Dynamics underlying Box-office: Movie Competition on Recommender Systems

We introduce a simple model to study movie competition in the recommender systems. Movies of heterogeneous quality compete against each other through viewers' reviews and generate interesting dynamics of box-office. By assuming mean-field interactions between the competing movies, we show that run-away effect of popularity spreading is triggered by defeating the average review score, leading to hits in box-office. The average review score thus characterizes the critical movie quality necessary for transition from box-office bombs to blockbusters. The major factors affecting the critical review score are examined. By iterating the mean-field dynamical equations, we obtain qualitative agreements with simulations and real systems in the dynamical forms of box-office, revealing the significant role of competition in understanding box-office dynamics.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Jurisdiction and Resentencing: How Prosecutorial Waiver Can Offer Remedies Congress Has Denied

This Essay is about what prosecutors can do to ensure that prisoners with meritorious legal claims have a remedy. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) imposes draconian conditions on when prisoners may file successive petitions for post-conviction review (that is, more than one petition for post-conviction review). AEDPA’s restrictions on post-conviction review are so severe that they routinely prevent prisoners with meritorious claims from vindicating those claims

How the Sentencing Commission Does and Does Not Matter in Beckles v. United States

Two years ago, in Johnson v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the so-called “residual clause” of the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) is unconstitutionally vague. Last spring, the Court made this rule retroactive in Welch v. United States. Then in June, the Court granted certiorari in Beckles v. United States to resolve two questions that have split lower courts in the wake of Johnson and Welch: (1) whether an identically worded “residual clause” in a U.S. Sentencing Guideline—known as the career offender Guideline—is unconstitutionally void for vagueness; and (2) if so, whether the rule invalidating the Guideline’s residual clause applies retroactively. The questions on which the Court granted certiorari in Beckles turn on how similar the ACCA and the Sentencing Guidelines are. Both the ACCA and the Sentencing Guidelines impose additional punishment on defendants with previous convictions for violent felonies, and both the ACCA and the Sentencing Guidelines define “violent felonies” to include any crime that “involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.” Those thirteen words are called the “residual clause,” in both the ACCA and the Sentencing Guidelines, and courts have interpreted this identical language the same way

Adult life stage and crisis as predictors of curiosity and authenticity: Testing inferences from Eriksons lifespan theory

During periods of developmental crisis, individuals experience uncomfortable internal incongruence and are motivated to reduce this through forms of exploration of self, other and world. From this, we inferred that crisis would relate positively to curiosity and negatively to a felt sense of authenticity. A quasi-experimental design using self-report data from a nationally representative UK sample (N = 963) of adults in early life (20-39 yrs.), midlife (40-59 yrs.) and later-life (60+) showed a pattern of findings supportive of the hypotheses. Three forms of curiosity (intrapersonal, perceptual and epistemic D-type) were significantly higher, while authenticity was lower, among those currently in crisis that those of the same age group not in crisis. Crisis was also related to curiosity about particular book genres; early adult crisis to self-help and spirituality, midlife to self-help and biography, and later life to food and eating

Intrapersonal curiosity: Inquisitiveness about the inner self

Intrapersonal Curiosity (InC) is the desire to learn more about one’s inner-self. A pool of 39 experimental InC items were administered to 988 participants (498 women), along with other measures of curiosity and personality. Three InC factors with acceptable model fit were identified, from which three internally consistent (alphas > .89) 4-item subscales were developed: “Understanding Emotions and Motives”, “Reflecting on the Past”, and “Exploring Identity and Purpose”. The InC scales correlated positively with other curiosity measures, evidencing convergent validity; divergent validity was demonstrated on the basis of weak relations to other constructs. The InC scales were positively associated with less self-awareness, poorer self-regulation, and experiences of distress, suggesting that InC tends to be higher in individuals who lack, but seek, new intrapersonal knowledge to reduce uncertainty about the self

Incentivizing High Quality Crowdwork

We study the causal effects of financial incentives on the quality of crowdwork. We focus on performance-based payments (PBPs), bonus payments awarded to workers for producing high quality work. We design and run randomized behavioral experiments on the popular crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk with the goal of understanding when, where, and why PBPs help, identifying properties of the payment, payment structure, and the task itself that make them most effective. We provide examples of tasks for which PBPs do improve quality. For such tasks, the effectiveness of PBPs is not too sensitive to the threshold for quality required to receive the bonus, while the magnitude of the bonus must be large enough to make the reward salient. We also present examples of tasks for which PBPs do not improve quality. Our results suggest that for PBPs to improve quality, the task must be effort-responsive: the task must allow workers to produce higher quality work by exerting more effort. We also give a simple method to determine if a task is effort-responsive a priori. Furthermore, our experiments suggest that all payments on Mechanical Turk are, to some degree, implicitly performance-based in that workers believe their work may be rejected if their performance is sufficiently poor. Finally, we propose a new model of worker behavior that extends the standard principal-agent model from economics to include a worker's subjective beliefs about his likelihood of being paid, and show that the predictions of this model are in line with our experimental findings. This model may be useful as a foundation for theoretical studies of incentives in crowdsourcing markets.Comment: This is a preprint of an Article accepted for publication in WWW \c{opyright} 2015 International World Wide Web Conference Committe

An architecture for the design of context-aware conversational agents

Proceedings of: 8th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multiagent Systems, Salamanca, Spain, April 26-28, 2010.In this paper, we present a architecture for the development of conversational agents that provide a personalized service to the user. The different agents included in our architecture facilitate an adapted service by taking into account context information and users specific requirements and preferences. This functionality is achieved by means of the introduction of a context manager and the definition of user profiles. We describe the main characteristics of our architecture and its application to develop and evaluate an information system for an academic domain.CICYT TIN2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC2008-06732-C02- 02/TEC, SINPROB, CAM MADRINET S-0505/TIC/0255 and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad