Browsing by Subject "Information"

Now showing 1 - 15 of 15

An Examination of the Impact of Information Communication Technologies on Social Movements in Latin America
(2007-02-03) Miller, Aaron
Art and ecology : an exploration of the nature of art through my own
(2021-09-27) Menendez-Pidal, Miguel Alejandro; Tejera, Januibe, 1979-
I pose the argument that all artistic mediums have the same underlying storyline but with varying details. My purpose in writing this paper is to explore this curious phenomenon I felt working in the state park: When I decided to stop composing almost entirely for a duration of nine months and fill that void with recording, filming, and producing a “wildlife documentary”, I didn’t stop composing. It was curious to see how many of my colleagues innocently questioned the nature of my work, while I felt that constructing the project was really no different than writing a fugue, a contemporary piece, or any other classification of music. The harmless questioning, I should add, was integral for me to look within myself and question the nature of art so rigorously. This paper essentially answers why I, through my own experience and perception of things, was able to switch between two “genres” of art -- music composition and film production. There are components of this paper that meander from the project to allow preception of art to be broad, and open to discussion. I stress that the principles, conceptions, and opinions presented speak best to my own processes of synthesis.
Chukchi Sea environmental data management in a relational database
(2013-05) Yang, Fengyan; Maidment, David R.
Environmental data hold important information regarding humanity’s past, present, and future, and are managed in various ways. The database structure most commonly used in contemporary applications is the relational database. Its usage in the scientific world for managing environmental data is not as popular as in businesses enterprises. Attention is caught by the diverse nature and rapidly growing volume of environmental data that has been increasing substantially in recent. Environmental data for the Chukchi Sea, with its embedded potential oil resources, have become important for characterizing the physical, chemical, and biological environment. Substantive data have been collected recently by researchers from the Chukchi Sea Offshore Monitoring in the Drilling Area: Chemical and Benthos (COMIDA CAB) project. A modified Observations Data Model was employed for storing, retrieving, visualizing and sharing data. Throughout the project-based study, the processes of environmental data heterogeneity reconciliation and relational database model modification and implementation were carried out. Data were transformed into shareable information, which improves data interoperability between different software applications (e.g. ArcGIS and SQL server). The results confirm the feasibility and extendibility of employing relational databases for environmental data management.
Essays on inflation expectations and information frictions
(2018-04-26) Ryngaert, Jane Maria; Coibion, Olivier; Bhattarai, Saroj; Boehm, Christoph; Sinclair, Tara
This dissertation empirically investigates the expectations formation process and the constraints that economic agents face in forming beliefs about macroeconomic variables. Chapter 1 contributes to and extends our current understanding of information frictions in expectations. I first propose a new framework for estimating noisy information using individual forecasts, rather than mean forecasts as commonly done in previous work. This approach provides more power for identifying underlying information rigidities. I further extend this framework to incorporate misperceptions on the part of economic agents about the persistence of the underlying process being forecasted. Applying this framework to the U.S. inflation forecasts of professional forecasters points toward significantly less noisy information than previous estimates suggest but reveals a systematic underestimation on the part of forecasters of the persistence of inflation. Using a structural model that incorporates both noisy signals and misperceptions of persistence, I quantify the relative importance of each channel in accounting for the expectations formation process of these agents. The results indicate that, even for professional forecasters, there are multiple forces that generate economically significant deviations from full information. Chapter 2 is joint work with Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Saten Kumar. Using novel survey questions on the higher-order expectations of firm managers, we study the formation and evolution of these beliefs. A unique experimental approach allows us to characterize the degree of higher-order thinking of economic agents and how this degree of higher-order thinking affects managers' expectations as well as their economic decisions. We then relate these results to macroeconomic models in which higher order thinking matters for dynamics. Chapter 3 is develops a method for measuring the information flow of economic agents at a given point in time using survey data. I document a reduction in attention to several macroeconomic variables over time. I further document that in periods in which agents are paying more attention to a specific variable, there is also greater cross-sectional dispersion in attention across agents.
