Good news is bad news: Leverage cycles and sudden stops

hiv/aids good news and bad news

The Good News and the Bad News

There is much that is attractive about Michael Burawoy’s examination of the critical turn to a public sociology. I find plausible his account of the academic nature of 1970s radical sociology especially that mobilized notions such as Althusser’s “theoretical practice.” I also was cheered to read the account of the positive developments currently in train in the USA and especially with how socia...

Consistent Good News and Inconsistent Bad News

Good news is more persuasive when it is more consistent, and bad news is less damaging when it is less consistent. We show when Bayesian updating supports this intuition so that a biased sender prefers more or less variance in the news depending on whether the mean of the news exceeds expectations, and we apply the result to selective news distortion by a manager of multiple projects. If news f...

Synchronous Grammars and Transducers: Good News and Bad News

Much of the activity in linguistics, especially computational linguistics, can be thought of as characterizing not languages simpliciter but relations among languages. Formal systems for characterizing language relations have a long history with two primary branches, based respectively on tree transducers and synchronous grammars. Both have seen increasing use in recent work, especially in mach...

Competition in the health system: good news and bad news.

Competition among health plans, hospitals, and physicians has taken place in fifteen health care markets primarily on the basis of price and secondarily on network breadth and style of care. In most markets, competition resulted in lower (or slowly growing) premium prices. Within a type of plan product, competition was leading to similar prices and networks and was reducing product differentiat...