Newton's "Experimental Philosophy"

My talk today will be about Newton’s avowed methodology, and specifically the place of experiment in his conception of science, and how his ideas changed significantly over the course of his career. I also want to look at his actual scientific practice and see how this influenced his views on the nature of the experimental sciences

Re-Fashioning Anakreon in Classical Athens

This paper represents a revised and expanded version of a lecture that I gave in Cologne in April 2010, under the auspices of the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata. I am grateful to the Directors of the Kolleg, Günter Blamberger and Dietrich Boschung, for the invitation to be among the first Morphomata Fellows and to present my research as part of a Ringvorlesung. I also thank Frank Wascheck and Thierry Greub for their help in preparing the manuscript for publication.—Earlier versions of the paper were delivered at the University of Sydney in 2008 and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2009. A brief version of the paper printed here was given at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in June, 2011, as part of a conference in honor of Susan I. Rotroff. It is to her that I would like to offer this book, as a token of many years of friendship and inspiration

The Business Cycle Consequences of Informal Labor Markets

This dissertation explores the connection between the structure of labor markets and business cycle dynamics, with a focus on informality. The first chapter summarizes the main contributions of the dissertation. Institutional quality is one of the most important determinants of cross-country differences in informality. The second chapter analyzes the link between institutions, the size of the informal sector, and aggregate volatility. I build a business cycle search and matching model with informal labor markets that captures the positive connection between informal sector size and consumption and investment volatility in the data. In addition, I show that the root cause of changes in the size of the informal sector matters for establishing the relationship between (1) informality and long-run macroeconomic outcomes and (2) informality and aggregate volatility. For the same change in informal sector size, changes in different parameters of institutional quality in the model have contrasting quantitative implications for the steady state and the volatility of unemployment in the economy. These results highlight the importance of identifying the specific source behind changes in the size of the informal sector to characterize the link between informality and business cycle dynamics. The third chapter explores the connection between the share of self-employment in the economy and the pace of economic recoveries. Self-employment comprises an important share of employment in many countries. Recent studies document that self-employment expands during downturns, a fact that arises from higher transition rates out of unemployment and into self-employment in recessions. Furthermore, countries with higher self-employment shares exhibit lower output persistence over the business cycle. I build a novel business cycle model with frictional labor markets where individuals can be self-employed or employed in salaried firms. I show that economies with larger self-employment shares exhibit faster recoveries following a negative economy-wide productivity shock. Differences in the ease of entry into self-employment as the economy recovers play a key role in explaining contrasting labor market and output dynamics. The model successfully captures some of the key cyclical patterns of self-employment absent in existing models, as well as the quantitative relationship between self-employment and cyclical output persistence in the data

Words to the Wives: The Jewish Press, Immigrant Women, and Identity Construction, 1924-1925

This dissertation examines how six publications sought to construct Jewish- American identities for Eastern European Jewish immigrant women between 1895 and 1925, beginning in 1895 with the world's first Jewish women's magazine, American Jewess (1895 - 1899), followed by a women's magazine in Yiddish, Di froyen-velt (1913 -1914), and ending with an another Yiddish women's magazine, Der idisher froyen zhurnal (1922-1923). Between 1914 and 1916, three mass circulation Yiddish daily newspapers, Dos yidishes tageblatt, Forverts, and Der tog, started printing women's pages. This study ends in 1925, after Congress passed legislation restricting immigration in 1924. These publications present a variety of viewpoints and identities, that were political, religious and class-based. The three magazines, all in the same genre, held different attitudes on everything from religion to suffrage. The three daily newspapers represented fundamentally different ideologies. Forverts was socialist. Der tog was nationalist-Zionist, and Dos yidishes tageblatt, the oldest publication examined, represented a conservative, traditionally religious viewpoint and supported Zionism. This study examines religious and political ideologies, celebrating religious and civic holidays, attitudes towards women working and learning, Jewish education, women's suffrage and exercising citizenship, as well as women in the public and private spheres of both the Jewish and American worlds. The central question asked is how those involved with these publications endeavored to create particular Jewish-American identities. Not being a reader- response study, I make no assumptions as to these publications' actual influence. The press represented only one institution involved in acculturation. Issues subsumed under the central question include how producers of these publications perceived Americanization and saw Jews in America; and what changes these journals advocated regarding religious practices, gender roles, and citizenship. "Acculturation" implies negotiation in the process of identity formation, as a blending of Old and New World customs, lifestyles, mores, economic and social conditions occurred. This dissertation takes a social constructionist view of ethnicity and identity formation. Based on translations relevant pieces from all issues of the publications under review, this study points to the diversity present on the American "Jewish Street" from 1895 to 1925

The Effects of Roster Turnover on Demand in the National Basketball Association

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of roster turnover on demand in the National Basketball Association (NBA) over a five-year period (2000-2005) and compare these results to previous research on turnover in Major League Baseball (MLB). A censored regression equation was developed to examine the relationship between roster turnover and season attendance, while controlling for other potentially confounding variables in the model. The censored regression model was used to account for the capacity constraints by forecasting the level of demand beyond capacity using information from the uncensored observations. The regression model was found to be significant with a log-likelihood statistic of 110.446. Previous attendance, current winning percentage, previous winning percentage, number of all-star players, and team history were found to be significant predictors of attendance. However, the variables measuring the effects of roster turnover were not found to be significant. There were substantial differences in the effect of roster turnover on attendance in the NBA compared with MLB. In addition, these findings provide evidence for using censored regression when dealing with constrained variables. Sellouts in the NBA appear to have an effect on all of the variables in the demand model. Future research will need to be conducted to help sport managers understand the role of roster turnover in specific professional leagues and to better understand the importance of using a censored regression model.basketball; roster turnover; demand; regression; censored regression

Newton's "Experimental Philosophy"

My talk today will be about Newton’s avowed methodology, and specifically the place of experiment in his conception of science, and how his ideas changed significantly over the course of his career. I also want to look at his actual scientific practice and see how this influenced his views on the nature of the experimental sciences

Turbulence and waves in numerically simulated slope flows

Direct numerical simulation (DNS) is applied to investigate properties of katabatic and anabatic flows along thermally perturbed (in terms of surface buoyancy flux) sloping surfaces in the absence of rotation. Numerical experiments are conducted for homogeneous surface forcings over infinite planar slopes. The simulated flows are the turbulent analogs of the Prandtl (1942) one-dimensional laminar slope flow. The simulated flows achieve quasi-steady periodic regimes at large times, with turbulent fluctuations being modified by persistent low-frequency oscillatory motions with frequency equal to the product of the ambient buoyancy frequency and the sine of the slope angle. These oscillatory wave-type motions result from interactions between turbulence and ambient stable stratification despite the temporal constancy of the surface buoyant forcing. The structure of the mean-flow fields and turbulence statistics in simulated slope flows is analyzed. An integral dynamic similarity constraint for steady slope/wall flows forced by surface buoyancy flux is proposed and quantitatively verified against the DNS data

Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects

The essays in this collection are meant to be representative both of the current work on the nature of interpretation and of the necessity for such work to go beyond narrow disciplinary interests. Several individuals and institutions aided in bringing the essays together. Since a 1981 conference, many of these papers have been revised to take into account the exchange of views that took place. The other essays in the book are intended to reflect the broad range of hermeneutical alternatives that are now being actively explored.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1183/thumbnail.jp