Accounting for secrets

The Soviet dictatorship used secrecy to shield its processes from external scrutiny. A system of accounting for classified documentation assured the protection of secrets. The associated procedures resemble a turnover tax applied to government transactions. There is evidence of both compliance and evasion. The burden of secrecy was multiplied because the system was also secret and so had to account for itself. Unique documentation of a small regional bureaucracy, the Lithuania KGB, is exploited to yield an estimate of the burden. Measured against available benchmarks, the burden looks surprisingly heavy

Identification of an Efficient Gene Expression Panel for Glioblastoma Classification.

We present here a novel genetic algorithm-based random forest (GARF) modeling technique that enables a reduction in the complexity of large gene disease signatures to highly accurate, greatly simplified gene panels. When applied to 803 glioblastoma multiforme samples, this method allowed the 840-gene Verhaak et al. gene panel (the standard in the field) to be reduced to a 48-gene classifier, while retaining 90.91% classification accuracy, and outperforming the best available alternative methods. Additionally, using this approach we produced a 32-gene panel which allows for better consistency between RNA-seq and microarray-based classifications, improving cross-platform classification retention from 69.67% to 86.07%. A webpage producing these classifications is available at http://simplegbm.semel.ucla.edu

Secrecy, Fear and Transaction Costs: The Business of Soviet Forced Labour in the Early Cold War

In 1949 the Cold War was picking up momentum. The Soviet state had entered its most secretive phase. The official rationale of secrecy was defense against external enemies. One of the Gulag’s most important secrets was the location of its labour camps, scattered across the length and depth of the Soviet Union. As this secret was guarded more and more closely, the camps began to drop out of the Soviet economic universe, losing the ability to share necessary information and do business with civilian persons and institutions without disclosing a state secret: their own location. For some months in 1949 and 1950, the Gulag’s camp chiefs and central administrators struggled with this dilemma without achieving a resolution. This episode teaches us about the costs of Soviet secrecy and raises basic questions about how secrecy was calibrated.Cold War, Forced Labour, Secrecy, Transaction Costs, Soviet Union

How Much Control is Enough? Monitoring and Enforcement under Stalin.

In hierarchies, agents’ hidden actions increase principals' transactions costs and give rise to a demand for monitoring and enforcement. The fact that the latter are costly raises questions about their scope, organisation, and type. How much control is enough? The paper uses historical records to examine Stalin’s answers to this question. We find that Stalin's behaviour was consistent with his aiming to maximise the efficiency of the Soviet system of control subject to the loyalty of his inspectors and the risk of a “chaos of orders” arising from parallel centres of power.Casymmetric information, principal-agent problem, transaction costs, hierarchy, USSR

Use of the oral history interview to assess communication and marital satisfaction in later-life couples

A study was designed to explore the content and process of marital history storytelling in later life couples and the relationship of storytelling content and process to marital satisfaction. Fifty-six Caucasian couples ranging in age from 47--83 years were recruited for participation in the study. Each spouse completed the Satisfaction subscale of the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS; Spanier & Cole, 1974) and couples participated in an Oral History Interview (Buehlman, Gottman, & Katz, 1992) designed to elicit their marital history story. Research team members viewed each interview and obtained consensus scores for each couple using the Global Assessment of Relational Functioning (GARF; APA, 1994). All interviews were transcribed and data was segmented into thought units and speeches. The Relationship Path Coding System (RPCS) was designed to code thought units in marital stories according to content and process variables. Content variables included amount of detail, positive storytelling, and chronological reference. Process variables included detailed and general communication sequences, and speech and thought unit differences between spouses for each couple. Investigators hypothesized that couples who utilized greater amounts of detail, positive storytelling and chronological reference in their marital history stories would report higher marital satisfaction on the DAS and would receive higher GARF ratings from observers. It was also hypothesized that couples who utilized more detailed communication sequences and spoke equally in terms of thought units and speeches would report higher marital satisfaction and would receive higher GARF ratings. Regression analyses were used to predict DAS and GARF scores. Results for content variables demonstrated that the greater use of detail in marital stories predicted DAS scores of husbands and GARF ratings but no content variables predicted DAS scores of wives. Results for process variables demonstrated that use of detailed sequences predicted greater marital satisfaction of husbands and wives as well as higher GARF ratings. GARF rating was predicted by equality in the number of speeches from husbands and wives. Implications include increasing the storytelling literature the use of stories as assessment in marital therapy