We study favoritism in public procurement of cleaning service contracts in Sweden 1990-1998. Cleaning services are a low-tech, clearly defined product with easy entry and no ex-ante quality differences. We study a period where the law allowed municipalities high degrees of freedom in choosing the winner. In our data, the lowest bid does not win 61% of the time, and municipalities pay on average...

In constructivist second language (L2) learning environments, particularly in relatively teacher-remote situations such as those involving Learning Management Systems (LMS), task performance freedom can be an obstacle to the achievement of specific educational objectives. This paper presents an example of task narrowing achieved by Cmap interface related task design. The relations represented b...

In the case of ubiquitous computation... people are still trying to find the loose verbal grab-bag just to put the concepts into. So I would argue that this work is basically a literary endeavor. When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don't want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial,...

It is crucial to promote interdisciplinary research and recommend collaborators from different research fields via academic database analysis. This paper addresses a problem to characterize researchers’ interests with a set of diverse research topics found in a large-scale academic database. Specifically, we first use latent Dirichlet allocation to extract topics as distributions over words fro...

This paper proposes a Japanese/English crosslanguage information retrieval (CLIR) system targeting technical documents. Our system rst translates a given query containing technical terms into the target language, and then retrieves documents relevant to the translated query. The translation of technical terms is still problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new te...