Labor market channels: perceptions of Vietnamese immigrants on accessing jobs in Chicago

My thesis establishes the factors that lead first generation female Vietnamese immigrants towards or away from employment in the nail niche from the role of employers, industries, government policies, and the agency of community development. Immigrants entering the United States labor markets have historically been subjected to culturally interpreted skills valuation and socialized to work in specific service industries. As a result, many first generation Vietnamese immigrants feel that they have little choice beyond underemployment in low wage jobs while struggling to earn a living. Employment history, education credentials, language skills and social networks are among the most well-known factors that lead immigrants towards niche employment. However, niche employment is also a result of socialization in the U.S., discrimination, stigmatized work, devalued skills, and social stigma. The development of the nail niche has created a space in U.S. labor markets and beyond for Vietnamese immigrants to reject secondary labor markets by using cultural advantages such as Vietnamese language instruction and ethnocentric social networks. Industry regulations and employer strategies have made room for the degradation of work, which when combined with racial and ethnic differentiation creates specific job categories for immigrants and minorities. Ethnic niches provide the similar employer strategies for a newly protected class of low wage workers, with different political negotiations of racial hierarchy than secondary labor markets. It is important to understand ethnic niche employment not only for its economic role in the lives of immigrants, but as a complex intersection of skill valuation, social capital versus human capital, politics of exclusion, the creation of advantage where it had not previously existed, and a protected cultural identity through industry authority. As a result of historic, social and economic influences on this population, nail care has become easy employment, often meant to provide income during the process of incorporation into American life. As ethnic niches have become normalized in the U.S., the permanence of employment in ethnic niches reflects a much larger issue within local labor markets

High coherence hybrid superconducting qubit

We measure the coherence of a new superconducting qubit, the {\em low-impedance flux qubit}, finding $T_2^* \sim T_1 \sim 1.5\mu$s. It is a three-junction flux qubit, but the ratio of junction critical currents is chosen to make the qubit's potential have a single well form. The low impedance of its large shunting capacitance protects it from decoherence. This qubit has a moderate anharmonicity, whose sign is reversed compared with all other popular qubit designs. The qubit is capacitively coupled to a high-Q resonator in a $\lambda/2$ configuration, which permits the qubit's state to be read out dispersively

A simple all-microwave entangling gate for fixed-frequency superconducting qubits

We demonstrate an all-microwave two-qubit gate on superconducting qubits which are fixed in frequency at optimal bias points. The gate requires no additional subcircuitry and is tunable via the amplitude of microwave irradiation on one qubit at the transition frequency of the other. We use the gate to generate entangled states with a maximal extracted concurrence of 0.88 and quantum process tomography reveals a gate fidelity of 81%

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Contains reports on four research projects

Efficient measurement of quantum gate error by interleaved randomized benchmarking

We describe a scalable experimental protocol for obtaining estimates of the error rate of individual quantum computational gates. This protocol, in which random Clifford gates are interleaved between a gate of interest, provides a bounded estimate of the average error of the gate under test so long as the average variation of the noise affecting the full set of Clifford gates is small. This technique takes into account both state preparation and measurement errors and is scalable in the number of qubits. We apply this protocol to a superconducting qubit system and find gate errors that compare favorably with the gate errors extracted via quantum process tomography.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, published versio

An Orientation Dependent Size Illusion Is Underpinned by Processing in the Extrastriate Visual Area, LO1

We use the simple, but prominent Helmholtz’s squares illusion in which a vertically striped square appears wider than a horizontally striped square of identical physical dimensions to determine whether functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) BOLD responses in V1 underpin illusions of size. We report that these simple stimuli which differ in only one parameter, orientation, to which V1 neurons are highly selective elicited activity in V1 that followed their physical, not perceived size. To further probe the role of V1 in the illusion and investigate plausible extrastriate visual areas responsible for eliciting the Helmholtz squares illusion, we performed a follow-up transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) experiment in which we compared perceptual judgments about the aspect ratio of perceptually identical Helmholtz squares when no TMS was applied against selective stimulation of V1, LO1, or LO2. In agreement with fMRI results, we report that TMS of area V1 does not compromise the strength of the illusion. Only stimulation of area LO1, and not LO2, compromised significantly the strength of the illusion, consistent with previous research that LO1 plays a role in the processing of orientation information. These results demonstrate the involvement of a specific extrastriate area in an illusory percept of size