Though political theorists have emphasized the importance of political discussion in non-political spaces, past study of online political discussion has focused on primarily political websites. Using a random sample from Blogger.com, we find that 25% of all political posts are from blogs that post about politics less than 20% of the time, because the vast majority of blogs post about politics s...

Electronically connecting with patients is a challenging frontier at which technical hurdles are probably exceeded by political, legal, and other barriers. The rise of consumerism, however, compels a response focused more on revenue and strategic advantage than on pure cost savings. Among the difficulties faced by providers is choosing among various models of connectivity and component function...

To the Editor;-Loss of transducer holders for invasive pressure monitoring to the postanesthesia care unit or intensive care unit is a frequent occurrence in our institution. We have developed the following solution to this problem. With the transducer holder attached to an intravenous pole, the small black screws securing the transducer holder to its mounting clamp are removed and replaced wit...

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect information. Voting rules that focus on the opposition party sometimes dominate voting rules that focus on the i...

This paper constructs a multiple regression model to evaluate the overdue risk of credit card holders. The results can identify the factors influencing the credit card holders’ overdue risk behavior in order to provide card issuing banks a decision-making reference in the investigation of credit card holders’ related characteristics and the relationship quality between the credit card holders a...

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENTS ARE THE SMALLEST AND MOST BASIC UNIT OF representative democracy (Dahl and Tufte 1973, 13). Politicians serving in these governments—mayors and members of municipal assemblies—perform important functions in the policy process by meeting residents on a regular basis, discussing policy matters with them, and making policy decisions that affect the communities in which they r...

This paper assesses the effect of political institutions on stock market performance in 14 African countries for which stock market data is available for the period 1990-2010. The estimation technique used is a Two-Stage-Least Squares Instrumental Variable methodology. Political regime channels of democracy, polity and autocracy are instrumented with legal-origins, religious-legacies, income-le...