There have been many attempts to infer latent performance attributes of governments (or other institutions) from conditional comparisons that control for observed variables. Success in doing so could greatly improve government performance. This paper critically reviews the econometric foundations of the methods used. It is argued that latent heterogeneity remains a fundamental but unresolved id...

Brazil presents an interesting case study of local factors influencing the adoption and impacts of e-commerce. It is a large developing country in which some segments of the economy are technologically sophisticated while others are quite backward. Based on existing knowledge of Brazil’s economic and policy environment and its experience with other information technologies, we develop three the...

The emergence of ubiquitous computing as a new design paradigm poses significant challenges for HCI and interaction design. Traditionally, human-computer interaction has taken place within a constrained and well-understood domain of experience – single users sitting at desks and interacting with conventionally-designed computers employing screens, keyboards and mice for interaction. New opportu...

Computer science provides an in-depth understanding of technical aspects of programming concepts, but if we want to understand how programming concepts evolve, how programmers think and talk about them and how they are used in practice, we need to consider a broader perspective that includes historical, philosophical and cognitive aspects. In this paper, we develop such broader understanding of...

Emotions are a fundamental part of our living experience, yet our grasp on what they are and how to study them is still tenuous. Cell editor Mirna Kvajo talked with Joe LeDoux, Cristina Alberini, and Liz Phelps about the challenges in researching emotions and whether studies in animals can teach us about them. An excerpt of the conversation appears below, and the full conversation is available ...

You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

Novelty and diversity are functions of three things: a system’s performance at ad-hoc retrieval, its ability to order documents diversely, and the collection over which the system is run. Ideally, our diversity evaluation framework (test collections and evaluation measures) would sort systems by their skill at ordering documents. Unfortunately, the current framework as exemplified by TREC is ac...

The current standards for meeting drug information (DI) requirements in American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP)-accredited pharmacy practice residency (PPR) programs and the impact of changes in ASHP standards for the DI requirements were studied. In September 2002 a nine-question survey was e-mailed to the directors of all ASHP-accredited PPR programs listed with an available e-ma...