Williams College

About: Williams College is a education organization based out in Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 2257 authors who have published 5015 publications receiving 213160 citations. The organization is also known as: Williams.

Grades, Course Evaluations, and Academic Incentives

Abstract: We develop a model that identifies a range of new and somewhat counterintuitive results about how the incentives created by academic institutions affect student and faculty behavior. The model provides a theoretical basis for grade inflation and the behavioral response of students. Comparative statics are used to analyze the effects of institutional expectations placed on faculty. The results show that placing more emphasis on course evaluations exacerbates the problems of grade inflation and can even decrease a professor's teaching effort. Increased emphasis on research productivity also decreases teaching effort and provides a further incentive to inflate grades. We use the model to analyze how grade targets can control grade inflation and align professorial incentives with institutional objectives. We also discuss the implications of the model for hiring, promotion, and tenure.

Marriage Meets the Joneses: Relative Income, Identity, and Marital Status

Abstract: :This paper investigates the effect of relative income on marriage. Accounting flexibly for absolute income, the ratio between a man's income and a local reference group median is a strong predictor of marital status, but only for low-income men. Relative income affects marriage even among those living with a partner. A 10 percent higher reference group income is associated with a 2 percent reduction in marriage. We propose an identity model to explain the results.

The alchemy screen-space ambient obscurance algorithm

Abstract: Ambient obscurance (AO) produces perceptually important illumination effects such as darkened corners, cracks, and wrinkles; proximity darkening; and contact shadows. We present the AO algorithm from the Alchemy engine used at Vicarious Visions in commercial games. It is based on a new derivation of screen-space obscurance for robustness, and the insight that a falloff function can cancel terms in a visibility integral to favor efficient operations. Alchemy creates contact shadows that conform to surfaces, captures obscurance from geometry of varying scale, and provides four intuitive appearance parameters: world-space radius and bias, and aesthetic intensity and contrast.The algorithm estimates obscurance at a pixel from sample points read from depth and normal buffers. It processes dynamic scenes at HD 720p resolution in about 4.5 ms on Xbox 360 and 3 ms on NVIDIA GeForce580.