Wall Street Journal Research Articles

Offshore Enters Uncharted Waters

Someone once said, “It is the thing we least expect that hits us the hardest.” For the offshore oil and gas industry, which has become somewhat accustomed to being hit hard by unforeseen circumstances during its 70-plus-year history, the events of March are unprecedented. Within the space of 3 weeks, coronavirus became a worldwide pandemic; demand—and with it, prices—for oil plummeted; and Saudi Arabia and Russia decided to flood the world market with oil instead of agreeing on an amount by which to curtail production. For the offshore sector, the latest oil-price rout came just as the market was beginning to look up after some operators had cut costs by more than 50% since 2016, and industry executives and analysts were forecasting annualized revenue growth of 9% from 2019 to 2023. “We’re only thinking about survival now,” said the chief financial officer of one Scandinavian offshore major after the price of Brent crude dropped 23% in a single session, to $35.01/bbl. (At the time of writing, Brent was $32.62.) Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Snyder said his company was exposed because it was banking on an acceleration in deepwater drilling. “This is a very unlikely proposition in the current landscape,” he told the Wall Street Journal on 9 March. The Saudi policy would be especially negative for deepwater development, Snyder explained, because developing these projects requires significant upfront capital expenditure (capex) and, thus, confidence in the commodity price outlook. As this article goes to press, the flooding of the world’s total oil production with an estimated extra 2.5 million B/D looms, leading toward one of the biggest oil supply gluts the world has ever seen. Rystad Energy predicts that the negative impact of COVID-19 on oil demand could amount to between 12 million and 16 million B/D over the next months as more people will have to be quarantined for a longer period, causing an even more dramatic impact on oil demand through the year. In its final March forecast for oil demand, Rystad projected a decrease of 4.9% for 2020, or 4.9 million B/D year-on-year, from a yearly total of 99.9 million B/D in 2019 to 95.0 million B/D in 2020. The consultancy said it expected the month of April to take the biggest hit, with demand for oil falling by nearly 16 million B/D year-on-year, almost a 16% drop (Fig. 1). January Optimism As 2020 opened, the offshore sector was celebrating 2019 as its third-best year on record, with free cash flow reaching nearly $90 billion. Offshore regions had dominated the highest volume of new resource discoveries since 2015. Break-evens for pre-final-investment-decision (FID) deepwater projects had fallen to an average of $50/bbl, and increased use of phasing and subsea tiebacks had cut time to first production. Re-thinking “business as usual” and bringing costs down had led to a resurgence in activity in 2019 and estimates of a moderate rise of 4–7% in 2020 exploration activity over 2019. The optimism was heightened by the expectation that nearly $60 billion of greenfield offshore commitments for 2020 would be for fields with breakeven prices below $40/bbl.

Xenophobia in America in the Age of Coronavirus and Beyond

“China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia” was the headline of an article published in the Wall Street Journal by Walter Russell Mead on February 3, 2020 (1). The title of this article generated a riptide of condemnation from the Chinese government as well as from people of Asian descent. The “sick man of Asia” phrase refers to the fall of the Qing Dynasty in the early 1900s and is a derogatory reference describing the humiliation of a nation besieged by internal strife and external forces. Although most likely generated for sensationalism, this phrase is rooted in xenophobia and reflects the anti-Chinese sentiment whose historical roots have increasingly surfaced with the evolution of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

Physical Scaling of Oil Production Rates and Ultimate Recovery from All Horizontal Wells in the Bakken Shale

