moderate the relationship between cognitive ability and career attainment are presented along with an empirical examination of this issue. Using longitudinal data provided for 156 managerial, professional, and technical employees, significant moderating effects for an age-graded index of early career success were observed. The relationships between two measures of cognitive ability and later career job level were stronger for individuals identified as below average with respect to early career success than for their above average counterparts. These results agree with the proposition that the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and information is particularly dependent upon cognitive ability for inhviduals competing without the advantages associated with early career signals of high potential

Forecasting Stock Time-Series using Data Approximation and Pattern Sequence Similarity

Time series analysis is the process of building a model using statistical techniques to represent characteristics of time series data. Processing and forecasting huge time series data is a challenging task. This paper presents Approximation and Prediction of Stock Time-series data (APST), which is a two step approach to predict the direction of change of stock price indices. First, performs data approximation by using the technique called Multilevel Segment Mean (MSM). In second phase, prediction is performed for the approximated data using Euclidian distance and Nearest-Neighbour technique. The computational cost of data approximation is O(n ni) and computational cost of prediction task is O(m |NN|). Thus, the accuracy and the time required for prediction in the proposed method is comparatively efficient than the existing Label Based Forecasting (LBF) method [1].Comment: 11 page

Media and Polarization

This paper provides a model of how media environments affect political polarization. We first develop a model of how media environments, characterized by their levels of accessibility and variety of content, interact with citizens' ideological views and attitudes and political motivation. We then embed it in a model of majoritarian electoral competition in which politicians react to those media-influenced views. We show how equilibrium polarization is affected by changes in the media environment, through two channels: the variety effect, whereby a decrease in media variety leads to convergence in citizens' views and hence to lower polarization; and the composition effect, whereby a lowering of barriers to media accessibility increases turnout and hence lowers polarization, since newly motivated voters are relatively more moderate. We take the model's predictions to the data, in the US context of the introduction of broadcast TV, in the 1940s and 1950s, and radio, in the 1920s and 1930s. We show that, consistent with the model's predictions, TV decreased polarization, and exposure to (network) radio was correlated with lower polarization. The evidence suggests that the variety effect was more important than the composition effect.