Teachers in a New Political Landscape

Teachers’ positionality within the political landscape has evolved rapidly over recent election cycles. In Texas, nationwide teacher advocacy and anti-teacher state legislation motivated teachers to become politically involved. Increased teacher voting greatly impacted the 2018 election results, which led statewide leaders and legislators of the 86th Texas legislative session (2019) to center teachers as a key component of school finance reform. Moving forward, it is important to understand other factors that are interrelated with the positionality of the education profession, such as gender, class, and the ability to run for office. Additionally, in order to maintain their centrality in the legislative decision-making process, teachers must develop action plans collectively.Educatio

Higher wages, lower pay : public vs. private sector compensation in Peru

Do public sector employees earn less than their counterparts in the private sector? This paper addresses this question in the case of Peru, a country where civil service reform is being debated yet the only available empirical studies on wage differentials date back to the late 1980s. Using data from the 2009 national household survey, the authors perform a multiple step analysis. First, they estimate a single equation with a public sector dummy, which is found to be statistically significant and positive when only monetary wages are taken into account. However, when in-kind payments and bonuses are included to measure compensation, the analysis finds a private sector premium. Second, they estimate for public and formal private employees two distinct wage functions, including the inverse Mills ratio. This takes into account the selection bias resulting from workers self-selecting into the public or private sector. Third, these results are used to decompose wage differentials using the standard Oaxaca-Blinder approach. The results show that the compensation differentials are not significant except for the sub-sample of employees that achieved a postgraduate degree.Labor Markets,Public Sector Economics,Inequality,Public Sector Management and Reform,Education and Digital Divide

BMS Modules in Three Dimensions

We build unitary representations of the BMS algebra and its higher-spin extensions in three dimensions, using induced representations as a guide. Our prescription naturally emerges from an ultrarelativistic limit of highest-weight representations of Virasoro and W algebras, which is to be contrasted with non-relativistic limits that typically give non-unitary representations. To support this dichotomy, we also point out that the ultrarelativistic and non-relativistic limits of generic W algebras differ in the structure of their non-linear terms.Comment: 27 pages; contribution to the proceedings of the workshop "Higher Spin Gauge Theories", Institute for Advanced Studies, NTU, Singapore, November 4-6, 201

Industrial Design strategies to enhance the value of Paraguayan artisans’ textiles

Countries around the world promote their identity by sharing their culture, traditions, and people. Artisans play an important way of demonstrating a unique variety of elements that show the identity of a country. They share the country’s culture through its products in the world. Artisans have an insight into the cultural interaction of the folkloric work, inspired by elements of nature to produce different artisanal products oftentimes lack technical knowledge for how to develop their products. This paper proposes an industrial design strategy to help enhance the value of the artisans broaden their offering through new product development, while preserving their traditions, modernizing their designs, and increasing their importance in the economic development of the country

Test-bed of a real time detection system for L/H and H/L transitions implemented with the ITMS platform

A basic requirement of the data acquisition systems used in long pulse fusion experiments is to detect events of interest in the acquired signals in real time. Developing such applications is usually a complex task, so it is necessary to develop a set of hardware and software tools that simplify their implementation. An example of these tools is the Intelligent Test and Measurement System (ITMS), which offers distributed data acquisition, distribution and real time processing capabilities with advanced, but easy to use, software tools that simplify application development and system setup. This paper presents the application of the ITMS platform to solve the problem of detecting L/H and H/L transitions in real time based on the use of efficient pattern recognition algorithms