A recent study by the Wall Street Journal reveals that the hydrofractured horizontal wells in shales have been producing less than the industrial forecasts with the empirical hyperbolic decline curve analysis (DCA). As an alternative to DCA, we introduce a simple, fast and accurate method of estimating ultimate recovery in oil shales. We adopt a physics-based scaling approach to analyze oil rates and ultimate recovery from 14,888 active horizontal oil wells in the Bakken shale. To predict the Estimated Ultimate Recovery (EUR), we collapse production records from individual horizontal shale oil wells onto two segments of a master curve: (1) We find that cumulative oil production from 4845 wells is still growing linearly with the square root of time; and (2) 6401 wells are already in exponential decline after approximately seven years on production. In addition, 2363 wells have discontinuous production records, because of refracturing or changes in downhole flowing pressure, and are matched with a linear combination of scaling curves superposed in time. The remaining 1279 new wells with less than 12 months on production have too few production records to allow for robust matches. These wells are scaled with the slopes of other comparable wells in the square-root-of-time flow regime. In the end, we predict that total ultimate recovery from all existing horizontal wells in Bakken will be some 4.5 billion barrels of oil. We also find that wells completed in the Middle Bakken formation, in general, produce more oil than those completed in the Upper Three Forks formation. The newly completed longer wells with larger hydrofractures have higher initial production rates, but they decline faster and have EURs similar to the cheaper old wells. There is little correlation among EUR, lateral length, and the number and size of hydrofractures. Therefore, technology may not help much in boosting production of new wells completed in the poor immature areas along the edges of the Williston Basin. Operators and policymakers may use our findings to optimize the possible futures of the Bakken shale and other plays. More importantly, the petroleum industry may adopt our physics-based method as an alternative to the overly optimistic hyperbolic DCA that yields an ‘illusory picture’ of shale oil resources.

The Arctic: Press, Policy and the Arctic Council

The changing situation in the Arctic due to global warming has prompted media coverage of a supposed “scramble for the Arctic,” an “Arctic boom,” or an “Arctic Bonanza.” Some even go further, deploying the rhetoric of a “New Cold War,” predicting an inevitable clash between the United States and Russia over interests in the region. The press coverage in both countries over the past decade reflects this new sensationalism. The academic literature unequivocally confirms that the press exerts substantial influence on governmental policy makers, and vice versa. However, while scholars agree that international organizations (IOs) are essential to shaping policies, the existing literature lacks research on media’s relationship with IOs, which often struggle to obtain the coverage and publicity they deserve. The Arctic Council has provided an effective platform for constructive dialogue and decision making involving the USA and Russia. Accordingly, despite disagreements in other regions of the world, the two global powers have managed to cooperate in the Arctic – notwithstanding recent media coverage painting a different and incomplete picture. This project surveys the media coverage of the Arctic over the past decade in Russia and the USA and its correlation with the Arctic Council’s activities. The analysis draws upon two prominent news organizations in Russia (Kommersant and Izvestiya) and two in the USA (the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal), as well as the Arctic Council’s press releases from June 2006 to June 2017. The paper finds that there is a clear disconnect between media coverage of the region and the Arctic Council’s activities. It recommends that the media pay more attention to the organization, particularly since it is the only prominent platform for international cooperation in the Arctic.

Media corruption perceptions and US foreign direct investment

ABSTRACT Media play an important role in shaping people’s beliefs and ideas. More specifically, media have a great influence on what we think about foreign countries. The media influence the way a country’s citizens view the people and governments of other countries and shape our image of them. All types of articles about foreign countries are covered in the media. Investors looking to invest abroad certainly pay attention to what is reported in the media about corruption in other countries. Since corruption plays a huge role in investment decisions, this paper investigates the role of corruption coverage in Wall Street journal on US foreign direct investment outflows. We find that an abundance of corruption stories about a specific country in The Wall Street Journal can demotivate investors and reduce the amount of US foreign direct investment outflows to that country.

Giving Guidance to Graphs: Evaluating Annotations of Data Visualizations for the News

This study quantifies the effectiveness of information recall with direct and indirect labeling of the annotation layer in a news data visualization. Variations of three data visualizations from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal were presented to participants in a crowdsourced experiment to measure their story comprehension. Our results demonstrate that direct labeling offers no advantage over indirect labeling. More significantly, annotations on visualizations do no better to enhance comprehension than visualizations without them, contradicting data visualization orthodoxy.

