Financing Direct Democracy: Revisiting the Research on Campaign Spending and Citizen Initiatives

The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research. We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the endogenous nature of campaign spending: initiative proponents spend more when their ballot measure is likely to fail. We address this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach to analyze a comprehensive dataset of ballot propositions in California from 1976 to 2004. We find that both support and opposition spending on citizen initiatives have strong, statistically significant, and countervailing effects. We confirm this finding by looking at time series data from early polling on a subset of these measures. Both analyses show that spending in favor of citizen initiatives substantially increases their chances of passage, just as opposition spending decreases this likelihood

Engineers and modern managers in the SS: The business administration main office SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt

In February of 1942, SS General Oswald Pohl amalgamated several lesser offices into the Business-Administration Main Office (Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt or WVHA). Pohl had long managed an array of SS industries, and as war became grim the chief of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ordered him to convert the expanding concentration-camp system into an industrial plant capable of contributing to war production. The office also contained an elite corps of civil engineers who used prison labor to build underground production facilities for high-tech weapons like the V-2 rockets. A history of the WVHA offers a unique location in which technical competence and extreme ideological commitment came together in modern engineering and management, including their involvement with the institutions of genocide. This dissertation explores the genesis, development, and activities of the WVHA combining narrative history of the institution and a social profile of the SS officers who built this office and, with it, their own careers

Engineers and modern managers in the SS: The business administration main office SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt

In February of 1942, SS General Oswald Pohl amalgamated several lesser offices into the Business-Administration Main Office (Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt or WVHA). Pohl had long managed an array of SS industries, and as war became grim the chief of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ordered him to convert the expanding concentration-camp system into an industrial plant capable of contributing to war production. The office also contained an elite corps of civil engineers who used prison labor to build underground production facilities for high-tech weapons like the V-2 rockets. A history of the WVHA offers a unique location in which technical competence and extreme ideological commitment came together in modern engineering and management, including their involvement with the institutions of genocide. This dissertation explores the genesis, development, and activities of the WVHA combining narrative history of the institution and a social profile of the SS officers who built this office and, with it, their own careers

The Perceptive Workbench: Towards Spontaneous and Natural Interaction in Semi-Immersive Virtual Environments

The Perceptive Workbench enables a spontaneous, natural, and unimpeded interface between the physical and virtual world. It is built on vision-based methods for interaction that remove the need for wired input devices and wired tracking. Objects are recognized and tracked when placed on the display surface. Through the use of multiple light sources, the objectUs 3D shape can be captured and inserted into the virtual interface. This ability permits spontaneity as either preloaded objects or those selected on the spot by the user can become physical icons. Integrated into the same vision- based interface is the ability to identify 3D hand position, pointing direction, and sweeping arm gestures. Such gestures can support selection, manipulation, and navigation tasks. In this paper the Perceptive Workbench is used for augmented reality gaming and terrain navigation applications, which demonstrate the utility and capability of the interface