The Why, the What, the How: Disney, the Population Council, and the Pre-Production of "Family Planning"

Family Planning, a short, animated film made by Walt Disney Productions in 1968, is a touchstone for historians of global population. Since Matthew Connelly's Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008) re-energized the field, the film has become a fixture in histories of population control; an irresistible opportunity to namecheck Donald Duck and inject some levity into otherwise sober accounts. Analysis has concentrated on salient features of the film: its construction of an ethnically generic "everyman," its consumerist message, and its coyness about contraception. It typically figures as one of the most significant products of a sustained effort to mobilize mass media in the service of international family planning.Our research mobilizes previously neglected lines of evidence, especially unpublished documents held by the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), to shed new light on hidden negotiations and contestations. In drawing from the materials at the RAC — and beyond — we aim to contribute to an increasingly concerted effort to embed questions about media and communication more centrally in histories of reproductive politics

The Vocal Repertoire of the White-throated Magpie-jay, Calocitta formosa

From February 2003 through May 2005, I studied the vocalizations and communication system of the white-throated magpie-jay (Calocitta formosa) in Santa Rosa National Park, Area de Conservacion Guancaste, Guanacaste, Costa Rica. The goal of the study was to determine the size and function of the vocal repertoire of this species. I surveyed the repertoire as a whole, and used playback and observation to study three specific call types to determine their explicit function. White-throated magpie-jays mob in response to low and high threat predators. Mobbing calls vary structurally and in delivery depending on the threat of the predator, with higher threat contexts elicit faster calling bouts and shorter calls. A playback showed that receivers pay attention to both variables, approaching if calls are short or given rapidly. Female magpie-jays beg loudly early in the nest cycle, when they are fertile. Group members provision the female at low rates initially, but increase provisioning when eggs hatch. Provisioning is positively related to begging. Begging is the loudest signal in the vocal repertoire, and is variable in structure. Begging probably indicates the need of a female, but the structural and amplitude characteristics suggest that females have co-opted begging to signal their fertility. Magpie-jays produce a distinct visual and vocal display in response to low-threat predators, the predator approach display. 134 call types were recorded during predator approaches, and the same call types were recorded in the hour before dawn. Production of and response to these calls is strongly male-biased, and males were more likely to respond to playback when their mate was fertile. These loud calls may function as alarms, but the male bias and elaborate nature suggest males have co-opted them for self-advertisement. Magpie-jays use fourteen functionally distinct call types, but use at least 150 structurally distinct types. Fourteen functional call types is not usual for a corvid, but such structural diversity is unprecedented in this group. Comparisons among nine corvids suggest that several aspects of social ecology can affect repertoire sizes

Two Essays on Turnaround Specialist CEOs

This dissertation consists of two essays investigating the labor market for CEOs who have developed a reputation for being a turnaround specialist. Turnaround specialists are managers who have developed reputations for having skills and experience in reversing the fortunes of financially distressed and underperforming firms. In the first essay I examine the economic consequences for firms that hire CEOs who, prior to being hired, have acquired a reputation for being a turnaround specialist. Abnormal returns around announcements that turnaround specialists have been hired as CEOs are significantly positive and more than 6 percentage points larger than the returns associated with announcements of other CEO successions. Significant differences exist in the attributes of firms that hire turnaround specialists as CEOs versus firms that hire others as CEOs in ways consistent with several hypotheses that I develop. Specifically, firms that hire turnaround specialists face a higher probability of distress, lower profit rates, and lower pre-succession stock returns than firms that hire others as CEOs. Firms that hire turnaround specialists reduce operating scale and show significant improvement in operating performance on average, indicating that the turnaround specialists' reputation is commensurate with their abilities and managerial style. In the second essay I examine the initial compensation contracts of turnaround specialist CEOs. After controlling for other factors that are associated with managerial compensation, I find that turnaround specialist CEOs earn significantly more total compensation than other newly appointed outside CEOs. Additionally, turnaround specialist compensation is more sensitive to firm performance than that of other newly appointed CEOs, contrary to the notion that career concerns of managers would serve as substitutes for explicit incentive contracts. Turnaround specialists receive a lower proportion of fixed cash compensation and a higher proportion of equity-based incentives than other CEOs, which is consistent with theories that predict incentive compensation comes at a lower cost to successful managers and has higher benefits for firms operating in distress

Hedge Fund Boards and the Market for Independent Directors

We provide the first examination of hedge fund boards and their directors. The majority of directorships are held by extremely busy independent directors. These directors are sought after by funds because they have more reputational capital at stake, making them independent and credible monitors whose presence can certify fund quality to investors. Busy independent directors are more likely to be hired by high quality funds, and their departure from the board is associated with investor withdrawals. Moreover, funds with busy independent directors are less likely to commit fraud, abuse discretionary liquidity restrictions, or engage in performance-based risk shifting

Jet Trimming

Initial state radiation, multiple interactions, and event pileup can contaminate jets and degrade event reconstruction. Here we introduce a procedure, jet trimming, designed to mitigate these sources of contamination in jets initiated by light partons. This procedure is complimentary to existing methods developed for boosted heavy particles. We find that jet trimming can achieve significant improvements in event reconstruction, especially at high energy/luminosity hadron colliders like the LHC.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables - Minor changes to text/figure

Malthus at the movies : science, cinema, and activism around Z.P.G. and Soylent Green

This article investigates cinema’s engagement with the Malthusian movement to control global overpopulation in the long 1960s. It examines the contested production and reception of Z.P.G.: Zero Population Growth (Michael Campus, 1972) and Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973) to shed new light on the nexus of science, activism, and the media. It argues that the history of the movement, usually reconstructed as an elite scientific and political discourse, cannot be fully understood without also taking into account mass-market entertainment

Globalization, Governance, and the Returns to Cross-Border Acquisitions

Using a sample of control cross-border acquisitions from 61 countries from 1990 to 2007, we find that acquirers from countries with better governance gain more from such acquisitions and their gains are higher when targets are from countries with worse governance. Other acquirer country characteristics are not consistently related to acquisition gains. For instance, the anti-self-dealing index of the acquirer has opposite associations with acquirer returns depending on whether the acquisition of a public firm is paid for with cash or equity. Strikingly, global effects in acquisition returns are at least as important as acquirer country effects. First, the acquirer’s industry and the year of the acquisition explain more of the stock-price reaction than the country of the acquirer. Second, for acquisitions of private firms or subsidiaries, acquirers gain more when acquisition returns are high for acquirers from other countries. We find strong evidence that better alignment of interests between insiders and minority shareholders is associated with greater acquirer returns and weaker evidence that this effect mitigates the adverse impact of poor country governance.

Identifying Boosted Objects with N-subjettiness

We introduce a new jet shape -- N-subjettiness -- designed to identify boosted hadronically-decaying objects like electroweak bosons and top quarks. Combined with a jet invariant mass cut, N-subjettiness is an effective discriminating variable for tagging boosted objects and rejecting the background of QCD jets with large invariant mass. In efficiency studies of boosted W bosons and top quarks, we find tagging efficiencies of 30% are achievable with fake rates of 1%. We also consider the discovery potential for new heavy resonances that decay to pairs of boosted objects, and find significant improvements are possible using N-subjettiness. In this way, N-subjettiness combines the advantages of jet shapes with the discriminating power seen in previous jet substructure algorithms.Comment: 26 pages, 26 figures, 2 tables; v2: references added; v3: discussion of results extende