Learning about movies: the impact of movie release types on the nationwide box office

Major Hollywood studios typically release new movies in North America in one of the two ways, wide release or platform release. In this paper, we investigate how release form affects the demand of a new movie after it is nationally released. In particular, we focus on movies for which the platform release is pre-planned to make the problem tractable. We estimate our model using a sample of Hollywood movies that eventually received nationwide release from 1999 to 2003. Our results show that platform release shifts consumers’ perception of unobservable movie appeal through its first stage performance, which turns out to be a stronger effect than that of advertising. Meanwhile, we find that the demand for platform movies decays faster than for wide release ones after their national release. Using counterfactual analysis, we find that more than half of the platform movies which later went to national release would have earned higher profits if they had been given a wide release.     

Knowledge integration in the shadow of tacit spillovers: Empirical evidence from U.S. R&D labs

Integrating knowledge across a firm's value chain (e.g. between R&D, marketing and manufacturing functions), which we denote “Knowledge Integration” (KI), has been consistently found to be a strong predictor of product innovation performance in the management literature. Such cross-functional integration does not occur by chance, but by design, as a result of managerial practices and organizational arrangements. The significant heterogeneity characterizing the diffusion of cross-functional integration across firms is suggestive of the well-known tension between internal and external diffusion of knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the hidden cost of KI is to expose firms to a higher risk of knowledge leakages and provide the first systematic empirical evidence of this apparent tension between internal and external knowledge flows. Based on data from the CMU Survey (one of the rare datasets offering observables on both sides of the tension for a representative set of R&D active firms in the US), we investigate the impact of knowledge spillovers to competitors on internal cross-functional knowledge integration involving the R&D function among manufacturing firms. We find that the intensity of (tacit) R&D knowledge spillovers at the industry-level has a negative and significant impact on the likelihood that firms adopt or achieve KI. Our results therefore suggest that firms may trade their optimal innovative performance against superior appropriability of their rents.     

Outdoor life,nature experience,and sports in Norway: tensions and dilemmas in the preservation and use of urban forest

Abstract

How should contemporary societies promote physical activity in nature and preservation of the natural environment? Outdoor life occupies a central and contested position on this question in the Nordic countries. In Norway, a 1957 Act of Parliament took a major step by guaranteeing free public access to both public and private uncultivated land. This article explores the media debate that raged in 2008–2009, when the national government proposed new legislation intended to promote outdoor life, sport, nature experience and urban forest preservation around Oslo, Norway’s capital. Applying narrative and discourse methodologies, this case study reveals how the media debate evolved from an initial cacophony of voices into a schism between advocates of nature preservation and advocates of sport. The controversy explored here is increasingly relevant throughout all of Europe: how to encourage urban active living, sustainable recreation and democratic citizenship that embody distinct social practices, identities, emotional bonds and symbolic meaning.     

Public health practitioners' information access and use patterns in the Maryland (USA) public health departments of Anne Arundel and Wicomico Counties

PURPOSE: To increase understanding of the information needs and use of public health practitioners. SETTING: From June 2005 to May 2006, the library offered a course in public health information resources to eighteen practitioners in two counties, access to the library's licensed electronic resources through a tailored web portal, and consulting services. EVALUATION METHOD: We combined usage statistics from the web portal, self-report and observational data collected during training and shadowing of participants. CONCLUSIONS: The data from this project indicate that usage of licensed information resources and services is infrequent but broad ranging. A few users register at the high end of the usage range, but one use of one high quality article can have a significant impact on policy decisions. Time and competing responsibilities often constrain the retrieval and use of resources for evidence-based decision making and an informationist or power-user model may be more appropriate than training all practitioners to integrate searching into their workflow. This study indicates (i) that evidence-based public health practice requires seamless and broadly based information access; and (ii) that the currently existing patchwork does not support the level of use or take into account the time constraints of information needs for public health practice.     

Spatial localization in infancy: position constancy in a square and circular room with and without a landmark

The ability of 8-month-old infants to localize an event from a new direction of facing was tested in a square and a circular room with and without a landmark. Subjects were trained to anticipate the site from 2 directions of facing and then tested in a new direction of facing. The number of trials to a criterion of learning, the number of subjects looking first at the event site after reorientation, and the time spent in doing so were recorded. Taken together, the results show that at 8 months ability to identify the site of an event after reorientation is based on the spatial relationship between the event and environmental features. The latter include features associated with room shape as well as a landmark at the site of the event.     

论教学活动中教师心理状态的自我调节特点

本文探讨的是高情绪化和低情绪化教师心理自我调节的特点问题.通过抽样调查和分析获得了具有不同程度情绪化的教师心理自我调节风格特征的准确差异.     

The Perceived Impact of Eight Systemic Factors on Scientific Capital Accumulation

Minerva - In the global academic capitalist race, academics, institutions and countries’ symbolic power results from the accumulation of scientific capital. This paper relies on the...     

The future of applied child development research and public policy

After reviewing a brief general history of applied child development research, this paper suggests that in the future we should study questions that society needs to answer as well as questions that might contribute to theory, and that our research methods need to be adjusted to match these types of questions. Further, academics are urged to broaden their audience from a nearly exclusive focus on other academics to a focus on the three ps--practitioners, policymakers, and the public--and to recognize that scholarship is packaged differently for these audiences. Finally, it is suggested that applied child development research should market as well as sell, partner with nonacademic groups, disseminate results more vigorously, and focus efforts on local as well as national issues.