Research Brief: Job-Mobility for People with Disabilities: Impact of Employer-Paid Health Insurance

As most employers appear to make decisions to offer EHI from an economic perspective, research has yet to demonstrate how such decisions could potentially contribute to higher turnover rates as indicated by job-mobility of workers, especially among employees with disabilities. This research brief describes the results from the analysis of large national survey data examining the relationship between employer-paid health insurance and the likelihood of job-change for people with and without disabilities

2008 Progress Report on the Economic Well-Being of Working Age People with Disabilities

This progress report on the prevalence rate, employment, poverty, and household income of working-age people with disabilities (ages 21-64) uses data from the 2007 and earlier Current Population Surveys – Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS-ASES, a.k.a. Annual Demographic Survey, Income Supplement, and March CPS). The CPS is the only data set that provides continuously-defined yearly information on the working-age population with disabilities since 198

Research Brief: The Role of Tasks and Skills in Explaining the Disability Pay Gap

A disparity in pay exists between workers with and without disabilities. This gap persists even in analyses that control for a variety of factors and incorporate compensation benefits other than wages and salaries. To better understand the underlying sources of these differences, occupation-level data on employee skill and task requirements are considered. Evaluating the earnings gap with this additional information provides insights regarding the economic returns to certain workplace tasks and skills that may contribute to the earnings gap that we observe for people with disabilities

2009 Progress Report on the Economic Well-Being of Working Age People with Disabilities

This progress report on the prevalence rate, employment, poverty, and household income of working-age people with disabilities (ages 21-64) uses data from the 2008 and earlier Current Population Surveys – Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS-ASES, a.k.a. Annual Demographic Survey, Income Supplement, and March CPS). The CPS is the only data set that provides continuously-defined yearly information on the working-age population with disabilities since 1981

2010 Progress Report on the Economic Well-Being of Working-Age People with Disabilities

This progress report on the prevalence rate, employment, poverty, and household income of working-age people with disabilities (ages 21-64) uses data from the 2010 and earlier Current Population Surveys – Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS-ASES, a.k.a. Annual Demographic Survey, Income Supplement, and March CPS). The CPS is the only data set that provides continuously-defined yearly information on the working-age population with disabilities since 1981

Research Brief: Total Compensation Gaps are Distinct from Wage Gaps

While the disparity in wage and salary income between workers with and without disabilities is well documented in the literature, less is known about the gap in total compensation. Health insurance, mandated benefits, and days of leave for vacation or illness are examples of the additional forms of compensation that comprise roughly 30 percent of total hourly compensation costs by firms for workers

Improving official statistics in emerging markets using machine learning and mobile phone data

Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing technologies in the developing world with global penetration rates reaching 90%. Mobile phone data, also called CDR, are generated everytime phones are used and recorded by carriers at scale. CDR have generated groundbreaking insights in public health, official statistics, and logistics. However, the fact that most phones in developing countries are prepaid means that the data lacks key information about the user, including gender and other demographic variables. This precludes numerous uses of this data in social science and development economic research. It furthermore severely prevents the development of humanitarian applications such as the use of mobile phone data to target aid towards the most vulnerable groups during crisis. We developed a framework to extract more than 1400 features from standard mobile phone data and used them to predict useful individual characteristics and group estimates. We here present a systematic cross-country study of the applicability of machine learning for dataset augmentation at low cost. We validate our framework by showing how it can be used to reliably predict gender and other information for more than half a million people in two countries. We show how standard machine learning algorithms trained on only 10,000 users are sufficient to predict individual’s gender with an accuracy ranging from 74.3 to 88.4% in a developed country and from 74.5 to 79.7% in a developing country using only metadata. This is significantly higher than previous approaches and, once calibrated, gives highly accurate estimates of gender balance in groups. Performance suffers only marginally if we reduce the training size to 5,000, but significantly decreases in a smaller training set. We finally show that our indicators capture a large range of behavioral traits using factor analysis and that the framework can be used to predict other indicators of vulnerability such as age or socio-economic status. Mobile phone data has a great potential for good and our framework allows this data to be augmented with vulnerability and other information at a fraction of the cost

Angular distributions of the atomic scandium 3d and 4s photoelectrons in the region of the 3p - \u3e 3d giant resonance

A determination of the angular distribution parameter beta of the 3d and 4s main lines of atomic scandium in the resonance region of the 3p-- \u3e nd,ms excitations has been carried out using electron spectrometry in conjunction with monochromatized synchrotron radiation., These measurements reveal strong variations of beta8 throughout the entire resonance region, highlighting the complicated nature of the ionization process for this first and seemingly simple 3d transition metal. The beta values-of the photoelectrons resulting in 4s subshell, ionization deviate significantly from 2.0 in qualitative, but not-quantitative, agreement with recent many-body perturbation-theory calculations

The autoinducer synthases LuxI and AinS are responsible for temperature-dependent AHL production in the fish pathogen Aliivibrio salmonicida

Published version, also available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12866-015-0402-zBackground: Quorum sensing (QS) is a cell-to-cell communication system used by bacteria to regulate activities such as virulence, bioluminescence and biofilm formation. The most common QS signals in Gram-negative bacteria are N-acyl-homoserine lactones (AHLs). Aliivibrio salmonicida is the etiological agent of cold water vibriosis in Atlantic salmon, a disease which occurs mainly during seasons when the seawater is below 12°C. In this work we have constructed several mutants of A. salmonicida LFI1238 in order to study the LuxI/LuxR and AinS/AinR QS systems with respect to AHL production and biofilm formation. Results: Using high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS) we found that LuxI in A. salmonicida LFI1238 is responsible for producing seven of the different AHLs, whereas AinS is responsible for producing only one. The production of these various AHLs is dependent on both cell density and growth temperature. The AHLs were efficiently produced when wild type LFI1238 was grown at 6 or 12°C, however at 16°C AHL production decreased dramatically, and LFI1238 produced less than 5% of the maximum concentrations observed at 6°C. LitR, the master regulator of QS, was found to be a positive regulator of AinS-dependent AHL production, and to a lesser extent LuxI-dependent AHL production. This implies a connection between the two systems, and both systems were found to be involved in regulation of biofilm formation. Finally, inactivation of either luxR1 or luxR2 in the lux operon significantly reduced production of LuxI-produced AHLs. Conclusion: LuxI and AinS are the autoinducer synthases responsible for the eight AHLs in A. salmonicida. AHL production is highly dependent on growth temperature, and a significant decrease was observed when the bacterium was grown at a temperature above its limit for disease outbreak. Numerous AHLs could offer the opportunity for fine-tuning responses to changes in the environment