Employment Data for Buffalo

The types of jobs available in Buffalo have changed post-recession, with midlevel skilled jobs disappearing and high and low skill jobs growing. The loss of jobs in fields such as teaching, office administration, factory work and construction work during the recession is exacerbated by the fact that many midlevel jobs, such as manufacturing, are being automated or sent to cheaper markets. Growth has occurred on the high and low skill ends of the spectrum, however, with increases in fields that require high-level business skill, healthcare expertise, computer training, engineering, etc. At the low end, there has been growth in food preparation, personal care, and jobs such as store clerks and child care providers. These changes are reflected in the fact that 31.2% of employed persons in Buffalo work in management, professional, and related occupations, and 20.8% work in service occupations, as of 2012. The data suggests the need for workers in Buffalo to acquire more education, training, and skills to ameliorate growing inequality and polarization in the job market, and for expansion of policies like living wages to ensure that the high number of low-skill jobs does not result in higher poverty

Pilot exercise - pre-commitment approach to market risk

This paper was presented at the conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century" as part of session 4, "Incentive-compatible regulations: views on the precommitment approach." The conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 26-27, 1998, was designed to encourage a consensus between the public and private sectors on an agenda for capital regulation in the new century.Bank capital ; Bank supervision

Scalable Peer-to-Peer Indexing with Constant State

We present a distributed indexing scheme for peer to peer networks. Past work on distributed indexing traded off fast search times with non-constant degree topologies or network-unfriendly behavior such as flooding. In contrast, the scheme we present optimizes all three of these performance measures. That is, we provide logarithmic round searches while maintaining connections to a fixed number of peers and avoiding network flooding. In comparison to the well known scheme Chord, we provide competitive constant factors. Finally, we observe that arbitrary linear speedups are possible and discuss both a general brute force approach and specific economical optimizations

Fast Approximate Reconciliation of Set Differences

We present new, simple, efficient data structures for approximate reconciliation of set differences, a useful standalone primitive for peer-to-peer networks and a natural subroutine in methods for exact reconciliation. In the approximate reconciliation problem, peers A and B respectively have subsets of elements SA and SB of a large universe U. Peer A wishes to send a short message M to peer B with the goal that B should use M to determine as many elements in the set SB–SA as possible. To avoid the expense of round trip communication times, we focus on the situation where a single message M is sent. We motivate the performance tradeoffs between message size, accuracy and computation time for this problem with a straightforward approach using Bloom filters. We then introduce approximation reconciliation trees, a more computationally efficient solution that combines techniques from Patricia tries, Merkle trees, and Bloom filters. We present an analysis of approximation reconciliation trees and provide experimental results comparing the various methods proposed for approximate reconciliation.National Science Foundation (ANI-0093296, ANI-9986397, CCR-0118701, CCR-0121154); Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowshi

Simple Load Balancing for Distributed Hash Tables

Distributed hash tables have recently become a useful building block for a variety of distributed applications. However, current schemes based upon consistent hashing require both considerable implementation complexity and substantial storage overhead to achieve desired load balancing goals. We argue in this paper that these goals can b e achieved more simply and more cost-effectively. First, we suggest the direct application of the "power of two choices" paradigm, whereby an item is stored at the less loaded of two (or more) random alternatives. We then consider how associating a small constant number of hash values with a key can naturally b e extended to support other load balancing methods, including load-stealing or load-shedding schemes, as well as providing natural fault-tolerance mechanisms

A Pragmatic Approach to DHT Adoption

Despite the peer-to-peer community's obvious wish to have its systems adopted, specific mechanisms to facilitate incremental adoption have not yet received the same level of attention as the many other practical concerns associated with these systems. This paper argues that ease of adoption should be elevated to a first-class concern and accordingly presents HOLD, a front-end to existing DHTs that is optimized for incremental adoption. Specifically, HOLD is backwards-compatible: it leverages DNS to provide a key-based routing service to existing Internet hosts without requiring them to install any software. This paper also presents applications that could benefit from HOLD as well as the trade-offs that accompany HOLD. Early implementation experience suggests that HOLD is practical