Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: How New York\u27s Bail Reform Saga Tiptoes Around Addressing Economic Inequality

This Note will analyze how, despite the fact that New York’s bail reforms reduced city and state prison populations, the revised bail law falls flat in its attempt to resolve the economic inequality in the State’s pretrial detention system—an overarching purpose of the reforms. Part I of this Note will chronicle the turbulent recent history of bail reform in New York and will describe the key differences between the old bail laws, the reformed bail laws, and the amendments to those reforms. Part II will analyze how the current state of New York’s pretrial detention system does little to address the Legislature’s goals. After assessing the shortcomings of the newly minted—and subsequently reminted—bail law, Part III of this Note will offer solutions to ensure that the bail law achieves its intended purposes. These solutions will focus on securing an individual’s return to court and reducing pretrial detention, while also ensuring that an individual’s wealth does not decide their freedom while they await trial

Transforming Digital Inventions into Digital Innovations – A Missing Material Perspective on Technology Adoption

Technology agnosticism dominates explanations of technology adoption in digital innovation. Accordingly, technology itself plays a limited role in determining adoption success. Instead, aspects outside the inventors' control, including marketing, user perceptions, and organizational environment, decide the adoption outcome. We revisit the original innovation concept and draw attention to what we call a digital invention. Looking at the transition of a digital invention to digital innovation, we argue for a technology-affinity perspective to complement existing adoption perspectives. The new perspective emphasizes the role of conscious invention design for innovation. We find three ways in which specific invention focus can increase the invention's chances for adoption. For instance, we show that contrary to the prevalent idea of technologies enabling new ways of doing things, it is the invention's focus on enabling innate behaviors that can facilitate adoption. Past innovation and contemporary innovation in the film industry illustrate our thinking

Page-Rewriting Digital Experiments – An Approach to Digital Field Experiments and a Demonstration in Carbon Offsetting

Field experiments are an integral part of the social sciences as they hold the promise of generalizable scientific findings. Yet, notwithstanding new opportunities brought upon by digital technologies, they are conducted seldomly, due to associated costs of alignment between industry and researchers. Against this background, we propose a new method for digital natural field experiments that offers an improved organizational and technical process for industry-academia alignment by limiting the requirement for the industry partners to change their systems for the experiment implementation. The method is demonstrated in a field setting, exploring the influence of carbon offsetting options on the purchasing behavior of consumers

Intronic motif pairs cooperate across exons to promote pre-mRNA splicing

A very early step in splice site recognition is exon definition, a process that is as yet poorly understood. Communication between the two ends of an exon is thought to be required for this step. We report genome-wide evidence for exons being defined through the combinatorial activity of motifs located in flanking intronic regions. Strongly co-occurring motifs were found to specifically reside in four intronic regions surrounding a large number of human exons. These paired motifs occur around constitutive and alternative exons but not pseudo exons. Most co-occurring motifs are limited to intronic regions within 100 nucleotides of the exon. They are preferentially associated with weaker exons. Their pairing is conserved in evolution and they exhibit a lower frequency of single nucleotide polymorphism when paired. Paired motifs display specificity with respect to distance from the exon borders and in constitutive versus alternative splicing. Many resemble binding sites for heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins. Specific pairs are associated with tissue-specific genes, the higher expression of which coincides with that of the pertinent RNA binding proteins. Tested pairs acted synergistically to enhance exon inclusion, and this enhancement was found to be exon-specific. The exon-flanking sequence pairs identified here by genomic analysis promote exon inclusion and may play a role in the exon definition step in pre-mRNA splicing. We propose a model in which multiple concerted interactions are required between exonic sequences and flanking intronic sequences to effect exon definition