Foreign-Affiliate Activity and U.S. Skill Upgrading

There has been little analysis of the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on U.S. wage inequality, even though the presence of foreign-owned affiliates in the United States has arguably grown more rapidly in significance for the U.S. economy than trade flows. Using data across U.S. manufacturing from 1977 to 1994, this paper tests whether inward flows of FDI contributed to within-industry shifts in U.S. relative labor demand toward more-skilled labor. We generally find that inward FDI has not contributed to U.S. within-industry skill upgrading; in fact, the wave of Japanese greenfield investments in the 1980s was significantly correlated with lower, not higher, relative demand for skilled labor. This finding is consistent with recent models of multinational enterprises in which foreign affiliates focus on activities less skilled-labor intensive than the activities of their parent firms. It also suggests that if inward FDI brought new technologies into the United States, the induced technological change was not biased towards skilled labor.

Observation of Neutrons with a Gadolinium Doped Water Cerenkov Detector

Spontaneous and induced fission in Special Nuclear Material (SNM) such as 235U and 239Pu results in the emission of neutrons and high energy gamma-rays. The multiplicities of and time correlations between these particles are both powerful indicators of the presence of fissile material. Detectors sensitive to these signatures are consequently useful for nuclear material monitoring, search, and characterization. In this article, we demonstrate sensitivity to both high energy gamma-rays and neutrons with a water Cerenkov based detector. Electrons in the detector medium, scattered by gamma-ray interactions, are detected by their Cerenkov light emission. Sensitivity to neutrons is enhanced by the addition of a gadolinium compound to the water in low concentrations. Cerenkov light is similarly produced by an 8 MeV gamma-ray cascade following neutron capture on the gadolinium. The large solid angle coverage and high intrinsic efficiency of this detection approach can provide robust and low cost neutron and gamma-ray detection with a single device.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to Nuclear Instruments and Methods,

Tradition and progress: California fire technology directors beliefs and values

This study explores the basic assumptions, beliefs, and occupational values of California Fire Technology Directors as they influence and socialize the next generation of firefighters entering the fire service. Definitions of industry culture, occupational culture, and organizational culture were applied to the fire service as well as the influence that heritage, traditions, values, meaning, and context play in the socialization process. Research methodology included emic and etic data collection techniques that documented the opinions and observations of the study group. Data from the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) along with descriptive data collected during an ethnographic interview provides a window to the world of firefighting. Findings show that the beliefs and core-values of the Fire Technology Directors are influencing the next generation of emergency responders. Their ideas and beliefs opens the conversation on how to best adapt the industry to accommodat

Selective bond-breaking in formic acid by dissociative electron attachment.

We report the results of a joint experimental and theoretical study of dissociative electron attachment to formic acid (HCOOH) in the 6-9 eV region, where H- fragment ions are a dominant product. Breaking of the C-H and O-H bonds is distinguished experimentally by deuteration of either site. We show that in this region H- ions can be produced by formation of two or possibly three Feshbach resonance (doubly-excited anion) states, one of which leads to either C-H or O-H bond scission, while the other can only produce formyloxyl radicals by O-H bond scission. Comparison of experimental and theoretical angular distributions of the anion fragment allows the elucidation of state specific pathways to dissociation

