Can’t Take a Joke? The Asymmetrical Nature of the Politicized Sense of Humor

In an effort to tease out possible expressions of dispositional differences in people of different political ideologies, this study uses media preference and consumption data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES08-Online) to examine characteristics of audiences for a range of television shows and genres. The individual shows include two political satires, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report; a late-night comedy/variety show, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno; a hospital-based ensemble situation comedy, Scrubs; two animated comedies, The Simpsons, and The Family Guy; and two action-oriented dramas, 24, and CSI: Miami. The genres include comedies, dramas, sports and documentaries. The results of a series of one-way ANOVAs and regression analyses supported the hypotheses that conservatives do not enjoy humor as much as liberals, and that they enjoy political humor even less than non-political humor

Regulatory implications of the global financial crisis

It has become popular for journalists who are trying to sell newspapers, and politicians who are trying to solicit votes, to refer to this financial crisis as the worst since the Great Depression or WWII. I don’t know whether it is the worst or not so will leave that question to the historians and economists of the future once the storm has past. But it is indeed a “storm” as described by Vince Cable, Member of Parliament in his UK bestselling book entitled “The Storm – The World Economic Crisis and What it Means”. He describes this “storm” as a very destructive one displacing jobs, businesses, banks and whole economies from Iceland to the United Kingdom to the United States. I propose to offer a short chronology and summary of the causes of the current economic crisis. Then I will review several of the regulatory responses to the crisis focusing on the Turner Report, the de Larosière Group and certain US Treasury statements. I will offer my critiques of these proposals and then make some predictions of what the financial services industry may look like in the future

Rhineura

Number of Pages: 2Integrative BiologyEarth and Planetary Science

Self-Regulating Artificial General Intelligence

Here we examine the paperclip apocalypse concern for artificial general intelligence (or AGI) whereby a superintelligent AI with a simple goal (ie., producing paperclips) accumulates power so that all resources are devoted towards that simple goal and are unavailable for any other use. We provide conditions under which a paper apocalypse can arise but also show that, under certain architectures for recursive self-improvement of AIs, that a paperclip AI may refrain from allowing power capabilities to be developed. The reason is that such developments pose the same control problem for the AI as they do for humans (over AIs) and hence, threaten to deprive it of resources for its primary goal

As Seen on TV: Health Policy Issues in TV's Medical Dramas

Explores how fictional television can shape public images about the state of our healthcare system and policy options for improving the delivery of care

Customer Loyalty and Supplier Strategies for Quality Competition

We analyze a model of consumer response to variation in product or service quality. The model, developed in [4], provides closed-form expressions that characterize short-term and long-term measures of customer loyalty to a supplier. In this paper, we develop sensitivity analyses that offer a rich characterization of how factors - such as the underlying quality levels of the suppliers, the customer's ability to distinguish between good and bad suppliers, and the customer's prior beliefs regarding the suppliers affect both short-term and long-term loyalty. We also use the expressions to develop simple normative models for suppliers that wish to develop effective quality strategies.

Measuring Up: A Study on Corporate Sustainability Reporting in Canada

In response to the growth in corporate sustainability reporting in Canada, CGA-Canada commissioned a sustainability reporting survey in the fall of 2004. The survey sought to advance understanding of sustainability reporting, advocate for business value and transparency in reporting, and look to enjoin participation by all stakeholders. The results of the survey show the growing trend towards sustainability reporting in Canada. Some 18% of all companies produce a dedicated sustainability report, while approximately 5% spend more than $100,000 annually to report on sustainability issues. Regulatory requirements, stakeholder pressure, and corporate image objectives influence the most the decision to adopt a corporate sustainability reporting practice. In turn, added cost and potential information overload were two of the main reasons why organizations have not adopted a comprehensive sustainability reporting function. Concerns regarding the credibility and the vagueness of reporting practices and guidelines were also expressed.sustainability reporting, corporate social responsibility, reporting practices, sustainable development, socially responsible investment

Mobile Network Competition, Customer Ignorance and Fixed-to-Mobile Call Prices.

This paper examines the influence of mobile network competition on the prices of fixed-to-mobile calls. Because fixed line customers cannot, in general, distinguish the identity of a specific mobile network, these networks have market power when setting termination charges for calls from fixed lines. We show that: (1) unregulated mobile termination charges will result in higher than monopoly call prices; (2) the regulation of termination charges and prices downward will affect mobile subscription rates and may lower these rates; and (3) regulation of any mobile carrier's termination charges can reduce fixed to mobile prices but will result in an increase in unregulated carriers' termination charges. When fixed line consumers can distinguish between the different mobile networks they are calling, fixed to mobile call prices will fall relative to their level under customer ignorance. Direct mobile charging for termination also exerts downward pressure on the total fixed to mobile call price. A low cost method of lowering fixed to mobile charges would be to facilitate the identification of carriers by consumers and to restructure billing so that mobile networks are able to directly charge fixed line consumers for termination services.TELECOMMUNICATIONS ; PRICES ; REGULATION

Minimax Iterative Dynamic Game: Application to Nonlinear Robot Control Tasks

Multistage decision policies provide useful control strategies in high-dimensional state spaces, particularly in complex control tasks. However, they exhibit weak performance guarantees in the presence of disturbance, model mismatch, or model uncertainties. This brittleness limits their use in high-risk scenarios. We present how to quantify the sensitivity of such policies in order to inform of their robustness capacity. We also propose a minimax iterative dynamic game framework for designing robust policies in the presence of disturbance/uncertainties. We test the quantification hypothesis on a carefully designed deep neural network policy; we then pose a minimax iterative dynamic game (iDG) framework for improving policy robustness in the presence of adversarial disturbances. We evaluate our iDG framework on a mecanum-wheeled robot, whose goal is to find a ocally robust optimal multistage policy that achieve a given goal-reaching task. The algorithm is simple and adaptable for designing meta-learning/deep policies that are robust against disturbances, model mismatch, or model uncertainties, up to a disturbance bound. Videos of the results are on the author's website, http://ecs.utdallas.edu/~opo140030/iros18/iros2018.html, while the codes for reproducing our experiments are on github, https://github.com/lakehanne/youbot/tree/rilqg. A self-contained environment for reproducing our results is on docker, https://hub.docker.com/r/lakehanne/youbotbuntu14/Comment: 2018 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System