162,761 research outputs found

    Justice for Janitors: The Challenge of Organizing In Contract Services

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    [Excerpt] In 1988 Omar Vasconez, a commercial office janitor in New York City, earned 11.29anhourplusfullbenefits.InAtlanta,janitorMaryJenkinswasearning11.29-an-hour plus full benefits. In Atlanta, janitor Mary Jenkins was earning 3.40-an-hour with no benefits. While Mary could be fired at the drop of a hat, Omar had job security and would keep his job even if his employer, a janitorial contractor, lost the cleaning account at that building and was replaced by another contractor. Both worked for large, multinational service contractors with tens of thousands of employees in all major U.S. cities. Omar is a member of Local 32B-32J, Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Mary typifies the nonunion office cleaner. This tale of two cities reveals at a glance some basic features of service contracting. In service industries, labor markets are strongly segmented by geography: janitorial services don\u27t compete in international markets, like cars and computers do. At the same time, cutthroat competition among contractors amplifies the already sharp competition among unskilled labor within the local market. Omar\u27s total compensation is over four times that of Mary for one reason only: his union controls the local labor market

    Digital Diaries, Digital Tools: A Comparative Approach to Eighteenth-Century Women’s History

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    The diaries of Martha Ballard and Elizabeth Drinker are two of the best-known American sources in the field of eighteenth-century women’s history. As a rural Maine midwife, Ballard was made famous by historian Laurel Ulrich in her Pulitzer prize-winning A Midwife’s Tale. Drinker, meanwhile, was the wife of a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker and chronicled the dramatic impact of the American Revolution from a female perspective. Both diaries present historians with a staggering amount of material: thousands of entries and hundreds of thousands of words stretched across three decades. Our project uses the tools of the digital age to re-examine these classic sources of eighteenth-century women’s history. We use data mining and analytical tools such as topic modeling in order to compare the two women’s writing: What persistent issues appeared in the two diaries and how did they reflect differences of class and education? How did environment (rural Maine vs. urban Philadelphia) shape their experiences? What was their scope of daily interactions with other people? Answering questions such as these offers insight not only into the lives of Drinker and Ballard, but also into how digital technology can illuminate women’s history in new ways

    Digital Diaries, Digital Tools: A Comparative Approach to Eighteenth-Century Women’s History

    Get PDF
    The diaries of Martha Ballard and Elizabeth Drinker are two of the best-known American sources in the field of eighteenth-century women’s history. As a rural Maine midwife, Ballard was made famous by historian Laurel Ulrich in her Pulitzer prize-winning A Midwife’s Tale. Drinker, meanwhile, was the wife of a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker and chronicled the dramatic impact of the American Revolution from a female perspective. Both diaries present historians with a staggering amount of material: thousands of entries and hundreds of thousands of words stretched across three decades. Our project uses the tools of the digital age to re-examine these classic sources of eighteenth-century women’s history. We use data mining and analytical tools such as topic modeling in order to compare the two women’s writing: What persistent issues appeared in the two diaries and how did they reflect differences of class and education? How did environment (rural Maine vs. urban Philadelphia) shape their experiences? What was their scope of daily interactions with other people? Answering questions such as these offers insight not only into the lives of Drinker and Ballard, but also into how digital technology can illuminate women’s history in new ways

    Epidemics and pandemics : Covid-19 and the ‘‘drop of honey effect’’

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    Purpose: The aim of this paper is the use of the “drop of honey effect” to explain the spread of Covid-19. Approach/Methodology/Design: After Covid-19 appearance in Wuhan, in the Chinese province of Hubei, by December, 2019, it spread all over the world. The World Health Organization declared it as pandemic in March 11, 2020. The infection is highly contagious and made thousands of deaths around the world. Timely decisions are key for the control of the dissemination. The “drop of honey effect” results as an important framework to explain the Covid-19 spread. Findings: An opportune decision in a very initial moment could have made all the difference in the virus spread. Practical Implications: The study will contribute positively for the understanding of the importance of well-timed decisions for governments, world organizations, academia, companies and people, each one on a different dimension’s level. Originality/Value: This study presents the “drop of honey effect” as an original and very suitable framework to explain the way how the virus spread all over the world after the virus in Wuhan began to infect people.peer-reviewe

