For TREC Crowdsourcing 2011 (Stage 2) we propose a networkbased approach for assigning an indicative measure of worker trustworthiness in crowdsourced labelling tasks. Workers, the gold standard and worker/gold standard agreements are modelled as a network. For the purpose of worker trustworthiness assignment, a variant of the PageRank algorithm, named TurkRank, is used to adaptively combine ev...

Radiation protection in humans: extending the concept of as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA) from dose to biological damage Ionizing radiation has proven to be a double-edged sword since its discovery by Dr Roentgen in 1895. Radiation is a potent mutagen and carcinogen; however, it is also used in the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. Background radiation consists of cosmic radiati...

Monte Carlo (MC) methods are the gold standard for modeling photon and electron transport in a heterogeneous medium; however, their computational cost prohibits their routine use in the clinic. Cloud computing, wherein computing resources are allocated on-demand from a third party, is a new approach for high performance computing and is implemented to perform ultra-fast MC calculation in radiat...

Social insects provide good model systems for testing trade-offs in decision-making because of their marked reproductive skew and the dilemma workers face when to reproduce. Attaining reproductive skew requires energy investment in aggression or fertility signaling, creating a trade-off between reproduction and dominance. This may be density-dependent because the cost of achieving dominance may...

What motivates a company to become politically connected and what impact does political connectedness have on corporate policies? To address this question, we exploit an exogenous Supreme Court decision (Citizens United) that lifted all restrictions on corporate political contributions. We find a significant increase in the cash holdings levels of historically politically connected firms relati...

A common view is that there is little correlation between firm performance and CEO pay. Using a new fifteen-year panel data set of CEOs in the largest, publicly traded U. S. companies, we document a strong relationship between firm performance and CEO compensation. This relationship is generated almost entirely by changes in the value of CEO holdings of stock and stock options. In addition, we ...

An important objective in delivering workers compensation medical benefits is ensuring an appropriate level of care to injured workers. Either excessive or inadequate care may result in poor outcomes. Jurisdictions employ various tools for utilization management such as independent medical exams, utilization review, and treatment guidelines to help ensure the appropriate level of care to achiev...

The paper presents a new, cost effective, volunteer computing based platform. It utilizes volunteers’ web browsers as computational nodes. The computational tasks are delegated to the browsers and executed in the background (independently of any user interface scripts) making use of the HTML5 web workers technology. The capabilities of the platform have been proved by experiments performed in a...

We study the role of underwriter compensation in mitigating conflicts of interest between companies going public and their investment bankers. Making the bank’s compensation more sensitive to the issuer’s valuation should reduce agency conflicts and thus underpricing. Consistent with this prediction, we show that contracting on higher commissions in U.K. IPOs leads to significantly lower underp...