Network analytical view of international trade in music

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-209).What are the effects of imports on export development? Would low influence from imports provide more opportunity to local producers to develop radically new products that could later be exported as a uniquely local specialization? Or would a lack of influence from imports only lead to local products being incompatible with foreign tastes or standards, thus hindering export development? I argue that consuming imports has a homogenizing effect on tastes, and domestic music that thrives in such an altered selective environment is more likely to be exportable as well. In a longitudinal network analysis of trade in music recordings, I find that success in developing new export markets was strongly dependent on importing history. The strongest effect from consuming imports for a given country's industry was in the likelihood of exporting to other countries that have experienced the same influences. I find that other industries describe a spectrum in terms of how strongly trade patterns are shaped by common influence effects in a cross-sectional network analysis of trade patterns beyond music. Other industries that were strongly shaped by common influence effects included goods that are largely valued in terms of personal tastes or cultural context. Industries at the opposite end of the spectrum, with very low common influence effects, included goods that are highly uniform or have an essentially objective utilitarian function. A middle group included goods for which personal taste is relevant, but also have widely shared criteria for quality. These findings are novel and important in that they require us to add the demand side, via the history of consumption of imports, to our understanding of global competitiveness in export development. The method of quantitative network analysis allows for a careful analysis of the endogenous dynamics of the global pattern of trade.by Jesse Conan Chu-Shore.Ph.D

Power Law versus Exponential State Transition Dynamics: Application to Sleep-Wake Architecture

BACKGROUND: Despite the common experience that interrupted sleep has a negative impact on waking function, the features of human sleep-wake architecture that best distinguish sleep continuity versus fragmentation remain elusive. In this regard, there is growing interest in characterizing sleep architecture using models of the temporal dynamics of sleep-wake stage transitions. In humans and other mammals, the state transitions defining sleep and wake bout durations have been described with exponential and power law models, respectively. However, sleep-wake stage distributions are often complex, and distinguishing between exponential and power law processes is not always straightforward. Although mono-exponential distributions are distinct from power law distributions, multi-exponential distributions may in fact resemble power laws by appearing linear on a log-log plot. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: To characterize the parameters that may allow these distributions to mimic one another, we systematically fitted multi-exponential-generated distributions with a power law model, and power law-generated distributions with multi-exponential models. We used the Kolmogorov-Smirnov method to investigate goodness of fit for the "incorrect" model over a range of parameters. The "zone of mimicry" of parameters that increased the risk of mistakenly accepting power law fitting resembled empiric time constants obtained in human sleep and wake bout distributions. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Recognizing this uncertainty in model distinction impacts interpretation of transition dynamics (self-organizing versus probabilistic), and the generation of predictive models for clinical classification of normal and pathological sleep architecture

Homogenization and Specialization Effects of International Trade: Are Cultural Goods Exceptional?

Summary In contrast to the logic that international trade leads to greater specialization and differentiation of products, cultural industries are often still protected from imports, in part, because of the worry that trade will lead instead to homogenization. Is this true for cultural goods and if so, is this different from other goods? I consider the effects of homogenization on industrial development, propose a network-based method of identifying homogenization in global trade patterns, and test a range of industries. I find evidence of homogenization in many industries, calling into question a major justification for free trade.global world international trade cultural industries homogenization specialization