An Empirical Investigation of Contingent Workforce in Information Systems

INTRODUCTION Since the recession in the 1980s, U.S. corporations have been strategically acquiring, merging, restructuring, and downsizing. Such strategic adjustments are aimed at configuring leanandmean operations in response to the increasingly dynamic, competitive and uncertain business climate (ScottMorton, 1991). A direct consequence of these radical changes to business operations is the revolutionary change in the traditional employer employee working relationship. Pfeffer and Baron (1988) suggest that there is a trend toward taking the workers back out , in which organizations externalize a buffer of temporary workers against the core or permanent workforce. This externalization involves the use of contingent workforce where workers are physically transported out of the organization\u27s boundaries to perform their work; where the duration of employment becomes shorter and more flexible; and where workers are detached administratively with organizations reducing their internal control of workers. Recent literature suggests that externalization of the workforce has been particularly pronounced in information systems (IS). Many internal IS organizations have been undergoing continual downsizing of their traditional permanent workforce since the late 1980\u27s by outsourcing and contracting (Niederman and Trower, 1993; Korzeniowski, 1990). Molloy (1991) highlighted an increasing number of temporary executive IS jobs while Ryan (1991) observed that jobless IS workers are turning to contract work to tide over their midcareer crisis. Clearly, these trends have significant implications for IS human resource management. For example, IS careers, incentive structures, and mutual employerworker obligations will be affected radically by an increasing presence and use of contingent workforce in organizations. However, despite the changing nature of IS employment options and the importance of IS human resource management (Niederman, Brancheau and Wetherbe, 1991), there has been little systematic analysis of the nature, extent and antecedents of externalizing IS human resources in organizations. Our study is designed with two objectives: to provide an empirical analysis of actual trends in IS employment strategies and to derive an explanatory model predicting the choice of a particular IS employment strategy. Thus, the first set of issues examined concerns the forms and trends of alternative employment strategies in IS. We examine the following questions: what are the hiring options opened to both employers and workers in IS ? what is the trend in alternative employment strategies in IS since the 1980s ? We draw upon transaction cost economics to derive an explanatory model predicting the antecedents of IS employment strategies. The choice to use internal or external IS employment strategies can be framed as a classic make or buy decision of transaction cost economics, with respect to human capital inputs. Economists have often focused on costs inherent in various make or buy decisions. Coase (1937) originally theorized about the tradeoffs between transaction costs of external procurement and management costs of internal production. Demsetz (1988) argued that there are three different kinds of costs: production costs, exchange or transaction costs, and management costs inherent in any boundary outcome and that it is a combination of all three that is important in determining the make or buy decision. Williamson (1981) shifted attention away from distinguishing transaction and management costs, as these costs are difficult to measure operationally. Instead, in the context of labor factor inputs, he focused on the presence of particular job characteristics such as firm specificity of skills, high interdependency, difficulty in monitorability, and task complexity, emphasizing the burden of management and transaction costs when jobs are externalized. In effect, these job characteristics offer proxy measures of transaction costs. Thus, the second set of issues examined in this study concerns the kinds of considerations that play a role in boundary determination for IS labor. We examine the following questions: how do transaction costs determine IS labor boundaries ? what kinds of IS skill and job characteristics are associated with alternative employment strategies for IS labor

Managing the Unmanageable: How IS Research Can Contribute to the Scholarship of Cyber Projects

Cyber projects are large-scale efforts to implement computer, information, and communication technologies in scientific communities. These projects seek to build scientific cyberinfrastructure that will promote new scientific collaborations and transform science in novel and unimagined ways. Their scope and complexity, the number and diversity of stakeholders, and their transformational goals make cyber projects extremely challenging to understand and manage. Consequently, scholars from multiple disciplines, including computer science, information science, sociology, and information systems, have begun to study cyber projects and their impacts. As IS scholars, our goal is to contribute to this growing body of inter-disciplinary knowledge by considering three areas of IS research that are particularly germane to this class of project, given their characteristics: development approaches, conflict, and success factors. After describing cyber projects, we explore how IS research findings in these three areas are relevant for cyber projects, and suggest promising avenues of future research. We conclude by discussing the importance and unique challenges of cyber projects and propose that, given our expertise and knowledge of project management, IS researchers are particularly well suited to contribute to the inter-disciplinary study of these projects

A Landslide Climate Indicator from Machine Learning

In order to create a Landslide Hazard Index, we accessed rain, snow, and a dozen other variables from the National Climate Assessment Land Data Assimilation System. These predictors were converted to probabilities of landslide occurrence with XGBoost, a major machine-learning tool. The model was fitted with thousands of historical landslides from the Pacific Northwest Landslide Inventory (PNLI)