Acknowledgements. Tyler Ernst provided excellent research assistance on this paper. I am grateful to Forrest Briscoe, Peter Cappelli, Olivier Chatain, John Paul Ferguson, Vit Henisz, Isabel FernandezMateo, Henrich Greve, Mauro Guillen, Sarah Kaplan, Katherine Klein, John Paul MacDuffie, Paul Osterman, Nancy Rothbard, Andrew von Nordenflycht, Valery Yakubovich, Paul Adler, two anonymous reviewer...

Objective: To ascertain whether programmers gain more knowledge about an unfamiliar program by enhancing the code or documenting the code. The context of this work was investigating whether maintenance programmers faced with an unfamiliar system should start by actively working on the system or spend time passively exploring the system before attempting to make changes. Method: We designed a la...

This paper discusses two important results on the expressive limitations of elementary languages that David Kaplan established a few decades ago, and clarifies how they relate to the expressive power of plural constructions of natural languages. Kaplan proved that such plural quantifications as the following cannot be paraphrased into elementary languages: Most things are funny. (1) Some critic...

We extend a finite group solvability criterion of J.G. Thompson, based on his classification of finite minimal simple groups, to a prosolvability criterion. Moreover, we generalize to the profinite setting subsequent developments of Thompson’s criterion by G. Kaplan and the second author, which recast it in terms of properties of sequences of Sylow subgroups and their products. This generalizat...

Abowd is Professor of Labor Economics at Cornell University, Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at the United States Bureau of the Census, research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA) and research affiliate of the Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique (Paris). Kaplan is a research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We are grateful for finan...

Given a system of equations in a “random” finitely generated subgroup of the braid group, we show how to find a small ordered list of elements in the subgroup, which contains a solution to the equations with a significant probability. Moreover, with a significant probability, the solution will be the first in the list. This gives a probabilistic solution to: the conjugacy problem, the group mem...

In this paper, we give a ‘direct’ construction of the endomorphism ring of supersingular elliptic curves over a prime field Fp from ‘ideal classes’ of Q( √−p). We use the result to prove that the result of Kaneko on ‘minimal’ CM liftings of such supersingular elliptic curves is a best possible result. We also prove that the result of Elkies on ‘minimal’ CM liftings of all supersingular elliptic...

The greatest gap between the practices of Hall of Fame organizations occurs for organization alignment…and this indicates that alignment, much like the synchronism achieved by a high-performance rowing crew, produces dramatic benefits. Understanding how to create alignment in organizations is a big deal, one capable of significant payoffs for all types of enterprises (Kaplan and Norton 2006). C...

My target in this paper is a view that has sometimes been called the ‘Linguistic Doctrine of Necessary Truth’ (L-DONT) and sometimes ‘Conventionalism about Necessity’. It is the view that necessity is grounded in the meanings of our expressions—meanings which are sometimes identified with the conventions governing those expressions—and that our knowledge of that necessity is based on our knowle...

Following Schlenker (1999); Percus & Sauerland (2003b); Anand (2006), we assume the following semantics for attitude relations A:1 • A(λGλx′λw′ . p)(x)(w) = 1⇔ ∃G∀〈w′, x′〉 ∈ Ax . p(G)(x′)(w′) = 1 • 〈x′, w′〉 ∈ Doxx ⇔ x′ is an individual compatible with who x takes herself to be in w, and w′ is a world compatible with what x believes in w. • G is a variable over concept generators of type 〈e, 〈κ,...