How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable?

Using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 BLS occupational codes, this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy/hard it is to offshore the work— either physically or electronically. Using that ranking, I estimate that somewhere between 22% and 29% of all U.S. jobs are or will be potentially offshorable within a decade or two. (I make no estimate of how many jobs will actually be offshored.) Since my rankings are subjective, two alternatives are presented—one is entirely objective, the other is an independent subjective ranking. It is found that there is little or no correlation between an occupation’s “offshorability” and the skill level of its workers (as measured either by educational attainment or wages). However, it appears that, controlling for education, the most highly offshorable occupations were already paying significantly lower wages in 2004.

Optimization of MPI Collective Communication Operations

High-performance computing (HPC) systems keep growing in scale and heterogeneity to satisfy the increasing need for computation, and this brings new challenges to the design of Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries, especially with regard to collective operations.The implementations of state-of-the-art MPI collective operations heavily rely on synchronizations, and these implementations magnify noise across the participating processes, resulting in significant performance slowdowns. Therefore, I create a new collective communication framework in Open MPI, using an event-driven design to relax synchronizations and maintain the minimal data dependencies of MPI collective operations.The recent growth in hardware heterogeneity results in increasingly complex hardware hierarchies and larger communication performance differences.Hence, in this dissertation, I present two approaches to perform hierarchical collective operations, and both can exploit the different bandwidths of hardware in heterogeneous systems and maximizing concurrent communications.Finally, to provide a fast and accurate autotuning mechanism for my framework, I design a new autotuning approach by combining two existing methods. This new approach significantly reduces the search space to save the autotuning time and is still able to provide accurate estimations.I evaluate my work with microbenchmarks and applications at different scales. Microbenchmark results show my work speedups MPI_Bcast and MPI_Allreduce up to 7.34X and 4.86X, respectively, on 4096 processes.In terms of applications, I achieve a 24.3% improvement for Hovorod and a 143% improvement for ASP on 1536 processes as compared to the current Open MPI

Estimating the Green Potential of Occupations: A New Approach Applied to the U.S. Labor Market

This paper presents a new approach to estimate the green potential of occupations. Using data from O*NET on the skills that workers possess and the tasks they carry out, we train several machine learning algorithms to predict the green potential of U.S. occupations classified according to the 6-digit Standard Occupational Classication. Our methodology allows existing discrete classications of occupations to be extended to a continuum of classes. This improves the analysis of heterogeneous occupations in terms of their green potential. Our approach makes two contributions to the literature. First, as it more accurately ranks occupations in terms of their green potential, it leads to a better understanding of the extent to which a given workforce is prepared to cope with a transition to a green economy. Second, it allows for a more accurate analysis of differences between workforces across regions. We use U.S. occupational employment data to highlight both aspects

Multimarket Contact and Strategic Entry Decisions

This work examines the relationship between multimarket contact (MMC) and entry in the US broadband service industry. I examine unique data on entry into ADSL broadband over the years 2005-2008 in the US. Results indicate that MMC increases the probability of entry into local broadband markets by incumbent local telephone companies, which is consistent with the firms’ expectations that competition will be softer in such markets. Thus, the evidence is consistent with the notion that MMC facilitates mutual forbearance. A deeper investigation uncovers evidence consistent with firms using MMC to help build “spheres of influence” to limit competition. Evidence for using MMC to “transfer power” (shifting slackness in the incentive constraint to other markets) is weaker and contradictory. This result indicates that heterogeneity among firms within markets may be a more important driver of competition (or its lack) than heterogeneity among markets

Attendance of ice hockey matches in the Czech Extraliga

This paper uses data about 3,640 matches played in the seasons 2000/01-2009/10 to explain individual match attendance of the top Czech ice hockey competition – the Extraliga. Some interesting results are that fans decide whether to attend based on the detailed information about the home team, but use just the easily observable information about the away team; that a match having no impact on the final season outcome is much less attended; that televising a match decreases attendances of all matches played on the same day, but there is no negative next-day effect; that both very good and very bad weather decreases attendance; and that if two home matches are played in a short time period, their attendance is lower with likely higher impact on the second match. Substitution of ice hockey with soccer is investigated on several different levels – while ice hockey and soccer are definitely long-term substitutes, there are mixed results for same-day substitution. Modernization of ice hockey arenas is identified as the key factor behind the almost 20% attendance growth in the analyzed period. This paper also presents a new realistic method of modeling seasonal uncertainty based on Monte Carlo simulation that does not rely on ex post information.attendance demand; ice hockey; Czech Republic; seasonal uncertainty; Monte Carlo

Testing Enforcement Strategies in the Field: Legal Threat, Moral Appeal and Social Information

We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong alert effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in compliance. Among different mailing conditions a legal threat that stresses a high detection risk has a significant and highly robust deterrent effect. Neither appealing to morals nor imparting information about others’ behavior enhances compliance. However, the information condition has a positive effect in municipalities where evasion is believed to be common. Overall, the economic model of crime performs remarkably well in explaining our data.field experiments, law enforcement, compliance, deterrence

A systems approach to synchronization and naming in a distributed computing environment

This thesis describes the development of a distributed computer architecture that supports the interconnection of loosely-coupled computing resources (sites) by heterogeneous communication networks. The internetwork system, named the intelligent message transport system, provides for reliable delivery of intersite messages even though the interconnecting networks may use a probabilistic ( best-effort ) delivery scheme. Processors are interfaced to each other by a network gateway processor. The gateway processors are autonomous network controllers that provide a simple and consistent site interface to the internetwork system. The gateway processors also provide for high level functions at the Transport Layer of the system rather than burdening the user with networking details at the Application Layer. These high-level functions include the synchronization of concurrent updates to replicated data objects, and the management of the system-wide name space for shared data

Mapping civic courage

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-96).Hero Reports extends the rationale of New York City's "See Something, Say Something" campaign-an alert public can be a good security measure. The current political climate within the United States translates the MTA's tactics into ones of fear. Instead of fostering collective security, these calls for vigilance create rifts between people and communities. An unhealthy impact of the "See Something, Say Something" campaign encourages people to look at each other with heightened and prejudicial suspicion. Although other projects have sought to interrogate the tactics of such citizen-detective campaigns, they do not provide productive alternatives. Because of this, projects seeking to deflect fear, only serve to reify and preserve its power. An alternative technology is needed to effectively destabilize the message of fear inherent in the MTA campaign. Hero Reports counterbalances the vigilance associated with suspicion and Othering with measures of positive and contextual alertness. It is a technology that builds communities that are truly, and collectively, empowering. Hero Reports provides this alternative first by aggregating stories of everyday heroism, and then by thematically, geographically and temporally mapping them. By linking and contextualizing discrete moments of heroism, Hero Reports promotes a public discourse about how we create, enforce and value social norms. Balancing the empirical ways we measure crime, Hero Reports provides the groundwork for determining the empirical parameters for heroism.Alyssa Pamela Wright.S.M