When Art isn’t Real

The art world is a multi-billion-dollar industry which captures world headlines on a regular basis, for both good and bad reasons. This book deals with one of the most-discussed areas of controversy: high-profile objects that have experts arguing about their veracity. Some may have been looted, others may be fakes, some may be heavily restored or misattributed. Often, in these cases, analytical science is called on to settle a dispute. The authors of this book have decades of experience in this field, working on a range of objects dating from prehistory to the twentieth century. They present seven of the most famous cases from the Getty Kouros to the Turin Shroud – some of which are still contested, and examine how a few words from a connoisseur or scientist can make a virtually valueless object worth hundreds of millions. And vice versa.

Why postmortems fail

Most high-profile disasters are followed by demands for an investigation into what went wrong. Even before they start, calls for finding the missed warning signs and an explanation for why people did not “connect the dots” will be common. Unfortunately, however, the same combination of political pressures and the failure to adopt good social science methods that contributed to the initial failure usually lead to postmortems that are badly flawed. The high stakes mean that powerful actors will have strong incentives to see that certain conclusions are—and are not—drawn. Most postmortems also are marred by strong psychological biases, especially the assumption that incorrect inferences must have been the product of wrong ways of thinking, premature cognitive closure, the naive use of hindsight, and the neglect of the comparative method. Given this experience, I predict that the forthcoming inquiries into the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol and the abrupt end to the Afghan government will stumble in many ways.

Antiracist Curriculum and Digital Platforms: Evidence from Black Lives Matter

In this paper, we examine the impact of racially charged events on the demand for antiracist classroom resources in U.S. public schools. We use book requests made by teachers on DonorsChoose, the largest crowdfunding platform for public school teachers, as a measure of intent to address race-related topics in the classroom. We use the precise timing of high-profile police brutality and other racially charged events in the United States (2010–2020) to identify their effect on antiracism requests relative to a control group. We find a significant increase in antiracism requests following the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and a null effect for all other events in the decade. We also find an increase in requests for books featuring Latinx, Asian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures, suggesting that a focus on equality for one group can spill over and yield culturally aware dialogues for other groups as well. Event studies suggest that local protests played a role in motivating some of the teachers to post these requests. In just four months following George Floyd’s death, $3.4 million worth of books featuring authors and characters from marginalized communities were successfully funded, reaching more than half a million students. Text analysis of impact notes posted by teachers suggests that hundreds of thousands of young students are being engaged in discussions about positive affirmation and cross-cultural acceptance. This paper was accepted by D.J. Wu, information systems.

A Review on Internet of Things

Today, Internet has become the most important and a revolutionary invention which has touched almost every corner of the world and has affect human life in tremendous ways. IOT, Internet of things is simply an interaction between the physical and digital world. It is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs). The communication taking place in today's world is basically in the form of human-human or human-machine but IOT has the ability for a great future where communication will take place in the form of machine-machine also. IOT has changed the way of living of people into a high-profile way and has impact in almost various sector which has given a positive impact on world. Also, along with various advantages it has some challenges and disadvantages too. This paper mainly focused on all the importance point related to IOT, how it works, its component, architecture, characteristics, applications, advantages-disadvantages and many more. IOT is overall a vast topic to discuss and talk about.

Margaret Clitherow

In the life of Margaret Clitherow (b. 1552/3–d. 1586), international Counter-Reformation piety met English national and provincial politics and led to the creation of a Catholic martyr. She was born Margaret Middleton in predominantly Protestant York and in 1571 married a widowed butcher and father of two, John Clitherow. By the end of 1574 she had given him at least two more children but had also embraced Catholicism, refusing to attend prescribed Protestant services. This recusancy resulted in three prison terms, each of six months or more, in 1577–1578, 1580–1581, and 1583–1584. She was particularly inspired by the heroism of missionary priests from the English seminaries in Continental Europe and made a point of sheltering them at the family home in York’s Shambles. One such was John Mush, who returned from Rome to England in 1583 and became her spiritual director from c. 1584. The 1585 Act against Jesuits and seminary priests made it a capital felony to harbor such clerics: the sentence could be death. On 10 March 1586 the Clitherows’ house was searched, evidence of Catholic worship was found and Margaret arrested. Her trial followed four days later, though it was for her refusal to enter a plea that she was sentenced to death peine forte et dure, being crushed to death. Her stepfather was then serving as York’s lord mayor, so it was a high-profile case in a close-knit community. Every effort was made to prevent the law taking its course, but Margaret would not be dissuaded from the path of martyrdom. The sentence was executed on 25 March, crushed to death under a door loaded with weights. Mush was among those who buried her body; he then wrote a life of the martyr. That Life is integral to all subsequent developments: popular Catholic devotion to the “Pearl of York,” her inclusion among the lives of the martyred priests, the opening of a formal process in 1874, beatification by Pius XI in 1929, and canonization—as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales—by Paul VI in 1970. Apart from the pious and the scholarly, there are few obvious divisions within the literature on Margaret Clitherow: Reference Works and an Overview derive from John Mush’s Life. Other Lives either parallel Mush or follow in his wake, though there are many other sources for wider studies of Recusancy in Yorkshire. For the martyr’s Trial and Death one must rely on Mush and his sources. His failure to locate the place of her burial has had diverse consequences, as conveyed in the final section of the present article, Burial and Legacy.

