The Rise of Political Fact-checking How Reagan Inspired a Journalistic Movement: A Reporter's Eye View

This report uses the Washington Post as a case study to trace the rise of modern political fact-checking. It considers fact-checking as a symptom of the larger, centuries-old struggle between the political establishment and the Fourth Estate to shape the narrative that will be presented to the voters. Through devices such as "Pinocchios" and "Pants-on-Fire" verdicts, journalists have formally asserted their right to adjudicate the truth or falsehood of the carefully-constructed campaign narratives of political candidates. This represents a shift of power back to the media following a low point during the run-up to the war in Iraq when The Post and other leading newspapers failed to seriously challenge the White House line on "weapons of mass destruction."The modern-day fact checking movement can be dated back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who attracted widespread ridicule for his claim that trees cause four times more pollution than automobiles. The ascent of political bloggers during the 2004 campaign put additional pressure on The Post and other mainstream news outlets to upgrade their fact checking operations. The Internet has democratized the fact-checking process by making information that was previously available only through expensive news databases such as Lexis-Nexis easily accessible to bloggers without any research budget

Generalized quantifiers in distributed databases.

Optimizing queries in a distributed database is quite difficult. This work proposes defining new generalized quantifiers which operate on sets rather than tuples. These quantifiers would allow for easier optimization in a horizontally distributed database. These operators are scalable with respect to both the number of hosts in the environment and the size of the data used

Long term evolution of planetary systems with a terrestrial planet and a giant planet

We study the long term orbital evolution of a terrestrial planet under the gravitational perturbations of a giant planet. In particular, we are interested in situations where the two planets are in the same plane and are relatively close. We examine both possible configurations: the giant planet orbit being either outside or inside the orbit of the smaller planet. The perturbing potential is expanded to high orders and an analytical solution of the terrestrial planetary orbit is derived. The analytical estimates are then compared against results from the numerical integration of the full equations of motion and we find that the analytical solution works reasonably well. An interesting finding is that the new analytical estimates improve greatly the predictions for the timescales of the orbital evolution of the terrestrial planet compared to an octupole order expansion. Finally, we briefly discuss possible applications of the analytical estimates in astrophysical problems.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA

Internal Analysis in Practice: Templates for Firm and Case Analysis

Case analysis is the foundation of business education at many educational institutions. However, there are significant challenges related to the use of cases with particular types of students, in courses with specific structural elements, and with a lack of guidance provided to students. While working with practicing managers, small business owners, and students, I developed a set of templates to aid in the assessment of a firm’s internal workings (to be used in conjunction with other templates addressing environmental, competitor, industry, and other factors). These internal analysis templates provide a structure that is systematic yet adaptable and has improved the quality of analysis and strategic insight demonstrated by student users. In this paper, I provide a copy of the templates, describe their structure and use, provide an example of a partially completed template, and discuss possible modifications and extensions

Identifying Interaction Sites in "Recalcitrant" Proteins: Predicted Protein and Rna Binding Sites in Rev Proteins of Hiv-1 and Eiav Agree with Experimental Data

Protein-protein and protein nucleic acid interactions are vitally important for a wide range of biological processes, including regulation of gene expression, protein synthesis, and replication and assembly of many viruses. We have developed machine learning approaches for predicting which amino acids of a protein participate in its interactions with other proteins and/or nucleic acids, using only the protein sequence as input. In this paper, we describe an application of classifiers trained on datasets of well-characterized protein-protein and protein-RNA complexes for which experimental structures are available. We apply these classifiers to the problem of predicting protein and RNA binding sites in the sequence of a clinically important protein for which the structure is not known: the regulatory protein Rev, essential for the replication of HIV-1 and other lentiviruses. We compare our predictions with published biochemical, genetic and partial structural information for HIV-1 and EIAV Rev and with our own published experimental mapping of RNA binding sites in EIAV Rev. The predicted and experimentally determined binding sites are in very good agreement. The ability to predict reliably the residues of a protein that directly contribute to specific binding events - without the requirement for structural information regarding either the protein or complexes in which it participates - can potentially generate new disease intervention strategies.Comment: Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, Hawaii, In press, Accepted, 200

Introducing Students to International Business: The Fortune Global 500 Home Country Game

Students taking courses in international business or other courses with international modules within them are frequently less than excited to learn about the material, even though its importance to their future success may be growing quickly. To partially address this issue, we have developed a fun, interactive, competitive exercise based on the Fortune Global 500 to introduce international content to students. Students are asked to identify the home countries of twenty international businesses, some of whose products and services students have most likely used frequently. Participants realize more fully that whether they are cognizant of it or not, they engage in international business every day in some form or fashion; large multinational companies are not just U.S. firms; and none of us is as knowledgeable as we could or should be regarding international business. Included in this paper are the latest version of the Fortune Global 500 Home Country Game (and its key), descriptions of its structure and use, and a discussion of extensions and implications for enhanced international business education

Free energy and equilibrium states for families of interval maps

Funding: MT was partially supported by FCT grant SFRH/BPD/26521/2006 and NSF grants DMS0606343 and DMS 0908093. ND was supported by ERC Bridges project, the Academy of Finland CoE in Analysis and Dynamics Research and an IBM Goldstine fellowship.We study continuity, and lack thereof, of thermodynamical properties for one-dimensional dynamical systems. Under quite general hypotheses, the free energy is shown to be almost upper-semicontinuous: some normalised component of a limit measure will have free energy at least that of the limit of the free energies. From this, we deduce results concerning existence and continuity of equilibrium states (statistical stability). Counterexamples to statistical stability in the absence of strong hypotheses are provided.PostprintPeer reviewe

An adaptable product for material processing and life science missions

The Experiment Control System II (ECS-II) is designed to make available to the microgravity research community the same tools and mode of automated experimentation that their ground-based counterparts have enjoyed for the last two decades. The design goal was accomplished by combining commercial automation tools familiar to the experimenter community with system control components that interface with the on-orbit platform in a distributed architecture. The architecture insulates the tools necessary for managing a payload. By using commercial software and hardware components whenever possible, development costs were greatly reduced when compared to traditional space development projects. Using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components also improved the usability documentation, and reducing the need for training of the system by providing familiar user interfaces, providing a wealth of readily available documentation, and reducing the need for training on system-specific details. The modularity of the distributed architecture makes it very amenable for modification to different on-orbit experiments requiring robotics-based automation

Executive Compensation in Higher Education: Effects of Institutional Characteristics and Performance on Presidents’ Compensation

While CEO compensation has been widely explored (Huang, 2010), there is also debate about whether university presidents are equitably paid given university budget cuts and rising tuition rates (Ehrenberg, Cheslock, and Epifantseva, 2001; Cotton, 2012). We explore possible determinants of compensation for university presidents of 419 private and 160 public universities. We hypothesize about the effects of enrollment, endowment, and employee size; graduation and retention rates; and other institutional factors on presidents’ compensation and use regression analysis to test these hypotheses. We find strong support for a positive effect of enrollment on university presidents’ pay levels, but this effect is moderated by institutional control