What Do Small Businesses Do?

In this paper, we show that most small business owners are very different from the entrepreneurs that economic models and policy makers often have in mind. Using new data that samples early stage entrepreneurs just prior to business start up, we show that few small businesses intend to bring a new idea to market. Instead, most intend to provide an existing service to an existing market. Further, we find that most small businesses have little desire to grow big or to innovate in any observable way. We show that such behavior is consistent with the industry characteristics of the majority of small businesses, which are concentrated among skilled craftsmen, lawyers, real estate agents, doctors, small shopkeepers, and restaurateurs. Lastly, we show non pecuniary benefits (being one’s own boss, having flexibility of hours, etc.) play a first-order role in the business formation decision. We then discuss how our findings suggest that the importance of entrepreneurial talent, entrepreneurial luck, and financial frictions in explaining the firm size distribution may be overstated. We conclude by discussing the potential policy implications of our findings.

Imitation in fashion: Further reflections on the work of Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel

Imitation continues to play a significant role within the fashion industry, but not in the way that Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel, who wrote over 100 years ago, suggest. Increased inequality in incomes, the adoption of an ethics of labour over leisure, and the creation of celebrities within the music and movie industries, who appear proximate to a broad demographic of consumers, means the social elite are no longer the predominant trendsetters and exemplars of sartorial tastes. More fundamentally, globalization has reduced interpersonal connections and increased feelings of isolation within many individuals. Correlatively, periods of the past, which appear to offer security, stability and status, have become an increasingly important source of sartorial – and cultural – imitation, as evidenced by the growing popularity of retro and vintage clothing styles. An awareness of the role played by heritage and history in the consumption of fashion is therefore important for researchers in academia and industry

A complete census of AGN and their hosts from optical surveys?

Large optical surveys provide an unprecedented census of galaxies in the local Universe, forming an invaluable framework into which more detailed studies of objects can be placed. But how useful are optical surveys for understanding the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies, given their limited wavelength coverage, selection criteria, and depth? In this conference paper I present work-in-progress comparing optical and mid-IR diagnostics of three "unusual" low redshift populations (luminous Seyferts, dusty Balmer-strong AGN, ULIRGs) with a set of ordinary star-forming galaxies from the SDSS. I address the questions: How well do the mid-infrared and optical diagnostics of star formation and AGN strength agree? To what extent do optical surveys allow us to include extreme, dusty, morphologically disturbed galaxies in our "complete" census of black hole-galaxy co-evolution?Comment: Proceedings of contributed talk at "Co-Evolution of Central Black Holes and Galaxies" (eds. B.M. Peterson, R.S. Somerville, and T. Storchi-Bergmann), IAU symposium 267, August 2009. 6 pages, 5 figure

Critical reflections on cultural appropriation, race and the role of fancy dress costume

Cultural appropriation in fashionable dress has become an increasingly urgent subject within scholarly and generalist discussions. Few weeks now pass without a news story criticizing a fashion brand for producing and promoting culturally insensitive clothing. A form of clothing most frequently and controversially associated with cultural trespass, but generally marginalized within academic enquiries, is fancy dress costume. This article seeks, first, to promote a critical and continuous academic engagement with fancy dress costume and contribute to a growing body of scholarship that recognizes its cultural and social importance. Second, I complicate discussions about the causes of cultural appropriation within fancy dress costume by reflecting on the circumstances and motives in which people perform, dressed very differently to their conventional appearance. Addressing these points, the article makes a unique contribution to clothing studies and discussions about cultural appropriation by advocating a more nuanced understanding of people’s self-awareness when they participate in fancy dress costume, and suggests how this might be achieved

Diffsurv: Differentiable sorting for censored time-to-event data

Survival analysis is a crucial semi-supervised task in machine learning with numerous real-world applications, particularly in healthcare. Currently, the most common approach to survival analysis is based on Cox's partial likelihood, which can be interpreted as a ranking model optimized on a lower bound of the concordance index. This relation between ranking models and Cox's partial likelihood considers only pairwise comparisons. Recent work has developed differentiable sorting methods which relax this pairwise independence assumption, enabling the ranking of sets of samples. However, current differentiable sorting methods cannot account for censoring, a key factor in many real-world datasets. To address this limitation, we propose a novel method called Diffsurv. We extend differentiable sorting methods to handle censored tasks by predicting matrices of possible permutations that take into account the label uncertainty introduced by censored samples. We contrast this approach with methods derived from partial likelihood and ranking losses. Our experiments show that Diffsurv outperforms established baselines in various simulated and real-world risk prediction scenarios. Additionally, we demonstrate the benefits of the algorithmic supervision enabled by Diffsurv by presenting a novel method for top-k risk prediction that outperforms current methods

Automatic methods for long-term tracking and the detection and decoding of communication dances in honeybees

The honeybee waggle dance communication system is an intriguing example of abstract animal communication and has been investigated thoroughly throughout the last seven decades. Typically, observables such as waggle durations or body angles are extracted manually either directly from the observation hive or from video recordings to quantify properties of the dance and related behaviors. In recent years, biology has profited from automation, improving measurement precision, removing human bias, and accelerating data collection. We have developed technologies to track all individuals of a honeybee colony and to detect and decode communication dances automatically. In strong contrast to conventional approaches that focus on a small subset of the hive life, whether this regards time, space, or animal identity, our more inclusive system will help the understanding of the dance comprehensively in its spatial, temporal, and social context. In this contribution, we present full specifications of the recording setup and the software for automatic recognition of individually tagged bees and the decoding of dances. We discuss potential research directions that may benefit from the proposed automation. Lastly, to exemplify the power of the methodology, we show experimental data and respective analyses from a continuous, experimental recording of 9 weeks duration