An unintended consequence of specialization in science is poor communication across specialties. Information developed in one area of research may be of value in another without anyone becoming aware of the fact. We describe and evaluate interactive software and database search strategies that facilitate the discovery of previously unknown cross specialty information of scientific interest. The...

Vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of words built from only a handful of phonemes, so that inevitably longer words tend to contain shorter ones. In many languages (but not all) such embedded words occur more often word-initially than word-finally, and this asymmetry, if present, has farreaching consequences for spoken-word recognition. Prior research had ascribed the asymmetry to suffix...

This paper analyzes the United States Medicare hospice reimbursement policy. The existing policy consists of a daily payment for each patient under care with a global cap of revenues accrued during the Medicare year, which increases for each newly admitted patient. We investigate the hospice’s expected profit and provide reasons for a spate of recent provider bankruptcies related to the reimbur...

rizona’s controversial immigration law is emblematic of a new period in American immigration history that features a rampedup commitment to reduce illegal immigration and to establish a new “illegal class” of those who have already entered the United States. The debate about changes to immigration law is often framed as a moral, ethical, or legal issue, but the facts behind this debate are not ...

While Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or prominent features within EMR have been hailed as an important step for advancing healthcare, a number of studies have noted that its introduction also brings unintended consequences (UCs) to healthcare organizations. According to the literature, the most disruptive type of unintended consequences is related to workflow issues, in that its occurrence wi...

Why do states commit to international human rights treaties that may limit state sovereignty? Existing arguments focus on either the fear of domestic democratic instability or on international norms. We focus instead on the variation in three kinds of costs that states must pay to commit: policy change, unintended consequences, and limited flexibility. We use a discrete time-duration model to t...

To control the deer population, state game commissions regulate the types of deer that can be legally harvested. These regulations, however, might have an unintended effect on hunting-related accidents by changing the care hunters take when firing their rifles—a moral hazard effect—or changing the composition of hunters. Using detailed data on hunting accidents and regulations in Pennsylvania c...

In this research work, we have a didactical look on the integration of a computer tool into mathematics teaching: the spreadsheet. We have related research about spreadsheet to an instrumental approach perceived as essential to analyze the questions of technological integration. This approach allowed us to extend to this technology the theoretical framework of instrumentation. These theoretical...

This paper examines how Congress’s 2008 expansion of who is disabled under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) impacts the labor market outcomes of newly covered individuals. Focusing on obese individuals, I exploit variation in coverage of obesity before and after the 2008 expansion to identify effects of the legal change, but I find no improvement in the labor market outcomes of the obe...

Let G be a reductive, connected algebraic group over an algebraic closure of a finite field. We define a tensor structure on the category of perverse sheaves on G which are direct sums of unipotent character sheaves in a fixed two-sided cell; we show that this is equivalent to the centre with a known monoidal abelian category (a categorification of the J-ring associated to the same two-sided ce...