Olympics Legacy: the London Olympics 2012

The reasons for proposing a London 2012 bid are outlined in the light of London city planning over the past sixty years. The processes influencing the bid for the London 2012 Olympics are investigated in respect of the lessons from Barcelona and Sydney. The role of environmental and landscape improvement is examined and the importance of legacy is described and analysed. The cost of Olympiads since Sydney 2000 are described and compared. Then progress of the London 2012 Olympics development is described relative to regeneration of East London. Finally the effects of current proposals to cut back the costs of the 2012 Olympics are considered. Olympic Games play significant roles in host city’s economy as well as other outcomes such as tourism, culture, unemployment, infrastructure. However the economy can never describe the whole picture of Olympic Games’ gainnings, it is one of the most significant sign before, during and after the event. All of the expenditures have different values at different legacy levels. Although post election budget cut-backs in the United Kingdom have placed a question mark on the costs; the proposed urban legacy make the city beautiful and London East End livable

A Robust Estimation of the Effects of Taxation on Charitable Contributions

While many studies find that the tax-price elasticity of giving exceeds unity, several recent studies find the contrary. This is important because it can be shown that if the elasticity exceeds one, then allowing taxpayers to deduct charitable giving from their taxable income is efficient in the sense that the amount donated exceeds the loss to the treasury. Here we use Consumer Expenditure Survey data to estimate the price elasticity of all deductible contributions. Because specification tests reject the consistency of estimators such as Tobit or the two-stage Heckman we use the semiparametric method of Ahn and Powell (1993). Rather than selecting bandwidths through cross-validation we demonstrate that because high and low bandwidths lead to the standard linear model one may use visual inspection for bandwidth selection. We also do not use the covariance matrix estimator of Ahn and Powell, instead bootstrapping a confidence interval. These bootstraps are also used to remove the finite sample bias inherent in nonlinear estimators. In our results we find an elasticity estimate greater than unity for the Tobit and Heckman methods but less than one for the Ahn and Powell method. Because specification tests suggest that the likelihood assumptions ensuring the consistency of the Tobit and Heckman do not hold, our results suggest that previous high tax-price elasticities may be caused by misspecification. However, our estimate of the elasticity of contributions to just social welfare organizations exceeds unity. In this sense the deduction for those types of contributions is efficient.

A comprehensive test of order choice theory: recent evidence from the NYSE

We perform a comprehensive test of order choice theory from a sample period when the NYSE trades in decimals and allows automatic executions. We analyze the decision to submit or cancel an order or to take no action. For submitted orders we distinguish order type (market vs. limit), order side (buy vs. sell), execution method (floor vs. automatic), and order pricing aggressiveness. We use a multinomial logit specification and a new statistical test. We find a negative autocorrelation in changes in order flow exists over five-minute intervals supporting dynamic limit order book theory, despite a positive first-order autocorrelation in order type. Orders routed to the NYSE’s floor are sensitive to market conditions (e.g., spread, depth, volume, volatility, market and individual-stock returns, and private information), but those using the automatic execution system (Direct+) are insensitive to market conditions. When the quoted depth is large, traders are more likely to “jump the queue” by submitting limit orders with limit prices bettering existing quotes. Aggressively-priced limit orders are more likely late in the trading day providing evidence in support of prior experimental results

Item Subtlety, Face Validity And The Structured Assessment Of Psychopathology

The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of two concepts of disguise in the structured self-report assessment of psychopathology. Using the Basic Personality Inventory with samples of university students, a distinction was made between the concepts of face validity and item subtlety. Face validity was viewed as the contextual relevance of structured test items whereas item subtlety was conceptualized as the lack of an obvious substantive link between test item content and its underlying construct. Under normal test-taking conditions where honest self-report was encouraged, greater face validity and lower levels of subtlety were associated empirically with higher item criterion validity.;Scale desirability, construct desirability, construct accessibility, construct unity, and item-construct substantiveness were examined as possible moderating variables of the relationships of face validity and item subtlety to criterion validity. Analyses indicated that construct accessibility might mediate the relationship of item subtlety to criterion validity whereby with the more accessible constructs, subtle items tended to demonstrate greater empirical validity.;Next, the relative validities of subtle versus obvious and face valid versus non-face valid scales were examined under conditions in which test respondents were provided with advance test knowledge and motivation to distort self-presentation. Results indicated that, in general, scores under faking conditions proved to be less valid than in the case where honest self-report was encouraged. Furthermore, the disguised scales proved not to be any more valid than the transparent scales under conditions where faking was induced or where information concerning the nature of the test was supplied.;Results of these studies were interpreted as supporting a rational strategy of test construction emphasizing the use of relevant test item content. Data, in general, failed to support the utility of obscured approaches to the assessment of psychopathology and it was suggested that the onus of proof must switch to those who advocate the use of disguised strategies for structured measurement

Design Considerations in the Development of an Automated Cartographic System

Cartography, the art of producing maps, is an extremely tedious job which is prone to human error and requires many hours for the completion of maps and their digital data bases. Cartography is a classic example of a job that needs to be automated. Through the new advances in image processing and pattern recognition, the automation of this task is made possible with the cartographer acting as a supervisor. This paper reviews current cartographic techniques, and examines design considerations for a fully automated cartographic system. The benefits of such a system would be improvements in speed, flexibility, and accuracy. The role of the cartographer, with such a system, would change to a process supervisor rather than that of a mass data entry

Assessing the Maintenance of Savings Sufficiency Over the First Decade of Retirement

The adequacy of retirement savings is central to the U.S. debate over the effects of Social Security reform and pension changes that would place greater responsibility on individuals for accumulation of retirement resources. We contribute to this discussion by examining the extent to which individuals maintain initial levels of resources over the first decade of retirement. We compare annuitized wealth, including Social Security and pension wealth, to two consumption standards— a household’s preretirement earnings and the poverty threshold. We analyze the relationship of individual characteristics to changes in this ratio over time, including the effects of widowhood and post-retirement work.

