An Interview With Caspar Bowden

Caspar Bowden ([email protected]) is the author of a recent DLTR article, Closed Circuit Television for Inside Your Head: Blanket Traffic Data Retention and the EmergencyAnti-Terrorism Legislation. He is the Director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research (http://www.fipr.org), an independent non-profit think-tank that undertakes research on the interaction between information technology and society, technical developments with significant social impact, and public policy alternatives. He was formerly a consultant specializing in Internet security and e-commerce, senior researcher of an option-arbitrage trading firm, a financial strategist with Goldman Sachs, and chief algorithm designer for a virtual reality software house. We interviewed Mr. Bowden about combating terrorism in Europe and other issues related to European cyber-policy, such as the success of a European Internet and Information policy

Carnivore: Will It Devour Your Privacy?

Perhaps you have written an e-mail that looks something like this

Ezekiel as the father of Judaism

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Consumer and retailer strategies when choosing from large assortments

Consumers are attracted to large assortments, but they experience negative consequences when they ultimately must make a choice form these large assortments. In Essay 1, four experiments examine whether a common retailer strategy--the use of recommendations such as "best seller" signs--attenuates or exacerbates these negative consequences. Results show that best seller signs can exacerbate decision difficulty and regret as consumers engage in a more extensive consideration of options, and these larger consideration sets are partly due to the increase consideration of non-signed options. The extent to which consumers have developed preferences is a key moderator of the effect of best seller signage on choice from large assortments. For consumers possessing more (less) developed preferences, best seller signage in large assortments increases (decreases) the size of consumer consideration sets and exacerbates (attenuates) decision difficulty and regret. The resultant choice outcome is that best seller signage is more likely to increase the overall quantity purchased when consumers have more compared to less developed preferences. Essay 2 investigates consideration set construction strategies consumers use to narrow down assortments into a more manageable consideration set, particularly when faced with large assortments. Past research proposes that consumers use two strategies to narrow down an assortment: include and exclude. Four experiments show that consumers are more likely to use an include strategy when faced with a large compared to a small assortment. It is argued that this preference for an include consideration set strategy is due to the decrease in relative effort required by an include strategy as the number of options in the set increases. The essay shows that compared to using an exclude strategy, the use of an include strategy leads consumers to (1) form smaller consideration sets, (2) express more (less) positive (negative) thoughts, (3) increase (decrease) the weighting of positive (negative) attributes, and (4) elaborate more on options in the consideration set and less on options not in the consideration set. The implications of using an include versus exclude strategy on final choice are explored and directions for future research are discussed.Marketin

But It Was With My Wife: Failing To Address After-Hours Workplace Indiscretions

Tom, an employee at Aztec Systems, was caught by Rose, a member of the cleaning staff, having sex, after hours, on his work desk with his wife.  An upset Rose discussed the matter with Aztec’s human resources manager.  The HR manager Fred, Tom’s boss Janet, and the company CEO Alan, decide that there was no disciplinary action needed since Tom and Janet were married.  An angry Rose was faced with a difficult decision – whether or not to file a claim against Aztec Systems for sexual harassment

The African American Male Initiative at the University of Louisville

Following a year of data gathering and planning during the 2010-2011 academic year, the University of Louisville launched the African American Male Initiative (AAMI) in the fall 2011 semester. The AAMI was designed using national best practices and current research findings as it relates to supporting African American male undergraduates. Now at the end of its first year, this practitioner’s brief provides an overview of the AAMI structure, design, and implementation

Old Rocks, New Limits: Excavated Ancient Mica Searches For Dark Matter

Minerals excavated from the Earth's crust contain gigayear-long astroparticle records, which can be read out using acid etching and microscopy, providing unmatched sensitivity to high mass dark matter. A roughly millimetre size slab of 500 million year old muscovite mica, calibrated and analyzed by Snowden-Ifft et al.~in 1990, revealed no signs of dark matter recoils and placed competitive limits on the nuclear interactions for sub-TeV mass dark matter. A different analysis of larger mica slabs in 1986 by Price and Salamon searched for strongly interacting monopoles. After implementing a detailed treatment of Earth's overburden, we utilize these ancient etched mica data to obtain new bounds on high mass dark matter interactions with nuclei.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures, published versio