World's Fair: What Music Meant
At the height of their cultural significance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, world's fairs and similar exhibitions were among the most prominent and popular public events. In addition to showcasing the scientific and technological achievements of the industrial age—the telephone (Philadelphia, 1876), gas-powered automobile (Paris, 1889), X-ray machine (New York, 1901), wireless telegraph (St. Louis, 1904) and Kodachrome photograph (San Francisco, 1915) all debuted at world's fairs—they reflected a growing preoccupation with class and social order.
"Many people used them to define their identity in relation to others," says Amanda Cannata, a doctoral student in musicology. Music, Cannata says, was a ubiquitous feature of the fairs. Originally intending to write her dissertation about a woman whose operatic compositions were performed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, she became intrigued by the broader question of how the events' soundtracks contributed to narratives of nationality, race and gender.
She examined printed scores, archival documents and news stories from international expositions in Santiago, Chile, in 1875; Philadelphia in 1876; Buenos Aires in 1910; and San Francisco in 1915. "The music itself is usually kind of generic—Sousa marches and so on," Cannata notes. "What's important is how it was presented and received."
At the Panama-Pacific Exposition, for example, tuxedo-clad musicians playing European music on modified indigenous instruments in the national pavilion sponsored by the Guatemalan government met with approval from San Francisco's upper crust, Cannata found. Meanwhile, similarly trained Mexican musicians playing in a "native village" sponsored by U.S. businessmen amid the fair's amusement zone were viewed more as a sideshow attraction. Fairgoers "likely heard the music as exotic—not as the cosmopolitan music it was" because of the context in which it was performed, she says.
Making Dodd-Frank Workable
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2010, includes a requirement that public companies disclose the ratio of their median employee compensation to that of their executive officers. The goal was to promote transparency and accountability and repair investor trust in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But many large corporations balked at the resources and expense required to collect compensation data and calculate median employee pay.
"The concept of a median salary sounds simple on the surface," says Michael Ohlrogge. "But when a company has hundreds of thousands of employees, many in different countries being paid in different currencies and so forth, things get complicated pretty quickly."
Ohlrogge, who is concurrently pursuing a PhD in the department of management science and engineering and a JD from Stanford Law School, found himself in a unique position to help shape policy.
Drawing on his quantitative training, Ohlrogge proposed that accurate estimates of median employee pay could be derived by randomly sampling a fraction—as little as one half of 1 percent—of a company's workforce. The method, detailed in a series of comment letters to the Securities and Exchange Commission, "provides accurate information to investors, complies with the requirements of the statute, and minimizes implementation costs for companies," he wrote. He also argued that legal precedent gives the SEC, which is charged with enforcing compliance with Dodd-Frank, latitude in interpreting how the median value is calculated.
Ultimately, the SEC agreed to allow companies to use statistical sampling, citing Ohlrogge's work. "It's unusual in this business for a graduate student to play such an instrumental role in the shaping of a law," says Law School professor and former SEC commissioner Joseph Grundfest. "It took Michael's dual capabilities in statistics and in law to make it happen."