What Is Your Anthropology? What Are Your Ethics?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: We tend to think of the great ridge that rose up inside the historical profession some three decades ago, splitting historians into two camps, as some kind of epistemological event. Ancient disagreements about the nature (and existence ) of truth suddenly became more extreme and divisive. Now, the biggest flags wave over the relativists on one side, and the truth seekers on the other. Smaller banners ( moderate historicists, construetivists , positivists, etc.) fly here and there along the slopes of lower-lying ranges on each side of the great divide, itself breached by passes and tunnels excavated by historians loathe to commit themselves to either camp. But there is another way of looking at what divides historians. Who we think we are affects what we think we can know: We are encouraged these days, Thomas Nagel has pointed out, to think of ourselves as contingent organisms arbitrarily thrown up by evolution . There is no reason in advance to expect a finite creature like that to be able to do more than accumulate information at the perceptual and conceptual level it occupies by nature. 1 I argue (from the standpoint of philosophical realism) that disagreements rooted in different epistemological assumptions might also be understood as rival ways of answering the question, Who is the human person? I find it curious that even as we cram our journals with articles about identity, we don\u27t seem to acknowledge the deeper differences over how we define the most fundamental of all identities. I argue, furthermore, that these differences in philosophical anthropology have ethical consequences for the writing of history: different anthropologies lead to fundamentally different ethics of knowledge. And those ethics come into play whenever historians choose topics to investigate, apply methods of research, and propose interpretations. First, to the anthropological question. Of all the branches of philosophy, Henri-Irénée Marrou argued, historical knowledge depends most on that dealing with anthropology. He likened the historian\u27s chosen philosophy of man to an axle or a nervous system, so that what we write as historians stands or falls with our philosophical anthropology, our idea of the human person.2 Most historians agree that we need to take into account both the spontaneity and creativity of the individual person as well as the limits and conditions that restrict individual freedom. So, just who is this free being who makes history, including the ideologies and institutions that condition his or her very freedom? One reason that the question has excited so little interest among historians may be the extreme historicism that prevails today. Of what use is a theory of the person when one assumes that all of man\u27s works and his very identity are nothing but expressions of history itself, and therefore merely relative to some time and place?3 What passed for philosophical anthropology in the 20th century ended up being the reductio ad absurdum of Rousseau\u27s idea of man as malleable, bereft of any fixed nature. Man is what has happened to him, what he has done, said José Ortega y Gasset, theorist of historicism. This is why it makes no sense to put limits on what man is capable of being. Man has no nature, the Spanish philosopher declared; he only has a history.4 It is, I submit, this particularly miserable idea of the human person—namely, the belief that our nature is nothing but our historicity —that ultimately accounts for the vague sensation among some of us that in reading a good deal of history today we are drinking from a poisoned well. What\u27s wrong with the water is not so much the relativistic assumptions about knowledge and truth but its Rousseauian naturalism. The water is not potable because it is not compatible with whom we know ourselves to be. Why should historians be guided by a belief in man\u27s essential nature? Because without it, anything man does, as well as anything he has done, is as valuable or as valueless as anything else. History would be meaningless

After the Deluge: Central American Historiography at Low Tide

This essay reviews the following works: Centroamérica: Filibusteros, estados, imperios y memorias. By Víctor Hugo Acuña. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica, 2014. Pp. xv + 151. $5.99 paperback. ISBN: 9789968684408. I Ask for Justice: Maya Women, Dictators, and Crime in Guatemala, 1898–1944. By David Carey Jr. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Pp. xxv + 335.$55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780292748682. A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a Banana Republic. By Kevin Coleman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 312. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477308554. Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America. By Michel Gobat. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 367.$39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780674737495. Solidarity under Siege: The Salvadoran Labor Movement, 1970–1990. By Jeffrey L. Gould. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii + 262. $29.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781108410199. Banana Cowboys: The United Fruit Company and the Culture of Corporate Colonialism.By James W. Martin. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018. Pp. x + 252.$58.10 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826359421. Breve historia de Centroamérica, 5th ed. By Héctor Pérez Brignoli. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2018. Pp. 352. ISBN: 9788491811923. El laberinto centroamericano: Los hilos de la historia. By Héctor Pérez Brignoli. San José, Costa Rica: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central, 2017. Pp. x + 163. $4.40 paperback. ISBN: 9789968919326. Las luchas de los trabajadores hondureños organizados (1880–1993). By Mario Posas. Tegucigalpa: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras, 2017. Pp. 523. ISBN: 9789992632987. Historia de las desigualdades sociales en América Central: Una visión interdisciplinaria, siglos XVIII–XXI. Edited by Ronny Viales y David Díaz. San José, Costa Rica: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central, 2016. Pp. xix + 634.$8.79 paperback. ISBN: 9789968919241