The Effect of Web Usability on Users’ Web Experience

The ease with which a website visitor can find what they need is positively correlated with visitor satisfaction(Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement, 2008). Web usability is a field that studies what factors affect the visitor’s ability to navigate through a website. Although there are publications outlining specific usability guidelines, many of them have little or no academic research to support the claim. HHS developed a list of 209 guidelines and rated each according to their strength of evidence (research-based support, 5 – high, 1 – low). Using heuristic evaluation and usability testing, this study provides additional research-based knowledge for those guidelines rated with a low strength of evidence. Results indicate that users desire printer-friendly webpages, require feedback on their location within the website, find linking to related content helpful, and expect a search option to be provided on every page. Additional research is necessary to determine if providing descriptive page titles or labeling pushbuttons clearly is important to web usability

Policy Issues Concerning the Reform of the Credit Rating Agencies

Proposes creating a private board of securitization market participants with a public mandate to set standards and encourage their adoption, improving transparency and realigning the incentives of rating agencies and others with those of final investors

Statistical turbulence theory and turbulence phenomenology

The application of deductive turbulence theory for validity determination of turbulence phenomenology at the level of second-order, single-point moments is considered. Particular emphasis is placed on the phenomenological formula relating the dissipation to the turbulence energy and the Rotta-type formula for the return to isotropy. Methods which deal directly with most or all the scales of motion explicitly are reviewed briefly. The statistical theory of turbulence is presented as an expansion about randomness. Two concepts are involved: (1) a modeling of the turbulence as nearly multipoint Gaussian, and (2) a simultaneous introduction of a generalized eddy viscosity operator

Globalization or Localization? A longitudinal study of successful American and Chinese online store websites

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study of 2562 images on the homepages of successful American and Chinese online store websites,with the goal of determining whether cultural factors impact their visual presentation and evolution. Descriptive and statistical content analyses reveal that the U.S. and Chinese online store sites showed significant cross-national image differences from their inception; moreover, the Chinese sites diverged further from the U.S. sites over time, strengthening their own cultural identity and suggesting a trend towards localization in a diverse and dynamic world market. These findings support the view that although English-speaking Western culture is widespread in today’s Information Age, other cultures are not necessarily undermined

Questioning the Generational Divide: Technological Exoticism and Adult Constructions of Online Youth Identity

Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. This chapter reflects on the effects and implications of the discrepancy between adult perspectives on digital media and youth experiences. Through an analysis of public discourse by marketers, journalists, and new media researchers compared with statements by young technology users, it is proposed that the current so-called "Internet generation" is in fact a transitional generation, in which young Internet users are characterized to varying degrees by a dual consciousness of both their own and adult perspectives, the latter of which tend to exoticize youth. An analogy with the first television generation is developed to suggest that the birth of a true Internet generation, some years in the future, will pave the way for more normalized, difficult-to-question changes in media attitudes and consumption, and thus that the present transitional moment should be taken advantage of to encourage conversation between adults and youth about technology and social change

A Conversation with Alan Gelfand

Alan E. Gelfand was born April 17, 1945, in the Bronx, New York. He attended public grade schools and did his undergraduate work at what was then called City College of New York (CCNY, now CUNY), excelling at mathematics. He then surprised and saddened his mother by going all the way across the country to Stanford to graduate school, where he completed his dissertation in 1969 under the direction of Professor Herbert Solomon, making him an academic grandson of Herman Rubin and Harold Hotelling. Alan then accepted a faculty position at the University of Connecticut (UConn) where he was promoted to tenured associate professor in 1975 and to full professor in 1980. A few years later he became interested in decision theory, then empirical Bayes, which eventually led to the publication of Gelfand and Smith [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 85 (1990) 398-409], the paper that introduced the Gibbs sampler to most statisticians and revolutionized Bayesian computing. In the mid-1990s, Alan's interests turned strongly to spatial statistics, leading to fundamental contributions in spatially-varying coefficient models, coregionalization, and spatial boundary analysis (wombling). He spent 33 years on the faculty at UConn, retiring in 2002 to become the James B. Duke Professor of Statistics and Decision Sciences at Duke University, serving as chair from 2007-2012. At Duke, he has continued his work in spatial methodology while increasing his impact in the environmental sciences. To date, he has published over 260 papers and 6 books; he has also supervised 36 Ph.D. dissertations and 10 postdocs. This interview was done just prior to a conference of his family, academic descendants, and colleagues to celebrate his 70th birthday and his contributions to statistics which took place on April 19-22, 2015 at Duke University.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-STS521 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Real Estate Booms and Banking Busts: An International Perspective