Comments on Trump's Trade War: An Indian Perspective

Noor Aini Khalifah, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia: With the backdrop of the decreasing hegemony of the United States and the emerging of two Asian giants, China and India, the article “Trump's Trade War: An Indian Perspective” succinctly captures the current scenario with references to history and the possibilities that the future may hold. From the perspective of leaders and domestic politics, it is always “better” to blame foreigners (“others”) for one's lack of competitiveness.The article highlights Trump's trade war and India's protectionist sentiment via the “Make in India” strategy, which does not bode well for either a liberalized world trading system or a liberalized FDI environment. The asymmetry of capital flows and labor flows between developed and developing countries is another source of contention in Trump's trade war. Both India and China's trade surplus with the United States led Trump to think that there exists “unfair trade practices” in these relationships. The U.S. trade deficit with China is about 20 times that of India in 2018.This article also addresses concern about China's growing geopolitical ambitions whereby both the United States and India aligned their interests in combatting the rise of China. Prior to Trump's tariffs, the strategic partnership between the United States and India was in tandem with Trump's vision of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” region. India's prior concern of “cheap” Chinese imports has gained momentum following Trump's trade war against China. India's allegation of “unfair competition” from “cheap” Chinese imports led India to resort to antidumping provisions under the auspices of WTO with the recent imposition of antidumping duties on imports of Chinese steel products. China in turn was the sole or one of the complainants of over two-thirds of the Indian antidumping cases (839 cases) brought to the WTO during 1995–2016, out of a total of 5,286 cases reported to the WTO.The United States is an important export destination for India with about double the amount of exports (US$ 42.2 billion) compared to source of imports (US$ 22.3). On the other hand, India's imports from China were US$ 62.3 billion and exports were US$ 10.2 billion, making India's trading relation with China more significant than that with the United States. It is difficult, however, to estimate the amount of China's trade with India that is conducted by U.S. affiliates domiciled in China.The chronology of events relating to U.S.–India trade by Prema-chandra Athukorala was quoted from many sources including Prime Minister Modi's article in the Wall Street Journal (2017), U.S. Department of State, U.S. Trade Representative (2018; 2019) as well as WTO reports. Data exhibited in the tables were mainly from USITC databases. The commodity composition of U.S. imports from India include semiprecious stones and jewellery (20.5 percent), chemical products (18.28 percent), cut and polished diamonds (16.48 percent), textiles and textile products (15.05 percent), machinery and mechanical appliances (9.31 percent), and mineral products (6.04 percent) amounting to 86 percent of imports in 2018. Overall, U.S. imports from India are based on India's comparative advantage in the production of final goods portraying minimal involvement in production networks. However, Foxconn Technologies’ and Wistron's plans of opening plants in Chennai amid Trump's trade war with China could help India regain missed opportunities from global production sharing. Hence, Trump's trade war with one Asian giant has a spillover effect on another Asian giant.

Structural Competency as a Simulation Performance Domain.

To the Editor: In the past few months, many in the medical education community have been defending social justice as a central tenet in medical education in response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Stanley Goldfarb, MD, a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania.1 In his piece, Dr. Goldfarb laments the current trend toward incorporating social justice and policy into medical school curricula. He opines that these curricular elements come at the expense of teaching diagnostic and procedural skills. However, we in the simulation community know that the fidelity of any learning experience depends on integrating complex factors to fully represent the whole patient. In examining our current programs of simulation-based medical education, we daresay that social justice and public health are not emphasized enough. This is particularly true when we consider that academic medicine has previously been criticized for failing its social responsibility to promote health equity by teaching social determinants of health as “facts to be known” rather than “conditions to be challenged.”2 Simulation-based clinical scenarios, particularly when paired with facilitated debriefing, provide an ideal transformative learning framework to explore disorienting experiences, thus promoting critical reflection and social discourse.3 Historically, simulation debriefing has focused on cognitive disequilibrium in relation to select performance domains, which are nicely summarized in the PEARLS Healthcare Debriefing Tool (ie, Decision Making, Technical Skills, Communication, Resource Utilization, Leadership, Situational Awareness, and Teamwork).4 However, these domains exclude a deeper exploration of the contexts shaping our simulated medical emergencies and scenarios. In addition to technical and situational competencies, simulation-based medical educators have a unique opportunity to build “structural competency,” which can be understood as the trained ability to discern inequity at individual, organizational, community, and societal levels to meaningfully address disparity and injustice.2,5 Structural competency goes beyond the mere recognition of social determinants of health; it pragmatically demands a language by which learners may recognize health conditions to be rooted in structural inequities that demand action.2 As such, structural competency should be an added performance domain in our debriefing toolkit. This may sound daunting, but in our work with the pediatric emergency medicine team at Columbia University's Department of Emergency Medicine, we piloted integrating a “language of structure” into our weekly, interprofessional, in situ simulations. Adding elements of structural competency to learning objectives and debriefing stems allowed us to incorporate topics such as urban poverty and heat insecurity into a simulated case of a hypothermic infant; vaccine hesitancy and public mistrust into a case of pediatric measles encephalitis; pharmaceutical price gouging and insulin rationing into a case of diabetic ketoacidosis; and structural racism into a case of penetrating trauma. Our simulations highlight that medical emergencies are rooted in a complex tapestry of physical, social, psychological, and environmental forces beyond the trauma bay, which must be explored, understood, and changed to achieve optimal health. Structural competency is a trained skill, and medical simulation with facilitated debriefing provides an ideal learning environment to cultivate it through a “pedagogy of discomfort.”2 As simulation-based medical educators, it is imperative to social justice, to training “doctor-citizens,”6 and to simulation fidelity that we strive to integrate structural competency into our daily work. Selin T. Sagalowsky, MD, MPH Department of Emergency Medicine New York University School of Medicine New York City, NY [email protected]David O. Kessler, MD, MSc Department of Emergency Medicine Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York City, NY