Political Endorsements by Scientific Organizations Reduce Trust in Scientific Expertise During COVID-19

High-profile political endorsements by scientific organizations and publications have been common in recent years, which raises concerns about political backlash against the endorsing organization in particular and scientific expertise in general. In a pre-registered large-sample online controlled experiment, I randomly assign subjects to receive information about Nature's endorsement of Joe Biden for the 2020 U.S. presidential election in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeing the endorsement message leads to large reductions in self-reported trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust translates into lower demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy and emerging COVID variants when offered. The endorsement also reduces Trump supporters' stated trust in scientists in general, suggesting "reputational externalities" on the scientific community. Treatment effect estimates for Biden supporters are positive but small and often statistically insignificant across outcomes. Finally, I find little evidence that the endorsement is successful at changing subjects' views about Biden and Trump. These results show political endorsement by scientific organizations can undermine public confidence in the endorsing organization and in the scientific community.

Districts Implementation of Active Shooter Drill Policies

High-profile school shootings provoke public outcry and calls for policy responses to gun violence in schools. However, policy makers face pressure from diverse stakeholders with distinct agendas, and in some areas, there is little empirical research to guide policy makers’ decisions. Active shooter drills are one such example of a hotly debated policy response in need of further study. As a preliminary step to filling this research gap, this mixed-methods study investigated how school districts in Florida have implemented active shooter drills following legislation passed after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. We analyzed school safety specialists’ perceptions and reports of drill procedures and their alignment with best practices. The majority of the districts surveyed aligned with Best Practices established by the National Association of School Psychologists and National Association of School Resource Officers. Implications for future research and considerations for the implementation of active shooter drills are discussed.

The Structure of Municipal Voting in Vancouver

We offer a new interpretation of the structure of municipal electoral competition in Vancouver, focusing on the city’s high-profile municipal election in 2018. Using novel “cast vote records” – a dataset containing each of the 176,450 ballots cast in the city’s municipal election – we use a Bayesian multidimensional scaling procedure to estimate the location of every 2018 candidate and voter in Vancouver in a shared two-dimensional political space. We then match observed votes from the cast vote records to survey responses in the Canadian Municipal Election Study (CMES), a large election survey undertaken in Vancouver in 2018, using 96 CMES variables to interpret our two measured dimensions of electoral competition. We find evidence of a single primary dimension of competition, structured by left-right ideology, along with a secondary dimension dividing establishment from upstart parties of the right. Our paper supplies a new interpretation of Vancouver’s electoral landscape, clarifies our understanding of the role of left-right ideology in municipal electoral competition, and demonstrates the promise of cast vote records for research on municipal elections and voting.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Leverage Level on High Profile Industries at Indonesian Stock Exchange of 2015-2019 Period

This study aims at analyzing the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the level of use of debt on financial performance. The variables used in this study included corporate social responsibility, debt, age, size and employees. This study uses a quantitative paradigm with the least square regression panel data processing method. The population in this study is all non-financial sector companies included in the high profile industry category at the Indonesia Stock Exchange (ISE) for the 2015-2019 period. The results prove that CSR has a significant positive effect on financial performance as proxied by Tobin's Q. When a company's CSR is high, it will have a positive impact on its financial performance. Then, leverage has a negative effect on the performance because the higher the debt, the lower the company's performance.

Conceptual confusing similarity and pictorial trade marks

Several high-profile rebrands, including those by Twitter and Starbucks, have involved removing text from logos. This move towards wordless, pictorial trade marks raises a difficult question about how the scope of protection of a registered trade mark should be determined. This article examines the particular issue of how much weight should be given to the idea or concept underlying a pictorial mark when assessing whether a defendant’s junior mark is ‘confusingly similar’. Drawing on legal principles and case examples from Europe, the United Kingdom, Singapore and New Zealand, it is claimed that courts and adjudicators should be careful not to overweight conceptual similarity. It is argued that a lack of care in assessing conceptual similarity risks awarding one trader overbroad protection, which may be tantamount to conferring on one trader a monopoly in an idea. A lack of care may also undermine the logic of a registration system by untethering protection from what is recorded on the Register, and may make trade mark law less predictable and certain. * The author declares that he was junior counsel in a case discussed in this article, Carabao Tawandang Co Ltd v Red Bull GmbH HC Wellington CIV-2005-485-1975, 31 August 2006. The views represented in this article are the author’s own, and do not reflect the views of his employer at the time, or the views of the client represented in that particular case.