Essays on information and mechanism design
(2014-05) Taneva, Ina Angelova; Stinchcombe, Maxwell; Mathevet, Laurent
My dissertation studies the optimal design of institutions and information structures for different objectives of a designer or a social planner. The questions addressed are interesting both from a theoretical point of view, and in terms of their real-life applications. The first chapter of the dissertation focuses on supermodular mechanism design in environments with arbitrary finite type spaces and interdependent valuations. In these environments, the designer may have to use Bayesian equilibrium as a solution concept, because ex post implementation may not be possible. We propose direct Bayesian mechanisms that are robust to certain forms of bounded rationality while controlling for equilibrium multiplicity. In quasi-linear environments with informational and allocative externalities, we show that any Bayesian mechanism that implements a social choice function can be converted into a supermodular mechanism that also implements the original decision rule. The proposed supermodular mechanism can be chosen in a way that minimizes the size of the equilibrium set, and we provide two sets of sufficient conditions to this effect: for general decision rules and for decision rules that satisfy a certain requirement. This is followed by conditions for supermodular implementation in unique equilibrium. The second chapter looks at the incentives of a revenue-maximizing seller (designer) who discloses information to a number of interacting bidders (agents). In particular, the designer chooses the level of precision with which agents can infer the quality of a common-value object from their privately observed signals. We restrict attention to the second-price sealed-bid auction format. If the seller has perfect commitment power and can choose the precision level before observing the quality of the object, in the presence of any small cost to precision it is ex ante optimal for her to choose completely uninformative signals. For the case when the seller chooses the precision level after observing the quality of the object, we characterize pooling, partial pooling, and separating equilibria. We show that in this setting the cost associated with precision can be viewed as a form of commitment device: if costs are too low, the best pooling equilibrium ceases to exist as the high type seller is too tempted to separate. Thus, the seller ends up with a lower ex ante expected payoff than in the case when cost parameters are above a certain threshold. The third chapter of this dissertation studies the optimal choice of information structure from the perspective of a designer maximizing a certain objective function. Generally speaking, there are two ways of creating incentives for interacting agents to behave in a desired way. One is by providing appropriate payoff incentives, which is the subject of mechanism design. The other is by choosing the information that agents observe, which we refer to as information design. We consider a model of symmetric information where a designer chooses and announces the information structure about a payoff relevant state. The interacting agents observe the signal realizations, update their beliefs, and take actions which affect the welfare of both the designer and the agents. We characterize the general finite approach to deriving the optimal information structure --- the one that maximizes the designer's ex ante expected utility subject to agents playing a Bayes Nash equilibrium. We then apply the general approach to a symmetric two state, two agent, and two actions environment in a parameterized underlying game and fully characterize the optimal information structure. It is never strictly optimal for the designer to use conditionally independent private signals. The optimal information structure may be a public signal, or may consist of correlated private signals. Finally, we examine how changes in the underlying game affect the designer's maximum payoff. This exercise provides a joint mechanism/information design perspective.
Incentives and competition for information in Congress
(2012-12) Lewallen, Jonathan Daniel; Theriault, Sean M., 1972-; Jones, Bryan D
Policymakers need a wide array of information for multiple purposes. Acquiring information often is costly, so it is assumed that incentives must be provided to overcome these costs and stimulate information gathering. It is further assumed that increasing the number of actors engaged in acquiring information creates free-rider problems. In 2007 the U.S. House of Representatives created a select committee to address energy and environment issues, but did not give that committee legislative authority. The new committee could not compete with others for the ability to write or amend legislation, so its presence should not have changed the standing committee’s information gathering patterns. In fact, committees did alter their hearing patterns in response to the select committee’s work. Information has jurisdictional and reputational value to policymakers in addition to the incentives it can help them obtain, and policymakers will act to acquire information even without explicit incentives to do so.
Information Technology and Brazil's Economic Revival
(2004-02-14) Khursh, Anjum; Karruz, Paula
Information visualization : working with screens of experience
(2012-05) Aler, Carolyn Jean; Lee, Gloria; Lee, Gloria; Shields, David
Information visualizations have become increasingly popular in the last decade. Viewing data visually has proved helpful in communicating or revealing information in many fields ranging from science to journalism to art. Information is incredibly malleable; given the same data, a group of designers may make wildly different information visualizations. The malleability of an information visualization leads me to believe that there are certain and finite truths in data, but when a designer converts data into information, they pass these truths through a screen of their experience. Additionally, a reader brings their own screen of experience, through which they read an information visualization. These screens of experience create infinite ways to communicate and interpret information. This report reviews some concepts and methods that I have found helpful when creating information visualizations.
