On both global and local levels, one can observe a trend toward the adoption of algorithmic regulation in the public sector, with the Chinese social credit system (SCS) serving as a prominent and controversial example of this phenomenon. Within the SCS framework, cities play a pivotal role in its development and implementation, both as evaluators of individuals and enterprises and as subjects of evaluation themselves. This study engages in a comparative analysis of SCS scoring mechanisms for individuals and enterprises across diverse Chinese cities while also scrutinizing the scoring system applied to cities themselves. We investigate the extent of algorithmic regulation exercised through the SCS, elucidating its operational dynamics at the city level in China and assessing its interventionism, especially concerning the involvement of algorithms. Furthermore, we discuss ethical concerns surrounding the SCS’s implementation, particularly regarding transparency and fairness. By addressing these issues, this article contributes to two research domains: algorithmic regulation and discourse surrounding the SCS, offering valuable insights into the ongoing utilization of algorithmic regulation to tackle governance and societal challenges.

Objectives/Goals: Academic research centers struggle to recruit and retain a diverse, competent clinical and translational science (CTS) workforce. The clinical research professional career pathway is particularly underrecognized among undergraduates, despite offering multiple career opportunities. Methods/Study Population: To address these challenges, two undergraduate outreach programs were developed. First, an undergraduate certificate program in CTS (UC-CTS) was designed to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to enter the workforce immediately after graduation. Second, a “CTS Roadshow” was launched to build awareness of CTS careers within a variety of undergraduate programs and majors. In this recruitment initiative, principal investigators (PIs) and CRPs visit classrooms to share information about CTS career pathways and offer insights into the roles, responsibilities, and professional opportunities available in the field. Results/Anticipated Results: The UC-CTS program launched in Fall 2024 as a 12-credit certificate that includes two paid internships: one in patient care and one in research. Currently, the program has 5 students enrolled with an anticipated increase in enrollment to 20 students by Spring 2025. Similarly, the CTS Roadshow has reached an increasing number of students each year. Since its inception in Spring 2023, the CTS Roadshow has introduced over 750 undergraduates across 21 courses to CTS careers. The CTS Roadshow has engaged students from a variety of majors, including biology, psychology, medical sciences, legal, finance, accounting, and pre-health programs, increasing awareness of and interest in CTS careers. Discussion/Significance of Impact: Both programs aim to expose students to CTS careers early in their education, better preparing them for full-time CTS roles after graduation. A rise in qualified applicants pursuing CTS careers locally and regionally is expected, improving job satisfaction and retention through enhanced preparation for the career field.

This article proposes and estimates a tractable, arbitrage-free valuation model for corporate coupon bonds that includes a more realistic recovery rate process. Most existing studies use a recovery rate process that is misspecified because it includes recovery for coupons due after default. Misspecification errors from assuming recovery on all coupons can be substantial; they increase with recovery rates, coupons, maturity, and default probabilities. For a large sample of market transactions, i) our model has lower pricing errors than one assuming recovery on all coupons and ii) the magnitude of our model’s outperformance is linked to misspecification errors from assuming recovery on coupons.

In Massachusetts, a proposed bill would reduce the sentence of those incarcerated who become living donors of either organs or bone marrow. We outline two concerns with such a proposal, which relate directly to the content of the proposal (as opposed to broader debates about payment for organs and validity of consent obtained from the incarcerated). The first of these concerns is about equality of opportunity. The proposal provides the opportunity for a sentence reduction for some but not for others – and the distribution of these opportunities reflects circumstances largely beyond the control of the incarcerated. The second concern is that the proposal may conflict with why we punish in the first place. The proposal is at odds with the non-consequentialist general deterrence defended by Tadros, retributivism, and communicative theories of punishment. Among the theories examined, only the purely consequentialist version of general deterrence might find the practice palatable. The upshot of the latter observation is that the proposal presupposes the truth of a purely consequentialist theory of punishment and sets aside others.

One of the main objectives of ecological research is to enhance our understanding of the processes that lead to species extinction. A potentially crucial extinction pattern is the dependence of contemporary biodiversity dynamics on past climates, also known as “climate legacy”. However, the general impact of climate legacy on extinction dynamics is unknown. Here, we conduct a systematic review to summarize the effect of climate legacies on extinction dynamics. We find that few works studying the relationship between extinction dynamics and climate include the potential impact of climate legacies (10%), with even fewer studies reaching beyond merely discussing them (3%). Among the studies that quantified climate legacies, six out of seven reported an improved fit of models to extinction dynamics, with most also describing substantial impacts of legacy effects on extinction risk. These include an increase in extinction risk of up to 40% when temperature changes add to a long-term trend in the same direction, as well as substantial effects on species’ adaptations, population dynamics and juvenile recruitment. Various ecological processes have been identified in the literature as potential ways in which climate legacies could affect the vulnerability of modern ecosystems to anthropogenic climate change, including niche conservatism, physiological thresholds, time lags and cascading effects. Overall, we find high agreement that climate legacy is a crucial process shaping extinction dynamics. Incorporating climate legacies in biodiversity assessments could be a key step toward a better understanding of the ecological consequences arising from climate change.

Almost every week national elections are held somewhere in the world. Many more elections take place at federal and local levels of government. Surely, these are important events to many of us. This thesis aims at providing a better understanding of why and how people vote in elections.