The influence of CEO duality and board size on the market value of spun-off subsidiaries

PurposeCorporate spin-offs have become more popular as a restructuring technique in recent decades. The market performance of these spun-off subsidiaries has been considered critical, as positive market signals are vital to the success of these newly independent firms. Drawing on both the stewardship and resource dependence theories, this study aims to examine how two critical governance characteristics (namely, CEO duality and board size) affect the change in the market valuation of spun-off subsidiaries. This study proposes that both board size and CEO duality of spun-off subsidiaries should positively influence the change in market valuation.Design/methodology/approachThis study used the SDC Platinum database to identify completed corporate US spin-offs between 2000 and 2014. To ensure consistency across spin-off events, this study included only those in which 100 percent of outstanding shares of spun-off subsidiaries were distributed. The study confirmed the SDC Platinum listings using online resources such as The Wall Street Journal and Lexis/Nexis. The study used weighted least square (WLS) regression to test all the proposed models.FindingsThis empirical analysis of 134 US-based spin-offs supported both main hypotheses. Furthermore, the analysis also finds that firm size has significant moderating effects on the link between governance structure and market performance.Originality/valueThese findings contribute to the governance literature on corporate spin-offs by advancing our understanding of the role of CEO and board characteristics in improving these subsidiaries' market valuation, as well as the moderating effect of the firm size.

Developing barcode scan system of a small-scaled reverse vending machine to sorting waste of beverage containers

Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle is a campaign which aims to reduce the production of waste. Industry used plastic bottle and cans to store the beverage. A research was done by University of Georgia, United States and was published by Wall Street Journal stated that Indonesia is the second predicate country which produced and mismanaged plastic waste in the world. This condition shoud be overcome and this research project was intended to develop reverse vending machine (RVM) to sorting waste of beverage containers either plastic bottles or cans as a campaign to reduce the production of waste. This RVM machine uses barcode scanning as the sorting system to determine whether the plastic bottle or can could be recycled or not. In order to check the weight of the beverage container, a load cell sensor is used to check whether the beverage container is empty or not. The machine will receive the container from the conveyor station, check the weight, and finally transfer it to the sorting station. The container will be sorted as cans or plastic bottle by the aid of barcode scanning and compare it to database. Furthermore, the plastic bottle will be sorted as clear or colored plastic bottle. Unrecyclable plastic or can container or any unemptied container will be classified as rejected container and be returned to the user through the outlet passage. The performance testing was done with 12 different types of plastic bottle and can and 10 samples for each type, so there were total 120 items tested and the result showed that the success rate was 94% while the processing time was varying in between 8 to 13 seconds.

