After an uproar last year between Mayor Bill de Blasio and the ride-hailing app Uber over the company’s growth in New York City, the two sides reached something of a truce on Friday with the release of a very short — and very expensive — traffic report from the city.
The long-awaited report concluded that the mayor’s contention that Uber vehicles and other ride-hailing services had worsened traffic in Manhattan was unfounded.
Long, but interesting. “Temporal flexibility.”
State and local government employees already earn less than similar private-sector workers. The wage and compensation gaps between public- and private-sector workers are significantly higher in right-to-work states…
http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/01/14/privacy-and-information-sharing/
Most Americans see privacy issues in commercial settings as contingent and context-dependent. A new Pew Research Center study based on a survey of 461 U.S. adults and nine online focus groups of 80 people finds that there are a variety of circumstances under which many Americans would share personal information or permit surveillance in return for getting something of perceived value. For instance, a majority of Americans think it would be acceptable (by a 54% to 24% margin) for employers to install monitoring cameras following a series of workplace thefts. Nearly half (47%) say the basic bargain offered by retail loyalty cards – namely, that stores track their purchases in exchange for occasional discounts – is acceptable to them, even as a third (32%) call it unacceptable.
A simulator; amusing stuff (from the numbers side)…
http://www.pewresearch.org/2015/11/18/advances-in-telephone-survey-sampling/
Telephone surveys face numerous challenges, but some positive developments have emerged, principally with respect to sampling. Companies that provide telephone samples have developed several products that have the potential to improve the efficiency of surveys in both the landline and cellphone frames and allow for more accurate geographic and demographic targeting of calling in the cellphone frame. A number of tests have been conducted with these products, and the relative costs and benefits of each are becoming clearer. This report describes some of these innovations and presents the results of experiments conducted with each of them.
http://www.pewresearch.org/2016/01/07/can-likely-voter-models-be-improved/
“In recent years, polling has missed the mark in several high-profile elections, drawing particular attention to the difficulties inherent in using surveys to predict election outcomes. These failures typically result from one or more of three causes: biased samples that include an incorrect proportion of each candidate’s supporters; change in voter preferences between the time of the poll and the election; or incorrect forecasts about who will vote. While not a new concern, the third of these – the difficulty of identifying likely voters – may be the most serious, and that is the focus of this study. Election polls face a unique problem in survey research: They are asked to produce a model of a population that does not yet exist at the time the poll is conducted, the future electorate.”
However, on p. 5:
“The analysis presented here suggests that modeling the electorate is likely to continue to vex pollsters, especially if no official record of past voting is available as an input to the models.”
http://altdaily.com/on-the-come-up-norfolk-wins-the-google-ecity-award-for-virginia/
This year Norfolk was named the digital capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia through the eCity Award.
http://sasconfidential.com/2016/01/04/elsevier-25-billion/
Brian Nosek, a professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Center for Open Science, says, “Academic publishing is the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher has no idea how much anything costs.” Nosek finds this whole system is designed to maximize the amount of profit. “I, as the researcher, produce the scholarship and I want it to have the biggest impact possible and so what I care about is the prestige of the journal and how many people read it. Once it is finally accepted, since it is so hard to get acceptances, I am so delighted that I will sign anything — send me a form and I will sign it. I have no idea I have signed over my copyright or what implications that has — nor do I care, because it has no impact on me. The reward is the publication.”
"We offer a tentative taxonomy of the social determinants of behavior and describe results of controlled and natural experiments that only a broader view of the social determinants of behavior can plausibly explain. The perspective suggests new tools to promote well-being and economic development."
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