Benson Snippets: Digitized Copies of Books from Latin American Collection Appear Online

Latin American Studie

From guests to hosts: a first whole picture of immigrant-native wage differentials in Spain

This article analyses the immigrant-native wage differentials in Spain, which only recently has become a host country. The paper exploits the Earnings Structure Survey 2006, which is the first nationally representative sample of both foreigner and Spaniard employees. Using the Machado-Mata econometric procedure, wage differentials between locals and foreigners are decomposed into the gap related to characteristics and that due to different returns to endowments (i.e., discrimination). We found that, in absolute terms, the latter component grows across wage distribution, reflecting the existence of a kind of glass ceiling consistent with the evidence of over-education found by previous research.immigration; wage differentials; Spain; quantile regression

What we leave behind: poetry, music, and Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney’s death in late summer, 2013, came as a shock and is now a residual sadness. I miss his guidance, his humanity, his humor. Heaney’s presence, through the poems, has been a richly-colored thread connecting each stage of my life—or at least of how I made sense of them. I sometimes think most everything I do is still stitched with his color (the color of a woodland in bloom). . .

Travelling in Time to Cape Breton Island in the 1920s: Protest Songs, Murals and Island Identity

Islands are places that foster a unique sense of place-attachment and community identity among their populations. Scholarship focusing on the distinctive values, attitudes and perspectives of 'island people' from around the world reveals the layers of meaning that are attached to island life. Lowenthal writes: 'Islands are fantasized as antitheses of the all-engrossing gargantuan mainstream-small, quiet, untroubled, remote from the busy, crowded, turbulent everyday scene. In reality, most of them are nothing like that. ...' Islands, for many people, are 'imagined places' in our increasingly globalised world; the perceptions of island culture and reality often differ. Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in eastern North America, a locale with a rich history of class struggle surrounding its former coal and steel industries, provides an excellent case study for the ways that local history, collective memory and cultural expression might combine to combat the 'untroubled fantasy' that Lowenthal describes

A Message from the Past President: PNLA Presidency… A year of Discovery!

My hope is that by telling folks what is involved and what can be gained from the experience it will become less of a looming gargantuan task, and more of an adventure to be enjoyed in small segments! Other ways to become involved are to volunteer for the Conference Committee or to run for the office of state/provincial representative to PNLA (chosen by your local association). Whatever choice you make, explore what this great organization has to offer and help us make PNLA stronger! I am happy to answer questions, so feel free to contact me - especially if you want to help with next summer’s con-ference! I look forward to meeting more of you at conferences, and getting to know better those of you who accept this adventurous challenge

A Complete Theory of Everything (will be subjective)

Increasingly encompassing models have been suggested for our world. Theories range from generally accepted to increasingly speculative to apparently bogus. The progression of theories from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe and multiverse theories and beyond was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the sizes of the postulated worlds, with humans being expelled from their center to ever more remote and random locations. Rather than leading to a true theory of everything, this trend faces a turning point after which the predictive power of such theories decreases (actually to zero). Incorporating the location and other capacities of the observer into such theories avoids this problem and allows to distinguish meaningful from predictively meaningless theories. This also leads to a truly complete theory of everything consisting of a (conventional objective) theory of everything plus a (novel subjective) observer process. The observer localization is neither based on the controversial anthropic principle, nor has it anything to do with the quantum-mechanical observation process. The suggested principle is extended to more practical (partial, approximate, probabilistic, parametric) world models (rather than theories of everything). Finally, I provide a justification of Ockham's razor, and criticize the anthropic principle, the doomsday argument, the no free lunch theorem, and the falsifiability dogma.Comment: 26 LaTeX page