Celebrity as a political resource: the human rights now! campaign

The use of celebrities as endorsers of causes and even political candidates has become ubiquitous in modern culture. Aided by the rise of mass and social media the impact of celebrity on the organizations that use their power is seldom examined. This work critically reviews the role celebrity played in one of the first and largest events of its kind—Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now! global tour of rock musicians in 1989. It analyzes both the short-term human rights goals of the tour and the long-term influence the tour had on organizational culture

ON THE QUANTUM THEORY OF ISOTOPE EFFECTS IN ELECTROMIGRATION AND THERMOMIGRATION OF LIGHT INTERSTITIALS

The electromigration and thermomigration of light interstitials, such as hydrogen in metals, have been examined in terms of the quantum theory of diffusion of Flynn and Stoneham. The pronounced isotope effect observed in the effective charge Z* is shown to come from the differences in the self trapping distortions of the various isotopes. The qualitative dependence of Z* on isotope, host lattice and temperature are correctly predicted. The interstitial contribution to the reduced heat of transport Q* is calculated directly from the quantum theory

Banking consolidation in Nigeria, 2000-2010

This study examines the Nigerian banking consolidation process using a dynamic panel for the period 2000-2010. The Arellano and Bond (1991) dynamic GMM approach is adopted to estimate a cost function taking into account the possible endogeneity of the covariates. The main finding is that the Nigerian banking sector has benefited from the consolidation process, and specifically that foreign ownership, mergers and acquisitions and bank size decrease costs. Directions for future research are also discussed

Coordinative Entities: Forms of Organizing in Data Intensive Science

Scientific collaboration is a long-standing subject of CSCW scholarship that typically focuses on the development and use of computing systems to facilitate research. The research presented in this article investigates the sociality of science by identifying and describing particular, common forms of organizing that researchers in four different scientific realms employ to conduct work in both local contexts and as part of distributed, global projects. This paper introduces five prototypical forms of organizing we categorize as coordinative entities: the Principal Group, Intermittent Exchange, Sustained Aggregation, Federation, and Facility Organization. Coordinative entities as a categorization help specify, articulate, compare, and trace overlapping and evolving arrangements scientists use to facilitate data intensive research. We use this typology to unpack complexities of data intensive scientific collaboration in four cases, showing how scientists invoke different coordinative entities across three types of research activities: data collection, processing, and analysis. Our contribution scrutinizes the sociality of scientific work to illustrate how these actors engage in relational work within and among diverse, dispersed forms of organizing across project, funding, and disciplinary boundaries

The roots of black studies

The plight of the "desegregated Negro" serves as a perfect metaphor for the development of Black Studies in the United States. Histories of Black Studies often view its development as emerging from the Black Power Movement with no link to the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the new spaces, called Black Studies, began to challenge the legitimacy of the dominant culture. In the seven-year period from 1968 to 1975, over 500 academic units began offering a Bachelor's degree in Black Studies. The differences between white and black student activists are dramatically illustrated in events at the University of California at Berkeley. In April 1960, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee was born, significantly changing the modern Civil Rights Movement. When the students fought for Black Studies at colleges and universities across the country their purpose was the same as that of the teachers in the Freedom Schools

Thermodynamic properties of QCD with two flavors of Wilson-type lattice quarks

I report on a study of finite temperature QCD by the CP-PACS Collaboration toward a precise determination of the equation of state with dynamical u,d quarks. Based on a systematic simulation using improved Wilson-type quarks on lattices with temporal size $N_t=4$ and 6, the energy density and pressure are calculated as functions of temperature and renormalized light quark mass in the range $T/T_c \approx 0.7$--2.5 and $m_{\rm PS}/m_{\rm V} = 0.65$--0.95. Results for $N_t=4$ are found to contain significant scaling violations, while results for $N_t=6$ are suggested to be not far from the continuum limit. On the other hand, the quark mass dependence in the EOS turned out to be small for m_{\rm PS}/m_{\rm V} \simlt 0.8.Comment: Talk presented at Statistical QCD, Aug. 26-30, 2001, Bielefeld, Germany. LaTeX2e, 6 pages, 4 PS figures, espcrc1.sty neede

Checklist of the Helminth Parasites of South American Bats

My Brazilian co-author paid for this paper to be open--access.Copyright © 2001-2015 Magnolia Press. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article

Productivity drivers in European banking: Country effects, legal tradition and market dynamics

This paper analyses efficiency drivers of a representative sample of European banks by means of the two-stage procedure proposed by Simar and Wilson (2007). In the first stage, the technical efficiency of banks is estimated using DEA (data envelopment analysis) in order to establish which of them are most efficient. Their ranking is based on total productivity in the period 1993-2003. In the second stage, the Simar and Wilson (2007) procedure is used to bootstrap the DEA scores with a truncated bootstrapped regression. The policy implications of our findings are considered