792 research outputs found

    Song, Ritual, and Commemoration in Early Greek Poetry and Tragedy

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    Charles Segal's most recent books include Interpreting Greek Tragedy (1986), Pindar's Mythmaking (1986), Language and Desire in Seneca's Phaedra (1986), and Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (1989). He is presently a Senior Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences for 1989-90, and will take an appointment as Professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard in 1990-91

    Improving School Readiness Outcomes: Lessons From Six Communities

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    Describes efforts in California, Florida, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia to develop early learning systems for school readiness, using federal and state resources. Includes common themes that emerged from these six case studies

    Strategic Auditing in a Political Hierarchy: An Informational Model of the Supreme Court\u27s Certiorari Decisions

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    We examine how the Supreme Court uses signals and indices from lower courts to determine which cases to review. In our game theoretic model, a higher court cues from publicly observable case facts, the known preferences of a lower court and its derision. The lower court attempts to enforce its own preferences, exploiting ambiguity in cases\u27 fact patterns. In equilibrium, a conservative higher court declines to review conservative decisions from lower courts regardless of the facts of die case or the relative ideology of the judges. But a conservative higher court probabilistically reviews liberal decisions, with the audit rate tied to observable facts and the ideology of the lower court judge. We derive comparative static results and rest them with a random sample of search-and-seizure cases appealed to the Burger Court between 1972 and 1986. The evidence broadly supports the model

    An Empirical Test of the Rational Actor Theory of Litigation

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    This article examines the decisions of litigants in criminal cases to appeal decisions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court. Using a random sample of search and seizure cases from 1962 through 1990 and a measure of the likelihood that the appeals court decision will be reversed if cert is granted, we demonstrate that litigants behave as if they rationally consider costs and benefits in their decisions to appeal. Given the extraordinary number of cases decided by lower federal courts vis-g-vis the number of cases the Supreme Court can decide, we argue that such behavior is necessary if the Supreme Court is to retain control over the federal judiciary

    Simple, Defensible Sample Sizes Based on Cost Efficiency -- With Discussion and Rejoinder

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    The conventional approach of choosing sample size to provide 80% or greater power ignores the cost implications of different sample size choices. Costs, however, are often impossible for investigators and funders to ignore in actual practice. Here, we propose and justify a new approach for choosing sample size based on cost efficiency, the ratio of a study’s projected scientific and/or practical value to its total cost. By showing that a study’s projected value exhibits diminishing marginal returns as a function of increasing sample size for a wide variety of definitions of study value, we are able to develop two simple choices that can be defended as more cost efficient than any larger sample size. The first is to choose the sample size that minimizes the average cost per subject. The second is to choose sample size to minimize total cost divided by the square root of sample size. This latter method is theoretically more justifiable for innovative studies, but also performs reasonably well and has some justification in other cases. For example, if projected study value is assumed to be proportional to power at a specific alternative and total cost is a linear function of sample size, then this approach is guaranteed either to produce more than 90% power or to be more cost efficient than any sample size that does. These methods are easy to implement, based on reliable inputs, and well justified, so they should be regarded as acceptable alternatives to current conventional approaches
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