Louise Jopling: artist, teacher, campaigner

No abstract available

Can Social Protection Reduce Environmental Damages?

Why do damages from changes in environmental quality differ across and within countries? Causal investigation of this question has been challenging because differences may stem from heterogeneity in cumulative exposure or differences in socioeconomic factors such as income. We revisit the temperature-violence relationship and show that cash transfers attenuate one-half to two-thirds of the effects of higher same-day temperatures on homicides. Our results not only demonstrate causally that income can explain much of the heterogeneity in the marginal effects of higher temperatures, but also imply that social protection programs can help the poor adapt to rising temperatures

The Innovation Threshold

In this paper, we propose an economic model to analyse the sales out of new products. This model accounts for the fact that even among firms for which R&D is a permanent activity, a fraction of firms does not have sales of innovative products during a two-year observation period. We propose a model in which the fixed costs of introduction is a major concern in the decision making process. In a structural model we estimate the fixed costs of the market introduction of new products and explain subsequent sales of innovative products. We examine an indicator of innovative output, i.e. sales of products 'new to the firm'. We estimate fixed costs thresholds using data from the Dutch part of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) from 1998. R&D intensity, competition and market structure have a positive impact on sales of new products. The most important factors to decrease the fixed costs threshold of introduction are product related R&D investments, R&D subsidies and knowledge spillovers.Innovation;Product R&D;Threshold model

The Trivial Program "yes"

A trivial program, one that simply prints “y” or a string that is given as an argument repeatedly, is explicated and examined at the levels of function and code. Although the program by itself is neither interesting or instructive, the argument is presented that by looking at “yes” it is possible to better understand how programs exist not only on platforms but also in an ecology of systems, scripts, and utilities

Katie and Jay, An Odious Essay

This alphonetic tale of Katie and Jay described fornication and violent death. Children should read instead William Steig\u27s excellent illustrated works C D B and C D C

Conceptual Computing and Digital Writing

In 1952 computer scientist Christopher Strachey wrote a parodical love letter generator. This system, the prototype of all computational conceptual writing – the almost completely secret prototype – was up and running not only before conceptual writing was formulated but even before conceptual art had arrived. The program predates the earliest work that is consistently identified as part of the (yet unnamed) conceptual art movement, Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing. It was not created by someone who identified or was identified as a writer, or as an artist, and it seems to have been seen as more the server-room equivalent of a parlor game than as a part of the tradition of literary arts. Only recently have programmers and scholars provided versions of the generator that appear in an installation and Web contexts and discussed in depth the literary aspects of the system. All of this makes Strachey’s program not only the first in its category but also quite typical of the scattered, marginal, often overlooked projects that have explored the computer’s ability to write conceptually over the last sixty years

XS, S, M, L: Creative Text Generators of Different Scales

Creative text generation projects of different sizes (in terms of lines of code and length of development time) are described. “Extra-small,” “small,” “medium,” and “large” projects are discussed as participating in the practice of creative computing differently. Different ways in which these projects have circulated and are being used in the community of practice are identified. While large-scale projects have clearly been important in advancing creative text generation, the argument presented here is that the other types of projects are also valuable and that they are undervalued (particularly in computer science and strongly related fields) by current structures of higher education and academic communication – structures which could be changed