Life of Alan

(tags: South_Carolina)

(tags: Baseball)

(tags: Sakha)

(tags: Minnesota Senate)

(tags: Louisiana)

(tags: Bolivia)

The Media Consortium is a network of the country’s leading independent, progressive journalism organizations. We support smart, powerful and passionate journalism that redefines American political and cultural debate. The Media Consortium is creating a solid cooperative infrastructure that will serve a 21st-century audience and offer a sustainable future for independent media. Millions of Americans are looking for honest, fair, and accurate journalism-We’re finding new ways to reach them. Our strategy has three focal points: Making Connections, Building Infrastructure, and Amplifying Our Voice.

(tags: Leftism)

(tags: Judaism)

(tags: Donors)

The U.S. Marines are trained to make split-second decisions based on incomplete information, in life-or-death situations. Can they provide clues to running a faster-reacting business?

(tags: Military)

(tags: National_Competitiveness)

(tags: NPR)

Schools throughout greater Seattle closed Wednesday at the mere threat of snow late in the day, a symptom of the city's deep phobia of the white stuff and near-complete inability to deal with any significant snowstorm. Even though Seattle is the nation's northernmost major city, snow is a rarity here, and the city is ill-equipped to clear the streets of its hilly neighborhoods. Combine that with drivers unaccustomed to driving on slick roads, and snow is a recipe for chaos. School officials' caution dates back to a 1990 snowstorm that dumped several inches of unexpected snow, paralyzing the city and forcing 1,200 children to spend the night in their classrooms. Since then, the state's largest school district and its suburban neighbors close as a precaution when snow threatens. "We always err on the side of caution, making sure our students are going to be as safe as possible, not just at school but traveling to school," said Seattle Public Schools spokesman David Tucker.

(tags: Meteorology)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Taiwan)

Many developing countries use food price subsidies or price controls to improve the nutrition of the poor. However, subsidizing goods that households spend a high proportion of their budget on can create large wealth effects. Consumers may then substitute towards foods with higher non-nutritional attributes like taste, but lower nutritional content per unit currency, weakening or perhaps even reversing the intended impact of the subsidy. We present data from a randomized program of large price subsidies for poor households in two provinces of China. We find that the nutritional impact caused by the subsidy was at best extremely small, and for some households actually negative.

(tags: Health)

(tags: Sovereign_Wealth_Funds)

(tags: Louisville)

(tags: China)

(tags: Management)

(tags: Labor)

(tags: Iceland)

(tags: Research)

(tags: 2008_Banking_Crisis)

(tags: Cold_War)

(tags: Space_Exploration)

(tags: Real_Estate)

(tags: Military)

(tags: Corruption)

(tags: NGO)

(tags: NYC)

(tags: Niger)

(tags: Water)

(tags: Water)

(tags: Foreign_Policy:Iraq)

(tags: Urban_Studies)

On a dark December morning three years ago, Howard Schultz bounded into a coffee shop in Dublin and started shaking hands with people in red T-shirts and green aprons before peppering them with questions. “Are you all new with Starbucks?” he asked the staff. “Who are the customers, and have they been to Starbucks before?”

The store was the second Starbucks to open in Ireland, and Schultz, a tall, lean, energetic man who had bought the Starbucks brand more than two decades earlier, was in town to find out what the locals thought of his empire. Watching his customers order espressos, lattes and cappuccinos as the morning sun slowly lit College Green Square, Schultz explained why the ubiquitous coffee brand had become so successful. “The story is kind of boring,” he said. “We keep doing the same thing, year-in and year-out.” And that thing wasn’t really about coffee. Starbucks’ rapid expansion, which saw it open more than 10,000 stores in three dozen countries, was sustainable…

(tags: Coffee)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: LA_Studies)

(tags: Neuroscience)

Why are foreigners willing to invest almost $2 trillion per year in the United States? The answer affects if the existing pattern of global imbalances can persist and if the United States can continue to finance its current account deficit without a major change in asset prices and returns. This paper tests various hypotheses and finds that standard portfolio allocation models and diversification motives are poor predictors of foreign holdings of U.S. liabilities. Instead, foreigners hold greater shares of their investment portfolios in the United States if they have less developed financial markets. The magnitude of this effect decreases with income per capita. Countries with fewer capital controls and greater trade with the United States also invest more in U.S. equity and bond markets, and there is no evidence that foreigners invest in the United States based on diversification motives.

(tags: Macroeconomics)

(tags: Urban_Studies)

(tags: Amazonas)

(tags: Obama)

(tags: English)

(tags: NYC:Media)

(tags: NYC:Media)

(tags: NYC:Media)

(tags: NYC:Media)

(tags: NYC:Media)

(tags: NYC:Media)

(tags: Brooklyn)

(tags: Journalism)

(tags: NYC)

(tags: Education)

Radio instruction at the Columbia School of Journalism emphasizes writing and reporting of in-depth radio reports, including news-information and documentary styles. Students learn formats heard on the best commercial and public network broadcasts, in particular on National Public Radio news programs such as Morning Edition. Advanced courses stress on-air production and hosting skills. Broadcast programs, as webcasts, include live coverage of national and local elections each November, a weekly news magazine January through May, and occasional broadcasts of the Radio Documentary class and "Masters Project" long-form documentaries each Spring.

(tags: Radio)

This paper presents new evidence on why unemployment insurance (UI) benefits affect search behavior and develops a simple method of calculating the welfare gains from UI using this evidence. I show that 60 percent of the increase in unemployment durations caused by UI benefits is due to a "liquidity effect" rather than distortions in marginal incentives to search ("moral hazard") by combining two empirical strategies. First, I find that increases in benefits have much larger effects on durations for liquidity constrained households. Second, lump-sum severance payments increase durations substantially among constrained households. I derive a formula for the optimal benefit level that depends only on the reduced-form liquidity and moral hazard elasticities. The formula implies that the optimal UI benefit level exceeds 50 percent of the wage. The "exact identification" approach to welfare analysis proposed here yields robust optimal policy results because it does not require structural…

(tags: Labor)

(tags: Illinois)

(tags: Jobs)

TimeSpace is an interactive map that allows you to navigate articles, photos, video and commentary from around the globe. Discover news hot-spots where coverage is clustered. Use the timeline to illustrate peaks in coverage, and customize your news searches to a particular day or specific hour. (Many Washington Post stories appear at midnight; others are published throughout the day as news happens). Click the ? In the upper right for help.

(tags: News)

(tags: 2008_Banking_Crisis)

(tags: Social_Networking)

(tags: Almost_Live)

The IASOC is a professional association of criminologists, researchers, working professionals, teachers, and students. IASOC works to promote greater understanding and research about organized crime in all its manifestations. IASOC was founded in 1984 and holds annual meetings in conjuction with the American Society of Criminology (November) as a forum to disseminate the latest knowledge and research about organized crime. The quarterly, peer-reviewed journal Trends in Organized Crime is provided as a benefit of membership in IASOC. The journal reports exclusively on current research in all areas of organized crime and the criminal justice response to it. It is published by Transaction Publishers. Reliable Information about organized crime is not always easy to obtain. A membership listing for IASOC is provided here, and linked to particular areas of expertise that members have self-identified.

(tags: Crime_and_Punishment)

(tags: Media)

(tags: Chicago)

(tags: Chicago)

(tags: Corruption Indonesia)

(tags: Nonproliferation)

(tags: Phoenix)

(tags: American_Presidency)

(tags: Judicial)

(tags: Brooklyn)