U. S. labor supply in the twenty-first century

The American labor force will be transformed as the twenty-first century unfolds, a change that will confront policymakers and business firms with new challenges and new opportunities. The impending slowdown of labor force growth that will accompany the retirement of the baby boom generation already is playing a central role in national debates over the future solvency of Social Security and Medicare, as well as U.S. immigration policies. But labor supply changes will be influenced by other dimensions as well. In the coming decades, American workers are likely to be, on average, older and better educated than today’s labor force. The globalization of labor markets is already opening new employment opportunities for some Americans and changing the wage rates paid to others. The production technologies and personnel policies adopted by tomorrow’s firms will undoubtedly reflect the numbers and types of workers available for employment.Labor supply ; Baby boom generation

Developing digital interventions: a methodological guide.

Digital interventions are becoming an increasingly popular method of delivering healthcare as they enable and promote patient self-management. This paper provides a methodological guide to the processes involved in developing effective digital interventions, detailing how to plan and develop such interventions to avoid common pitfalls. It demonstrates the need for mixed qualitative and quantitative methods in order to develop digital interventions which are effective, feasible, and acceptable to users and stakeholders

Spatial and labor market contributions to earnings inequality: an overview

Wages ; Labor market ; Income distribution

A frontline service? Nursery Schools as local community hubs in an era of austerity

Nursery Schools in the UK have been described as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of early years provision because of the quality of education and a wide range of other support services that they provide, particularly for children from socio-economically disadvantaged families and those with complex special educational needs (SEN). In this paper, we explore the role of Nursery Schools in the local community, arguing that they have been re/constructed as a frontline service in the context of austerity policies enacted in England over the past decade. The data presented in support of this argument arise from detailed interviews with 17 staff based in four Nursery Schools. Our data lead us to argue that, in the current context of austerity and cuts to a range of local services, Nursery Schools are filling welfare gaps for families by providing clothing, trips and food voucher advice to families. They are also supporting increasing numbers of SEN children and are described as a first point of contact with state-run services by many, especially minority ethnic and working-class families. We conclude by arguing that Nursery Schools’ funding must be protected so that they can continue to provide support to some of the most vulnerable children and their families in England

Mapping solar array location, size, and capacity using deep learning and overhead imagery

The effective integration of distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays into existing power grids will require access to high quality data; the location, power capacity, and energy generation of individual solar PV installations. Unfortunately, existing methods for obtaining this data are limited in their spatial resolution and completeness. We propose a general framework for accurately and cheaply mapping individual PV arrays, and their capacities, over large geographic areas. At the core of this approach is a deep learning algorithm called SolarMapper - which we make publicly available - that can automatically map PV arrays in high resolution overhead imagery. We estimate the performance of SolarMapper on a large dataset of overhead imagery across three US cities in California. We also describe a procedure for deploying SolarMapper to new geographic regions, so that it can be utilized by others. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed deployment procedure by using it to map solar arrays across the entire US state of Connecticut (CT). Using these results, we demonstrate that we achieve highly accurate estimates of total installed PV capacity within each of CT's 168 municipal regions

Between Thought and Expression, a Magnetoencephalography Study of the "Tip-of-the-Tongue" Phenomenon

“Tip-of-the-tongue” (TOT) is the phenomenon associated with the inaccessibility of a known word from memory. It is universally experienced, increases in frequency with age, and is most common for proper nouns. It is a good model for the symptom of anomia experienced much more frequently by some aphasic patients following brain injury. Here, we induced the TOT state in older participants while they underwent brain scanning with magnetoencephalography to investigate the changes in oscillatory brain activity associated with failed retrieval of known words. Using confrontation naming of pictures of celebrities, we successfully induced the TOT state in 29% of trials and contrasted it with two other states: “Know” where the participants both correctly recognized the celebrity's face and retrieved their name and “Don't Know” when the participants did not recognize the celebrity. We wished to test Levelt's influential model of speech output by carrying out two analyses, one epoching the data to the point in time when the picture was displayed and the other looking back in time from when the participants first articulated their responses. Our main findings supported the components of Levelt's model, but not their serial activation over time as both semantic and motor areas were identified in both analyses. We also found enduring decreases in the alpha frequency band in the left ventral temporal region during the TOT state, suggesting ongoing semantic search. Finally, we identified reduced beta power in classical peri-sylvian language areas for the TOT condition, suggesting that brain regions that encode linguistic memories are also involved in their attempted retrieval

Within-school spillover effects of foreclosures and student mobility on student academic performance

Aside from effects on nearby property values, research is sparse on how foreclosures may generate negative externalities. Employing a unique dataset that matches individual student records from Boston Public Schools - including test scores, demographics, home address moves, and school changes - with real estate records indicating whether the student lived at an address involved in foreclosure, we investigate the degree to which the test scores of students attending high-foreclosure schools suffer, even among students not directly experiencing foreclosure. We also explore the impact on individual test scores of school-level (by grade and year) student mobility - that is, inflows of new students to a school during the school year - including mobility induced by residential moves (in some cases caused by foreclosures) and mobility arising for other reasons. We find fairly robust evidence that higher student mobility at a school, induced by residential moves, imposes significant negative effects on test scores of students at the receiving school. Beyond this channel, school-level foreclosure prevalence does not appear to generate externalities. Since we also find that residential-moveinduced school changes appear to harm the outcomes of the school-changers themselves, policies that seek to limit such changes within the academic year may uniformly raise test scores, at least in the short run

The effect of foreclosure on Boston public school student academic performance

Although the recent wave of mortgage foreclosures has clearly been accompanied by economic hardship, relatively little research has examined how foreclosures affect the academic performance of students. This paper investigates the relationship between mortgage foreclosures and the academic performance of students using a unique dataset that matches information on the standardized test scores and attendance of individual Boston Public School students with real estate records indicating whether the student lived at an address involved in foreclosure and whether that student's parent or guardian was the owner or a tenant in the property. Econometric analysis of this relationship suggests that foreclosures are associated with slightly lower test scores and attendance, controlling for the previous-year's test score and attendance as well as other student characteristics and environmental factors. The results suggest that both the foreclosure event and the diminished student outcomes stem from underlying economic stress within the family. School changes during the school year, which are sometimes induced by foreclosure-related residential moves but also occur independently of foreclosure, may be associated with more substantial negative effects on academic performance than foreclosures, although this causal relationship is not certain. This latter finding suggests that policies that decouple residential moves from school changes during the school year may help to mitigate this indirect effect of foreclosure on student performance