The Impact of Advice on Selection into Competition

Comunicación presentada en European Economic Association & Econometric Society. 2012 Parallel Meetings, celebrada del 27 al 31 de agosto de 2012 en Málaga (España)We conduct a laboratory experiment, in which subjects decide whether to enter a tournament, in which they have to perform a real effort task. In one treatment subjects receive advice on whether to participate in the tournament. Advice is given by subjects who have already had some experience with the same decision and have some informational advantage. We show that advice significantly improves the entry decision of subjects. The total costs of wrong entry decisions go significantly down and the payoffs of those who receive advice go up. This is mainly driven by the fact that high ability women enter the tournament significantly more often while low ability men enter significantly less often. Though the gender gap in tournament entry is reduced, it still persists. Overall, advice given tends to be ‘good’ advice. Finally, we find that women are slightly more hesitant than men to advice entry into tournament.Peer Reviewe

Increasing Workplace Diversity: Evidence from a Recruiting Experiment at a Fortune 500 Company

While many firms have set ambitious goals to increase diversity in their ranks, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on effective ways to reach them. We use a natural field experiment to test several hypotheses on effective meansto attract minority candidates for top professional careers. By randomly varying the content in recruiting materials of a major financial services corporation with more than 10,000 employees, we find that signaling explicit interest in employee diversity more than doubles the interest in openings among racial minority candidates, as well as the likelihood that they apply and are selected. Impacts on gender diversity are less sharp and generally not significan

The Impact of advice on women's and men's selection into competition

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how advice affects the gender gap in the entry into a real-effort tournament. Our experiment is motivated by the concerns raised by approaching the gender gap through affirmative action. Advice is given by subjects who have already had some experience with the participation decision. We show that advice improves the entry decision of subjects, in that forgone earnings due to wrong entry decisions go significantly down. This is mainly driven by significantly increased entry of strong performing women, who also become significantly more confident, and reduced entry of weak performing men

Human Cytomegalovirus IE1 Protein Elicits a Type II Interferon-Like Host Cell Response That Depends on Activated STAT1 but Not Interferon-γ

Human cytomegalovirus (hCMV) is a highly prevalent pathogen that, upon primary infection, establishes life-long persistence in all infected individuals. Acute hCMV infections cause a variety of diseases in humans with developmental or acquired immune deficits. In addition, persistent hCMV infection may contribute to various chronic disease conditions even in immunologically normal people. The pathogenesis of hCMV disease has been frequently linked to inflammatory host immune responses triggered by virus-infected cells. Moreover, hCMV infection activates numerous host genes many of which encode pro-inflammatory proteins. However, little is known about the relative contributions of individual viral gene products to these changes in cellular transcription. We systematically analyzed the effects of the hCMV 72-kDa immediate-early 1 (IE1) protein, a major transcriptional activator and antagonist of type I interferon (IFN) signaling, on the human transcriptome. Following expression under conditions closely mimicking the situation during productive infection, IE1 elicits a global type II IFN-like host cell response. This response is dominated by the selective up-regulation of immune stimulatory genes normally controlled by IFN-γ and includes the synthesis and secretion of pro-inflammatory chemokines. IE1-mediated induction of IFN-stimulated genes strictly depends on tyrosine-phosphorylated signal transducer and activator of transcription 1 (STAT1) and correlates with the nuclear accumulation and sequence-specific binding of STAT1 to IFN-γ-responsive promoters. However, neither synthesis nor secretion of IFN-γ or other IFNs seems to be required for the IE1-dependent effects on cellular gene expression. Our results demonstrate that a single hCMV protein can trigger a pro-inflammatory host transcriptional response via an unexpected STAT1-dependent but IFN-independent mechanism and identify IE1 as a candidate determinant of hCMV pathogenicity

In-situ estimation of ice crystal properties at the South Pole using LED calibration data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory instruments about 1 km3 of deep, glacial ice at the geographic South Pole using 5160 photomultipliers to detect Cherenkov light emitted by charged relativistic particles. A unexpected light propagation effect observed by the experiment is an anisotropic attenuation, which is aligned with the local flow direction of the ice. Birefringent light propagation has been examined as a possible explanation for this effect. The predictions of a first-principles birefringence model developed for this purpose, in particular curved light trajectories resulting from asymmetric diffusion, provide a qualitatively good match to the main features of the data. This in turn allows us to deduce ice crystal properties. Since the wavelength of the detected light is short compared to the crystal size, these crystal properties do not only include the crystal orientation fabric, but also the average crystal size and shape, as a function of depth. By adding small empirical corrections to this first-principles model, a quantitatively accurate description of the optical properties of the IceCube glacial ice is obtained. In this paper, we present the experimental signature of ice optical anisotropy observed in IceCube LED calibration data, the theory and parametrization of the birefringence effect, the fitting procedures of these parameterizations to experimental data as well as the inferred crystal properties.</p

TXS 0506+056 with Updated IceCube Data

Past results from the IceCube Collaboration have suggested that the blazar TXS 0506+056 is a potential source of astrophysical neutrinos. However, in the years since there have been numerous updates to event processing and reconstruction, as well as improvements to the statistical methods used to search for astrophysical neutrino sources. These improvements in combination with additional years of data have resulted in the identification of NGC 1068 as a second neutrino source candidate. This talk will re-examine time-dependent neutrino emission from TXS 0506+056 using the most recent northern-sky data sample that was used in the analysis of NGC 1068. The results of using this updated data sample to obtain a significance and flux fit for the 2014 TXS 0506+056 "untriggered" neutrino flare are reported

Galactic Core-Collapse Supernovae at IceCube: “Fire Drill” Data Challenges and follow-up

The next Galactic core-collapse supernova (CCSN) presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make astrophysical measurements using neutrinos, gravitational waves, and electromagnetic radiation. CCSNe local to the Milky Way are extremely rare, so it is paramount that detectors are prepared to observe the signal when it arrives. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a gigaton water Cherenkov detector below the South Pole, is sensitive to the burst of neutrinos released by a Galactic CCSN at a level >10σ. This burst of neutrinos precedes optical emission by hours to days, enabling neutrinos to serve as an early warning for follow-up observation. IceCube\u27s detection capabilities make it a cornerstone of the global network of neutrino detectors monitoring for Galactic CCSNe, the SuperNova Early Warning System (SNEWS 2.0). In this contribution, we describe IceCube\u27s sensitivity to Galactic CCSNe and strategies for operational readiness, including "fire drill" data challenges. We also discuss coordination with SNEWS 2.0

All-Energy Search for Solar Atmospheric Neutrinos with IceCube

The interaction of cosmic rays with the solar atmosphere generates a secondary flux of mesons that decay into photons and neutrinos – the so-called solar atmospheric flux. Although the gamma-ray component of this flux has been observed in Fermi-LAT and HAWC Observatory data, the neutrino component remains undetected. The energy distribution of those neutrinos follows a soft spectrum that extends from the GeV to the multi-TeV range, making large Cherenkov neutrino telescopes a suitable for probing this flux. In this contribution, we will discuss current progress of a search for the solar neutrino flux by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory using all available data since 2011. Compared to the previous analysis which considered only high-energy muon neutrino tracks, we will additionally consider events produced by all flavors of neutrinos down to GeV-scale energies. These new events should improve our analysis sensitivity since the flux falls quickly with energy. Determining the magnitude of the neutrino flux is essential, since it is an irreducible background to indirect solar dark matter searches