Linking words in economic discourse: Implications for macroeconomic forecasts

This paper develops indicators of unstructured press information by exploiting word vector representations. A model is trained using a corpus covering 90 years of Wall Street Journal content. The information content of the indicators is assessed through business cycle forecast exercises. The vector representations can learn meaningful word associations that are exploited to construct indicators of uncertainty. In-sample and out-of-sample forecast exercises show that the indicators contain valuable information regarding future economic activity. The combination of indices associated with different subjective states (e.g., uncertainty, fear, pessimism) results in further gains in information content. The documented performance is unmatched by previous dictionary-based word counting techniques proposed in the literature.

Metaphorical modeling of migration: on the material of the U. S. mass media

This article is dedicated to examination of metaphorical peculiarities of representation of migration in the U. S. press. The object of this research is the metaphorical perception of migrants and migration in mass media language of the United States. The subject is the metaphorical models structuring the concept sphere of “migration” in mass media language of the United States. The goal of this work consists in analysis of the peculiarities of metaphorical modeling of migration in the U. S. political media discourse. The relevance is defined by insufficient coverage of metaphorical perception of the migration processes by modern mass media of the United States. The research is based on the cognitive approach, according to which metaphor is a fundamental phenomenon in perception of the surrounding environment. Study of the linguistic material and description of metaphorical model allowed determining the attitude towards migrants at the current stage of development of the U. S. society. The analysis of conceptual metaphors was conducted via continuous sampling from digital versions of the well-known newspapers “The New York Times”, “USA Today” and “The Wall Street Journal”. The author highlights the three main groups of metaphors: signifying natural phenomena and disasters; military; and goods-commodity.

National print media vs. agricultural trade publications: communicating the 2012 Midwestern US drought

The 2012 Midwestern US drought resulted in major impacts to farmers and the public. Extreme events like drought will continue in the future due to climate change. We studied how the elite national press—New York Times (NYT) and Wall Street Journal (WSJ)—covered the 2012 Midwestern drought, how climate change was addressed, and how NYT and WSJ articles differed from each other and agricultural trade publication (ATP) article coverage before, during, and after the drought. A previous study found that ATP articles emphasized short-term drought recovery efforts. We suggest this emphasis was exacerbated by how drought and climate change were reported in the national media. Few articles discussed climate change in all publication types. Most articles that did cover climate change did not attribute a cause; however, over half of NYT articles mentioned human-caused climate change. WSJ and ATP articles had more content similarities than NYT articles. Overall, climate change discussions in all publication types were related to personal impacts. Climate change reporting in the WSJ and NYT was broad. ATP climate change reporting related to weather conditions in relation to farm resilience. Focusing on impacts and recovery may have attenuated risk perceptions. We contend that communication should recognize human-caused climate change and increased likelihood of weather extremes.

Critical Discourse Analysis of Sino-U.S. News Reports on Trade War: A Corpus-based Comparative Study

Since April 2018, the U.S. government headed by U.S. President Trump has adopted trade protection measures, and the Sino-U.S. trade war broke out. This lasting event has attracted widespread attention from domestic and foreign media, and the attitudes and opinions presented by various reports are different. In order to explore more in-depth information behind news reports, we analyze the Sino-U.S. trade war news based on the collected corpora. By combining corpus analysis and Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and collecting 15 news reports on the websites of China Daily and The Wall Street Journal respectively from January 2019 to January 2020, this study explores the focuses of Sino-U.S. reports and their attitudes towards Sino-U.S. trade issues, and further reveals the national images of the two countries constructed by the media. It is found that the Wall Street Journal reports focus on the tariff policies and the economic impact of the Sino-U.S. trade war on its own country. While China Daily reports focus on response to trade war. For building a national image, The Wall Street Journal uses more positive words to construct the United States as an image of strong and just. China Daily builds China as an image of a big country that actively responded to challenges and actively promoted global free trade and peaceful coexistence. This study provides some empirical evidence for the critical discourse analysis of news discourse, deepens our understanding of the ideology hidden behind the news discourse, and has a certain enlightening role for discourse analysis of different genres.