Literacy, Censorship and Intellectual Freedom: The Independent Library Movement in Contemporary Cuba
(2007-02-03) Vidaillet, Kelsey
Madam or Mr. President? Chile's Michelle Bachelet, Press Coverage and Public Perceptions
(2007-02-03) Valenzuela, Sebastian
O estado da arte dos estudos do jornalismo digital no Brasil
(2007-02-03) Schwingel, Carla
The problematic application of economic discourse to the creation and transfer of information
(2012-05) Johnson, Christopher Garland; Ensmenger, Nathan, 1972-; Howison, James
In Citizen's United v. FEC (2010) and Sorrell v. IMS Health, Inc. (2011), the Supreme Court of the United States passed down a pair of opinions which clearly show the weaknesses of economic discourse as applied to the creation and transfer of information, itself defined as speech the court's opinion in Bartnicki v. Vopper (2001). Foucoult described economic discourse in his Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) as being particularly exclusive, both in terms of other discourse as well as to the potential participants in the discourse. This paper argues for the need to incorporate alternate modes of discourse that would provide a more complete understanding of the practical, social, ethical and legal parameters surrounding information's creation and transfer.
The Obama Administration and digital content : a case study of Healthcare.gov
(2016-05) Gant, Alia; Wickett, Karen M.; Towery, Stephanie
The United States government has made enormous strides to adapt and evolve with the digital era in the 21st century. Initially the Clinton Administration in the 1990s showed a sense of acceptance and willingness to work with the changing times in regards to technology. The subsequent administrations also continued to support platforms that utilized digital programs such as the Internet. This Master’s Report will examine government websites under the Obama Administration, in particular Healthcare.gov, however through the perspective of information professionals. The report will describe and analyze the information pertinent to users to accessing health needs for insurance plans. The report will discuss and apply frameworks from information studies, including metadata, digital libraries and community informatics Lastly, the report will provide critiques, suggestions, and ways to research this topic in the future.
Use of sources by science news writers: an exploration of information credibility
(2016-08) Finn, Jeanine Ellen; Howison, James; Barker, Lecia; Bias, Randolph; Gil de Zúñiga, Homero; Westbrook, Lynn
This dissertation describes an ethnographic study of how science journalists understand and use credible research information when they select sources to inform their news writing. This research emerges from a socially constructed understanding of credibility that includes social epistemology and community of practice theories, as well as more foundational theories of trust. As economic and technological forces are radically reshaping scientific research and journalism practices, current scholarly discourse suggests that science communication is undergoing a period of significant change. Simultaneously, research data is becoming increasingly important to issues of broad public concern, such as in research related to global climate change. Scholars in many fields are noting that Internet communication can subvert a number of paradigms related to “expert information” and formal structures for knowledge sharing. Science journalism is selected as a particular site for this study, as it resides at a nexus of two communities of practice with distinct epistemological structures: scientific research and journalism. Data was gathered from 18 interviews with established science journalists and an analysis of the participants’ published works to explore patterns of sourcing and the integration of research data into published works. Findings center around the themes of identity and process in a collaborative knowledge-sharing space. Freelance science writers, frequently untethered from formal organizational affiliations, were found to construct their voice as a credible science author over time and through a series of interactions. For example, early-career science writers may be more likely to rely on their formal scientific education to support their writing. Later-stage writers are more confident in their ability to approach and explore new topics, supported by a network of expert sources and colleagues. These findings are organized to inform the development of interdisciplinary collaborative research information spaces and contribute to ongoing conversations related to public understanding of science.
Vexations, volumes, and volunteers: institutionalization and the veneration of information at a small international NGO
(2009-08) Letalien, Bethany Lynn; Doty, Philip
The author performed action research over the two years between March 2006 and February 2008 with the Instituto Dois Irmãos (i2i), a non-governmental organization (NGO) in a low-income area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil consisting of a group of approximately 3-5 locals and 2-30 foreigners at any one time that in March 2006 offered few services and lacked the expertise or confidence to offer more. Together, participants and the author improved and increased the NGO’s services and implemented a reading room – a place of information and literacy – for Portuguese-speaking students of English. This dissertation describes participants’, the organization’s, and the author’s journey to transform the i2i into a better functioning organization and to create the NGO’s reading room. The analysis focuses on the practical learning that took place within the i2i. Throughout the research process, the author both made use of and questioned the concepts of participation and development. In the text, she also draws on the experiences of the i2i’s leaders and volunteers to question the prevailing notion of information as a social good. A critical understanding of these three notions is essential for the work of librarians, development professionals, and policymakers alike.