Trends in Unemployment and Other Labor Market Difficulties

[Excerpt] The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has for many years published various measures of unemployment and other labor market difficulties. There are six “alternative measures of labor underutilization” published each month in the Employment Situation news release. These measures provide insights into a broad range of problems encountered by workers in today\u27s labor market. The official unemployment rate, also referred to in the list of alternative measures as U-3, is defined as the total number of unemployed persons as a percentage of the labor force, while U-1 and U-2 are more narrowly defined and U-4 through U-6 are broader in scope. The original set of alternative measures was first introduced by the BLS in 1976.5 These measures were later revised following the 1994 redesign of the Current Population Survey (CPS) to account for changes in the definitions of certain labor force measures as well as the collection of new data. Since the redesign of the CPS in 1994, the economy has experienced two recessions—in 2001 and in 2007-2009—during which the entire range of alternative measures (U-1 through U-6) increased. This issue of Beyond the Numbers examines trends in the BLS alternative measures of labor underutilization over the period from 1994 to 2014

BLS Spotlight on Statistics: Profile of the Labor Force by Educational Attainment

Increased education is associated with both higher wages and lower unemployment. This Spotlight on Statistics highlights how that relationship has changed over time and examines additional detail on educational attainment. The charts and analysis that follow illustrate historical and current statistics from the Current Population Survey on the U.S. labor force for people age 25 years and older by educational attainment, defined as the highest diploma or degree received at the time the survey was conducted

Fast Room-Temperature Phase Gate on a Single Nuclear Spin in Diamond

Nuclear spins support long lived quantum coherence due to weak coupling to the environment, but are difficult to rapidly control using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) as a result of the small nuclear magnetic moment. We demonstrate a fast ~ 500 ns nuclear spin phase gate on a 14N nuclear spin qubit intrinsic to a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond. The phase gate is enabled by the hyperfine interaction and off-resonance driving of electron spin transitions. Repeated applications of the phase gate bang-bang decouple the nuclear spin from the environment, locking the spin state for up to ~ 140 microseconds.Comment: Related papers at http://pettagroup.princeton.ed

Highly-tunable formation of nitrogen-vacancy centers via ion implantation

We demonstrate highly-tunable formation of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers using 20 keV 15N+ ion implantation through arrays of high-resolution apertures fabricated with electron beam lithography. By varying the aperture diameters from 80 to 240 nm, as well as the average ion fluences from 5 x 10^10 to 2 x 10^11 ions/cm^2, we can control the number of ions per aperture. We analyze the photoluminescence on multiple sites with different implantation parameters and obtain ion-to-NV conversion yields of 6 to 7%, consistent across all ion fluences. The implanted NV centers have spin dephasing times T2* ~ 3 microseconds, comparable to naturally occurring NV centers in high purity diamond with natural abundance 13C. With this technique, we can deterministically control the population distribution of NV centers in each aperture, allowing for the study of single or coupled NV centers and their integration into photonic structures.Comment: Related papers at http://pettagroup.princeton.ed

Pacific islands which escaped the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic and their subsequent mortality experiences

Very few Pacific islands escaped the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Subsequent influenza epidemics in the established colonial outposts of American Samoa and New Caledonia infected many but killed very few persons whereas the extraordinarily isolated Niue, Rotuma, Jaliut and Yule islands experienced high mortality influenza epidemics (>3% of population) following 1918. These dichotomous outcomes indicate that previous influenza exposure and degree of epidemiological isolation were important mortality risk factors during influenza epidemics on Pacific islands

X-band system performance of the very large array

The Very Large Array (VLA) is being equipped to receive telemetry from Voyager 2 during the Neptune encounter in 1989. Cryogenically cooled amplifiers are being installed on each of the 27 antennas. These amplifiers are currently a mix of field effect transistors (FETs) and high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) and exhibit zenith system temperatures that range from 30 to 52 K. The system temperatures and aperture efficiencies determined during the past year are summarized. The nominal values of the noise diode calibration are compared with derived values made under the assumption of a uniform atmosphere over the array. Gain values are determined from observations of unresolved radio sources whose flux densities are well known. The tests suggest that the completed VLA will have a ratio of gain to system temperature that is approximately 4.4 dB above that of a single 64 m antenna of the Deep Space Network