ВИКОРИСТАННЯ КОНКОРДАНСІВ ТА КОРПУСНИХ ТЕХНОЛОГІЙ ДЛЯ ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ КОНЦЕПТУ ЗДОРОВ’Я/HEALTH

The article discusses the notion of concordance as a kind of dictionary of compatibility, which allows to analyze different contexts, to deduce shades of word meaning on their basis, to model semantic fields of correlated words in different languages. The aim of the article is to reveal the methodology of using the technologies of composing corpora of texts and concordances to build a nominative field of the concept HEALTH in English and Ukrainian media texts. The study was based on media texts on medicine, health and coronavirus in English and Ukrainian media texts (newspapers and magazines: USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Vysokyi zamok, Ukrainska pravda; online edition: www.bbc. com/ukrainian/, www.bbc. com/news, time.com/, www.nytimes.com/, www.who.int; Gazeta.ua, Holos Ameryky, Hromadskyi prostir, Ukrainskyi tyzhden, Yevropeiska pravda, Hromadske.ua, Ukraina moloda and others). It is illustrated how concordance reflects all cases of use of words in this or that text, corpora of texts; the keywords of the researched concept are searched and the frequency of their use is determined. The use of concordance and corpus technologies (works by A. McCarthy and R. Carter, O'Keefe) is usually associated in linguistics with the study of the semantics of language units based on the calculation of word frequency, keywords, cluster analysis, etc., lexical and grammatical profiles. Work of users with the case is carried out by means of the specialized software – case managers who provide various opportunities on reception of the necessary information from the case. Concordance programs are used in a variety of areas: language learning and learning, language data search and analysis, translation and language engineering, corpus linguistics, lexicography, content analysis in accounting, history, marketing, music, politics, geography, journalism, and more. With concordance, you can create indexes and glossaries, calculate the frequency of use of a word, compare different uses of the word, analyze keywords, find phrases and idioms, create a concordance of one author, and so on. The main task of the concordance is to display all cases of use of the word registered in some texts. The possibility of realization of lexical meaning in the text is demonstrated, which helps to determine the role of lexical unit in the formation of textual conceptual structure.

“Where Life Is Precious”: Intersectional Feminism in the Time of COVID-19

Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 729 Judy Rohrer “Where Life Is Precious”: Intersectional Feminism in the Time of COVID-19 Early in this pandemic, which has stretched, compressed, and warped time and space unimaginably, I had to move my yoga practice from the local Y to YouTube. Resistant at first, I have accepted yoga’s power in assisting me to “Be. Here. Now.” I knew this would be even more valuable during the lockdown. What I hadn’t anticipated was the impact of yoga’s focus on breath. I learned that, whether in-person or virtual, all yoga sessions start and end here, reminding us it is the breath that gives us life. In the liminal time-space of COVID-19, breath and life have come into high relief. We are challenged with how to scale macro and micro questions about how we live with ourselves, our communities, our institutions , other living beings, and the environment. What sort of life truly matters? Whose lives matter? In what follows, I use the breath and life to weave some thinking from Black and Indigenous feminist scholar-activists about the pandemic, the collapsing capitalist economy, the uprising for racial justice, and how all of this is coalescing in an historic moment. As anxiety mounted about COVID-19, we all realized that breath could kill us through “community spread.” The yogi mantra “remember to breathe” began to feel both incredibly necessary and terrifying. Science entered stage Left wearing a face mask and tightly gripping a script titled “public health.” It has battled to hold its position, and our attention, through an onslaught of show-stopping entitlement and denial from 730 Judy Rohrer Roger Peet, COVID Dreamscape, August 2020. 10 × 13 inches. Reprinted with permission by Roger Peet. Judy Rohrer 731 multiple characters entering stage Right. And then, hospitals began running out of ventilators because of their capitulation to “just-in-time” business principles meant to maximize profit, not health.1 Doctors were compelled to quickly develop metrics for “rationing care” among COVID-19 patients. My disabled comrades, who were already in the trenches battling medicalized ableism, went ballistic. A better example of neoliberal bankruptcy would be hard to find, and instead of intervening with structural corrections, we seem to be circling back to this doomsday scenario in the fall. Suddenly, simply being able to breathe is a luxury. In a webinar at the end of April, Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminded us that the organized abandonment and organized violence that characterize neoliberal divestment from social welfare are foundational to what Gilmore calls the “anti-state state.”2 Our anti-state state is presently abandoning frontline healthcare and “essential” workers and engaging in direct state violence in the forms of police/ICE brutality, mass incarceration , detention, and deportation—often against the very same people. As a final word, Gilmore offered this simple declaration: “where life is precious, life is precious.” She said she repeats this often as it helps her think about what it takes to make life precious. At first, this declaration didn’t stick with me, but the more I thought about it, the more it sank in. Significantly, Gilmore didn’t say “when life is precious,” she said “where.” As a critical geographer, that makes sense, and it also reminds me of another important statement Gilmore made years ago: “freedom is a place.” So, freedom and a valuing of life happen (and conversely don’t happen) in particular places and environments. That attention to place is incredibly important in this pandemic. Breath and life, after all, happen or are extinguished in particular places. While many of us feel caught in a liminal place-time, we are all very much emplaced—and that emplacement is profoundly (really, mortally) tied to privilege. We are hyperaware of the spaces we are occupying, who is sharing (or not sharing) them with us, how much power we have over them, and what air we are breathing into and out of those spaces. As 1. Yossi Sheffi, “Commentary: Solving the Health-Care Equipment Supply Shortage,” Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles /commentary-solving-the-health-care-equipment-supply-shortage...