Three original modifications of Palfrey and Rosenthal's (1983) participation game are used to study voter turnout theoretically and experimentally. In the basic game, each voter supports (i.e., prefers) one of two exogenous candidates and privately decides between voting at a cost and abstaining (without costs). The candidate who receives more votes wins the election (ties are broken randomly) and each supporter of this candidate receives an equal reward, independent of whether or not she voted.

The first study (published in the American Political Science Review 100, pp. 235248) analyzes the effects of social embeddedness on turnout, assuming that voters may be influenced by observing the decisions of other voters around them (e.g., a family or working place). Our experimental results show that the social context matters: this information increases turnout by more than 50%. The increase is greater when neighbors support the same candidate rather than when they support opponents.

The second study investigates the effects of public opinion polls on voter turnout and welfare. Poll releases resolve uncertainty about the level of support for each candidate caused by ‘floating’ voters, whose preferences change across elections. This information increases turnout in the laboratory by 28-34%, depending on the fraction of floating voters in the electorate. If polls indicate equal levels of support for both candidates—in which case aggregate benefits for society are not affected by the outcome—welfare decreases substantially due to costs from excessive turnout.

In the final study, elections are preceded by the competition between two candidates: they simultaneously announce binding policy offers in which some voters can be favored at the expense of others through inclusion and exclusion in budget expenditure (Myerson 1993). We observe that policy offers include 33% more voters—yielding a smaller budget share for each—when voting is compulsory rather than voluntary. Moreover, we find evidence of political bonds between voters and long-lived parties.

Overall, in all three experiments many subjects strongly react to economic incentives (i.e., benefits, costs, and informational clues), often in line with what is observed outside of the laboratory.

In this paper we study the effect of downward social information in contribution decisions to fund public goods. We describe the results of a field experiment run in conjunction with the fundraising campaigns of a public radio station. Renewing members are presented with social information (information about another donor's contribution) which is either above or below their previous (last year's) contribution. We find that respondents change their contribution in the direction of the social information; increasing their contribution when the social information is above their previous contribution, and decreasing their contribution when the social information is below. We hypothesize about the psychological motivations that may cause the results and test these hypotheses by comparing the relative size of the upward and downward shifts. These results improve our understanding of cooperation in public good provision and suggest differential costs and benefits to fundraisers in providing social information.

Field studies were conducted on certified organic land in Lafayette and Vincennes, IN, in 2023 to determine the impact of different between-row weed control methods on weed suppression and sweetpotato yield. Between-row treatments consisted of organic buckwheat (108 kg ha−1) broadcast seeded immediately after sweetpotato transplanting followed by silage tarping from 3 wk after transplanting (WATr) through harvest, organic buckwheat (108 kg ha−1) broadcast seeded 3 WATr and terminated 7 WATr, and cultivation as a grower standard. Weed density at 6 WATr was 0, 184, and 162 plants m−2 for the silage tarping, living mulch buckwheat, and cultivation treatments, respectively. Total yield was 11,048 kg ha−1 for the living mulch buckwheat, 19,792 kg ha−1 for the cultivation, and 17,814 kg ha−1 for the tarping treatments. Tarping effectively suppressed weeds and produced sweetpotato yields comparable to cultivation, indicating the potential for use by organic growers. When buckwheat was grown between rows 3 to 7 WATr, sweetpotato yield was lower than it was with tarping and cultivation. These results suggest that researchers should be evaluating tarps for small-acreage farmers as a weed management strategy.

Historiographical accounts generally explain Belgian technocracy as a short-lived phenomenon of the 1930s, when the politicians Hendrik de Man and Paul van Zeeland unsuccessfully tried to reinforce state power by strengthening the role of experts (at the expense of the parliament). This article focuses on the overlooked ideas and activities of the political scientist Louis Camu, who, also during the 1930s, pushed for technocratic governance – with more success than van Zeeland and de Man. As ‘Royal Commissioner’ for civil service reform, Camu sought to transform Belgian politics and even the morality of the population at large. Yet despite his public prominence, Camu was far from a transparent political operator. While defending a Montesquieuan democracy in public, he covertly became involved in extreme-right politics during the latter years of the 1930s, culminating in his 1940 membership of a wartime reform committee that sought to abolish the liberal democracy.

We investigate when the algebraic numerical range is a C-spectral set in a Banach algebra. While providing several counterexamples based on classical ideas as well as combinatorial Banach spaces, we discuss positive results for matrix algebras and provide an absolute constant in the case of complex $2\times 2$-matrices with the induced $1$-norm. Furthermore, we discuss positive results for infinite-dimensional Banach algebras, including the Calkin algebra.

In the study of politics, many theoretical accounts assume that we are experiencing a ‘crisis of democracy’, with declining levels of political trust. While some empirical studies support this account, others disagree and report ‘trendless fluctuations’. We argue that these empirical ambiguities are based on analytical confusion: whether trust is declining depends on the institution, country, and period in question. We clarify these issues and apply our framework to an empirical analysis that is unprecedented in geographic and temporal scope: we apply Bayesian dynamic latent trait models to uncover underlying trends in data on trust in six institutions collated from 3,377 surveys conducted by 50 projects in 143 countries between 1958 and 2019. We identify important differences between countries and regions, but globally we find that trust in representative institutions has generally been declining in recent decades, whereas trust in ‘implementing’ institutions has been stable or rising.