Auto-regulating New Media

Using Foucault's (1977, 1978) notion of panoptic method of governmentality and looking at the case of Singapore's Internet policy, this paper attempts to expand on the idea-and ideals-of 'auto-regulation'(Lee, 2000, pp. 4-5; Lee & Birch, 2000). Auto-regulation, as I shall posit in this paper, provides a way for regulatory enforcement and surveillance to become sufficiently transparent and 'normalised' so that 'the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole'(Foucault, 1977, pp.207-208) rather than by a select group of policy and law enforcement officers, or civil society /activist groups

More or less unequal? Evidence on the pay of men and women from the British Birth Cohort Studies

Gender pay differences are not merely a problem for women returning to work and part-time employees, but also for those in full-time, continuous careers. In data from cohort studies, the gender wage gap for full time workers in their early thirties fell between 1978 and 2000. This equalisation reflects improvements in women’s education and experience, rather more than a move towards equal treatment. Indeed, had the typical woman full-timer in 2000 been paid at men’s rates she would have actually received higher pay than the typical man. Women in one cohort faced increasing inequality as they aged from 33 to 42, partly due to differences in qualifications and experience. However, unequal treatment also rose among women employed full-time at both ages

Unpacking Unequal Pay Between Men and Women Across Cohort and Lifecycle

This paper analyses the pay gap between men and women in the two British birth cohort studies using the new data collected in 2000 when their subjects had reached the ages of 30 and 42 respectively. The paper also includes new analysis of improved data on the 1958 cohort at 33 in 1991, and a comparison with our earlier analyses of the 1946 cohort at 32 in 1978 and the 1958 cohort at 33 in 1991. The analysis is of hourly earnings in full-time jobs, where the impact of the Equal Pay Act might be expected to be more complete, given the lack of male comparators in the extensive but low paid part-time employment sector for women. We decompose the wage gap at each age, and the change in the components of the average wage gap over time. We also examine the distribution of estimated gender premia across our samples and relate them to the wage level. For people in their early thirties, the crude wage gap closed between 1978 and 2000, but this was mainly due to improved human capital characteristics of the women in full-time employment at that stage of their lives. Unequal treatment also fell, but not by much. When following the 1958 cohort from age 33 to age 42 in 2000, men’s real wages rose more than women’s. The increased gap was roughly equally due to widening differentials in characteristics and deteriorating rates of remuneration for women entering middle age. Although the 42 year-old employees included women with less exceptional qualifications, who had returned to the labour force with interrupted employment histories, women who had been relatively continuously in employment also experienced the rising gender penalty over time

Significance of log-periodic signatures in cumulative noise

Using methods introduced by Scargle in 1978 we derive a cumulative version of the Lomb periodogram that exhibits frequency independent statistics when applied to cumulative noise. We show how this cumulative Lomb periodogram allows us to estimate the significance of log-periodic signatures in the S&P 500 anti-bubble that started in August 2000.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures; AMS-Latex; introduction rewritten, some points of the exposition clarified. Author-supplied PDF file with high resolution graphics is available at http://btm8x5.mat.uni-bayreuth.de/~bothmer

Blunt traumatic celiac artery avulsion managed with celiac artery ligation and open aorto-celiac bypass.

Traumatic celiac artery injuries are rare and highly lethal with reported mortality rates of 38-62%. The vast majority are caused by penetrating trauma with only 11 reported cases due to blunt trauma (Graham et al., 1978; Asensio et al., 2000, 2002). Only 3 of these cases were complete celiac artery avulsions. Management options described depend upon the type of injury and have included medical therapy with anti-platelet agents or anti-coagulants, endovascular stenting, and open ligation. We report a case of a survivor of complete celiac artery avulsion from blunt trauma managed by open bypass

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Latent Separability

This paper extends the nonparametric methods developed by Samuelson (1948), Houthakker (1950), Afriat (1973), Diewert (1973) and Varian (1982, 1983) to latently separable models. It presents necessary and sufficient empirical conditions under which data on the market behaviour of a price-taking consumer, and a hypothesised allocation across latent groups are nonparametrically consistent with latent separability (Gorman (1968, 1978), Blundell and Robin (2000)). It considers homothetic latent separability and weak separability as special cases.Separability, revelaed preference

Generalized Kneser coloring theorems with combinatorial proofs

The Kneser conjecture (1955) was proved by Lov\'asz (1978) using the Borsuk-Ulam theorem; all subsequent proofs, extensions and generalizations also relied on Algebraic Topology results, namely the Borsuk-Ulam theorem and its extensions. Only in 2000, Matou\v{s}ek provided the first combinatorial proof of the Kneser conjecture. Here we provide a hypergraph coloring theorem, with a combinatorial proof, which has as special cases the Kneser conjecture as well as its extensions and generalization by (hyper)graph coloring theorems of Dol'nikov, Alon-Frankl-Lov\'asz, Sarkaria, and Kriz. We also give a combinatorial proof of Schrijver's theorem.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

How to Restore Animal Spirits and Reduce Unemployment: A Tax Credit for Employment Growth in Fiscal 2010 and 2011

Returning to the 64.3% employment/population ratio of 1999-2000 would necessitate an 11+ percent increase in private sector employment in just two years (or a 13% increase in three years). A challenge for sure, but not impossible. Four times in the last 70 years, private sector employment has grown by more than 11 percent in just 24 months. Three of them were war related: entry into World War 2, demobilization after WW2 and entry into the Korean War. The peace time example was from January 1977 to January 1979 when private employment rose 11.5 percent. This two year period also set a 50 year record for percentage increase in total hours worked in the non-farm economy and for increases in the employment-population ratio. What caused such remarkable growth in 1977 and 1978? Answer: a generous TEMPORARY Federal tax credit for increases in employment above 102 percent of the firm’s 1976 level of employment. The Democratic Congress elected in 1976 arrived in Washington at a time of high unemployment, anemic (3.4% during 1976) employment growth and rising inflation due to the quadrupling of world oil prices in 1973-74. It responded with a temporary New Jobs Tax Credit (NJTC) for 1977 and 1978 that lowered the marginal cost of expanding a firm\u27s workforce by roughly 15 percent on average (more for low wage and high turnover firms). Despite foot dragging by the IRS, one third of the nation’s private employers received NJTC credits that lowered their 1978 taxes by $3.1 billion. By the final quarter of 1978, capacity utilization had spiked, real output had increased 15 percent and unemployment had dropped from 7.8 to 5.9 percent. The expiration of the NJTC at the end of 1978 did not unravel these effects. During the next 12 months, output and employment continued to grow albeit at a slower pace and the employment-population ratio and unemployment rate were stable. The later 1980 and 1982-83 recessions were caused by the 160% increase in oil prices precipitated by the Iranian revolution & the Iran/Iraq war and the Federal Reserve response to inflationary consequences of the oil shock