Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit " of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action. " Two models of cultural influence are developed

field properties may be accounted for in terms of a strategy for producing a sparse distribution of output activity in response to natural images. Here, in addition to describing this work in a more expansive fashion, we examine the neurobiological implications of sparse coding. Of particular interest

the hallmark of tabu search approaches, founded on a quest for "integrating principles, " by which alternative forms of memory are appropriately combined with effective strategies for exploiting them. In this chapter we address the problem of training multilayer feed-forward neural networks

The authors suggest that the most promising route to effective strategies for the prevention of adolescent alcohol and other drug problems is through a risk-focused approach. This approach requires the identification of risk factors for drug abuse, identification of methods by which risk factors

estimates of effects of class size on test scores. The resulting identification strategy can be viewed as an application of Donald Campbell’s regression-discontinuity design to the class-size question. The estimates show that reducing class size induces a significant and substantial increase in test scores

Abstract This paper presents a Downsian model of political competition in which parties have incomplete but richer information than voters on policy effects. Each party can observe a private signal of the policy effects, while voters cannot. In this setting, voters infer the policy effects from

We exploit differences in early colonial experience to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Our argument is that Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. The choice of colonization strategy was

to the explanations of these differences, namely how well investors, both shareholders and creditors, are protected by law from expropriation by the managers and controlling shareholders of firms. We describe the differences in laws and the effectiveness of their enforcement across countries, summarize

to the minimization strategy. We enumerate and classify many of these variants, and evaluate their effect on the speed with which the correct alignment is reached. In order to improve convergence for nearly-flat meshes with small features, such as inscribed surfaces, we introduce a new variant based on uniform

As the Netflix Prize competition has demonstrated, matrix factorization models are superior to classic nearest-neighbor techniques for producing product recommendations, allowing the incorporation of additional information such as implicit feedback, temporal effects, and confidence levels. Modern