Real estate cycles and banking cycles may occur independently but they are correlated in a remarkable number of instances ranging over a wide variety of institutional arrangements, in both advanced industrial nations and emerging economies. During the recent Asian financial crisis, the most seriously affected countries first experienced a collapse in property prices and a weakening of the banking systems before experiencing their exchange rate crises. Countries where banks play a more dominant role in real estate markets and hold a greater percentage of assets are the most severely affected during such a crisis. In this paper, the authors develop an explanation of how real estate cycles and banking crises are related and why they occur. The authors first discuss how real estate prices are determined and why they are so vulnerable to deviations from long-run equilibrium prices, paying special attention to the role of the banking system in determining prices. Increases in the price of real estate may increase the economic value of bank capital to the extent that banks own real estate. This then increases the value of loans collateralized by real estate and may lead to a decline in the perceived risk of real estate lending. For these reasons, an increase in real estate prices may increase the supply of credit to the real estate industry which is then likely to lead to further increases in real estate prices. The opposite is also true. A decline in the price of real estate will decrease bank capital by reducing the value of the bank's own real estate assets as well as reduce the value of loans collateralized by real estate. This may lead to defaults, thus further reducing capital. A decline in the price of real estate is also likely to increase the perceived risk in real estate lending. All of these factors reduce the supply of credit to the real estate industry. Supervisors and regulators may also react to the resulting weakening of bank capital positions by increasing capital requirements and instituting stricter rules for classifying and provisioning against real estate assets, leading to even further decline in prices and supply of credit to the real estate industry. In order to explain how real estate cycles begin, the authors turn to a model of land prices developed by Mark Carey that details the role of optimists in the process. They then bring in the role of non-financial variables as well as of banks and then turn to the part played by "disaster myopia" -- the tendency over time to underestimate the probability of low-frequency shocks -- in determining cycles. Other factors that contribute to cycles are inadequate data and weak analysis by bank managers as well as "perverse incentives" -- one result of "disaster myopia" that occurs when lenders believe that they can accept higher loan-to-value rations, weaker commitments or guarantees and looser loan covenants without increasing their risk of loss. Using this framework of the interactions between the real estate market and bank behavior, the authors interpret recent examples of real estate booms linked to banking crises in Sweden, the United States, Japan and Thailand. They then discuss measures that can be taken to limit the amplitude of real estate cycles and ways to insulate the banking system from real estate cycles. They believe that the heart of the problem is the structure of the real estate market and that cycles can be avoided by taking measures that counter: The bias towards optimism; Excessive leverage; Disaster myopia; Inadequate data and weak analysis; Perverse incentives. The authors detail their recommendations for avoiding these problems in the future. These include the development of an options market for commercial real estate, greater reliance on equity financing, changes in supervisory policy that allow the identification of vulnerable banks before they become weak banks, better publication of information relevant to the valuation of commercial real estate projects, and refraining from providing full protection to all bank creditors, especially sophisticated creditors such as corporations, banks, and institutional investors.

The Case of the Missing Market: The Bond Market and Why It Matters for Financial Development

Over the last decade interest in the role of finance in economic growth has revived. Building from the pioneering work of Goldsmith (1965) and the insights of Shaw (1973) and McKinnon (1973), the more recent work examines the role of financial institutions and financial markets in corporate governance and the consequent implications for economic growth and development. Levine (1997) and Stulz (2000) have provided excellent reviews of this literature and Allen and Gale (2000) have extended it by developing a framework for comparing bank-based financial systems with market-based financial systems. Although the literature addresses "capital markets," on closer inspection the main focus is really equity markets. Bond markets are almost completely overlooked. Although the omission of the bond market is not defended in the literature, one could argue that it does little violence to reality. As Table 1 shows, in most emerging economies in Asia, bond markets are very small relative to the banking system or equity markets. Moreover, the most striking theoretical results flow from a comparison of debt contracts with equity contracts and at a high level of abstraction bank lending can proxy for all debt. In any event, data are much more readily available for equity markets and the banking system than for bond markets, even in the United States.