    A Tale of Two Cities

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    Published in March 2007 by the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board, A Tale of Two Cities is a report portraying Philadelphia's human capital challenge as latent economic opportunity. The research highlights the economic potential that investing in the education of Philadelphia's people can yield, both for the individual and the community as a whole. The publication is intentionally designed to be readable and accessible to all Philadelphia citizens -- thought leaders, community members, public officials, and business owners. In everyday language, it identifies the connection between the undereducation of the city's workforce and Philadelphia's economic problems, high levels of unemployment and poverty, social dislocation, tax challenges, and safety concerns; concerns that all Philadelphians understand and have a stake in addressing

    Russian Lexicographic Landscape: a Tale of 12 Dictionaries

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    The paper reports on quantitative analysis of 12 Russian dictionaries at three levels: 1) headwords: The size and overlap of word lists, coverage of large corpora, and presence of neologisms; 2) synonyms: Overlap of synsets in different dictionaries; 3) definitions: Distribution of definition lengths and numbers of senses, as well as textual similarity of same-headword definitions in different dictionaries. The total amount of data in the study is 805,900 dictionary entries, 892,900 definitions, and 84,500 synsets. The study reveals multiple connections and mutual influences between dictionaries, uncovers differences in modern electronic vs. traditional printed resources, as well as suggests directions for development of new and improvement of existing lexical semantic resources

    A Tale of Two Elephants: Overcoming the Postelection Crisis in Kenya

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    The article discusses the postelection crisis in Kenya which has caused suffering to innocent civilians in the area. It states that the chaos was caused by the negligence of both the opposing parties of incumbent candidate Mwai Kibaki and his rival Raila Odinga. The author claimed that Kenyan people would continue to suffer and the nation will continue to be troubled because of the selfishness of both leaders over power

    Download It While It\u27s Hot: Open Access and Legal Scholarship

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    This article analyzes the shift of legal scholarship from the old world of law reviews to today\u27s world of peer reviews to tomorrow\u27s world of open access legal blogs. This shift is occurring in three dimensions. First, legal scholarship is moving from the long form (treatises and law review articles) to the short form (very short articles, blog posts, and online collaborations). Second, a regime of exclusive rights is giving way to a regime of open access. Third, intermediaries (law school editorial boards, peer-reviewed journals) are being supplemented by disintermediated forms (papers on the Internet, blogs). Blogs and internet conversations between academics are expanding interdisciplinary legal scholarship and increasing the avenues of communication among legal scholars, practitioners and a wide array of interested laypersons worldwide

    Polynomial-Time Key Recovery Attack on the Faure-Loidreau Scheme based on Gabidulin Codes

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    Encryption schemes based on the rank metric lead to small public key sizes of order of few thousands bytes which represents a very attractive feature compared to Hamming metric-based encryption schemes where public key sizes are of order of hundreds of thousands bytes even with additional structures like the cyclicity. The main tool for building public key encryption schemes in rank metric is the McEliece encryption setting used with the family of Gabidulin codes. Since the original scheme proposed in 1991 by Gabidulin, Paramonov and Tretjakov, many systems have been proposed based on different masking techniques for Gabidulin codes. Nevertheless, over the years all these systems were attacked essentially by the use of an attack proposed by Overbeck. In 2005 Faure and Loidreau designed a rank-metric encryption scheme which was not in the McEliece setting. The scheme is very efficient, with small public keys of size a few kiloBytes and with security closely related to the linearized polynomial reconstruction problem which corresponds to the decoding problem of Gabidulin codes. The structure of the scheme differs considerably from the classical McEliece setting and until our work, the scheme had never been attacked. We show in this article that this scheme like other schemes based on Gabidulin codes, is also vulnerable to a polynomial-time attack that recovers the private key by applying Overbeck's attack on an appropriate public code. As an example we break concrete proposed 8080 bits security parameters in a few seconds.Comment: To appear in Designs, Codes and Cryptography Journa
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