Does Audit Client’s Positive Media Attention Matter: An Investigation of Audit Quality and Audit Fees

This paper empirically investigates whether audit quality and audit fees differ for audit clients receiving positive media attention. Specifically, we use the Wall Street Journal's top 250 ranking of best-managed companies to investigate the impact of positive media attention. Employing a matched pair design of U.S. American listed companies, we find that audit clients receiving positive media attention do not differ from their peers in terms of audit quality. However, turning to audit fees, we find that audit clients receiving positive media attention pay higher audit fees than their peers. Our results highlight that not only audit client’s negative media attention but also their positive media attention can influence the auditor-client relationship.

Trust and the Media: Perceptions of Climate Change News Sources Among US College Students

With increasing fake news and polarizing politics, Americans have been exposed to false or misinterpreted scientific information. A disconnect between the scientific community and news outlets has perpetuated public uncertainty about climate change. With the widening of such disconnect, it is crucial to understand how youth, who mainly use digital sources for information, comprehend climate change, as such a demographic will be a vehicle for climate change mitigation. We aim to understand climate change knowledge and attitudes among college students and their trustworthiness of six news outlets as sources of information about climate change. Results from a survey show that students care and are aware of climate change. Moreover, students are hesitant about news sources for climate change information. While students trust more the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, local news sources to the college, they overall neither trust nor distrust CNN, The Washington Post, Fox News, and Breitbart. This hesitation to trust or distrust such contrasting news regarding climate change may be explained by the overabundance of misinformation, the usage of cognitive heuristics, the rise of anti-intellectualism, and the lack of digital literacy, which make processing information more challenging in this postdigital era. We conclude by emphasizing the need to develop different information literacies in higher education. As digital platforms continue to grow, it is important to understand how youth receive and process information about topics like climate change in a complex information ecosystem.

OYO Hotels USA: Coming to America

This case studies the growth of OYO Hotels (OYO) to illustrate the operational processes necessary to succeed in the service sector. The case allows for a discussion of employee- and customer-management systems, tech-driven solutions, and profit drivers. The material unfolds OYO's growth and its solution for making economy hotels discoverable and bookable online. The case raises a series of questions around OYO's business model, its ability to translate across global markets, and growth potential. It has been successfully taught in a second-year MBA class on the management of service operations. Excerpt UVA-OM-1641 Rev. May 1, 2020 OYO Hotels USA: Coming to America Jakayla Michel, a second-year MBA student, stood in the hallway gazing at her smartphone. She flicked her finger across the screen, reading through the job postings on Indeed.com for OYO Hotels USA, the new American arm of the fast-growing Oravel Stays Private Ltd. (OYO) that had been launched in February 2019. OYO had grown in just six years from a single room listing in India to one million rooms spanning the globe—one of the largest hotel chains in the world. The company boasted a tech-driven solution for making economy hotels predictable, discoverable, and bookable online that had attracted leading investors like SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Airbnb, attaining a heady $ 10 billion valuation. OYO's 25-year-old wunderkind founder, Ritesh Agarwal, had produced what the Wall Street Journal was calling an emerging-market unicorn among unicorns. After first becoming the leader of hotel rooms in India, OYO had begun in 2017 to export its formula into Malaysia, Nepal, China, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In fall 2018, OYO entered its first developed market, the United Kingdom. And now it was spending $ 300million to enter the United States. Michel, who had been a junior investment banker for four years after college, was looking for a career shift. She didn't mind taking a short-term step back in pay to join a company with growth potential, but wanted to make sure the opportunity was real. OYO seemed to be hiring for every type of position in the United States: human resources director, field sales director, territory operations leader, and business development manager. She spotted opportunities in Dallas, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; Las Vegas, Nevada; Miami, Florida; and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina—and even near her family's home in Washington, DC. With a few taps, Michel saved the positions that seemed most interesting to her (Exhibit 1), made a note to herself to further research the company later, and found a seat in her operations class. When she got home, she looked through OYO's website, which described OYO's secret sauce as design cool, in spaces whenever you need them, at fantastic prices. The company seemed to be operating a franchise model wherein it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade small, unbranded hotels, hang the OYO shingle, and charge the hotel owner around 20% per transaction. The company's team of engineers created apps to streamline such things as customer procurement, front desk management, room pricing, food and beverage offerings, and even room cleaning. The company said its upgrades increased hotel utilization and profitability. . . .

Refuge

Refuge Houston Cofield (bio) early this spring, at the beginning of quarantine, my wife and I had the privilege of living at my grandmother's lake house, located between Water Valley and Oxford, Mississippi. She owns about seventeen acres of pine woodland. There is another 100+ acres of property adjacent to her home that she does not own but that [End Page 24] is informally shared among her neighbors. We were able to be there just over a month, and I spent most days outside with my dogs, jogging in the woods and swimming in the spring-fed lake. My time there was like pushing a hard reset button on life and career. Click for larger view View full resolution All photographs were made near Brown Lake, outside Oxford, Mississippi, in April 2020. A few weeks into our stay, I began making pictures on the land surrounding my grandmother's home. My work usually involves portraits or some sort of human presence, but making landscape pictures seemed like the most appropriate response to all of the chaos in the world and in my own life. I began to look at nature as a reprieve for myself and notice its quiet resilience. The last year for me has been filled with devastating loss. My father was murdered, my best friend lost his younger brother to an undiagnosed heart disorder, and the coronavirus pandemic soon followed. The pictures in this series come from a moment when I was reflecting on loss and a year of grieving my father. My dad spent much of his childhood in this North Mississippi landscape, and the process of wandering alone through these woods gave me a sense of connection to him that I hadn't expected. As I look back on these pictures five months later, it is clear to me that I made them in an attempt to look at something lasting in response to the impermanence that had been the overwhelming theme of the past year. As I walked through the forest, I noticed the various deer stands strategically positioned on hills, tucked away behind trees, or in dark spaces. Sometimes they took me by surprise, and it felt at times as if I were being watched. I began to think about the inherent danger and threat these stands posed to the wildlife that encounters them. The idea that the woods I used as a refuge could also be an inherently violent space was a striking parallel to my life. I've been told more than once over the last year that grief comes in waves, not chapters or stages. Its timing and effects are virtually impossible to forecast or decipher. As I revisit the pictures from this short month of my life that came and went not long ago, it seems like a different lifetime altogether. I now see the pictures in this series as a testament to my own experience of grief and loss. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 28] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 29] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 30] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 32] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 33] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 34] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 35] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 36] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 37] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 39] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 40] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 41] Houston Cofield Memphis-based photographer houston cofield earned his MFA in photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has contributed to the New York Times, VICE, Wall Street Journal, and Zeit Magazin, among other publications. He is a fourth generation photographer of the American South. Copyright © 2020 Center for the Study of the...