Job Queues and Wages: New Evidence on the Minimum Wage and Inter-Industry Wage Structure

This paper uses job applications- data to test the existence of non-competitive, ex-ante rents in the labor market. We first examine whether jobs that pay the legal minimum wage face an excessively of labor as measured by the number of job applications received for the most recent positions filled by the firs. The results indicate that openings for jobs that pay the minimum wage attract significantly more job applications than jobs that pay either more or less than the minimum wage. This spike in the job application rate distribution indicates that ex-ante rents generated for employees by an above market-level minimum wage do not appear to be completely dissipated by employer actions. The second part of the paper uses a similar approach to examine whether jobs in high-wage industries pay above market-clearing wage rates. We find a weak, positive relationship between inter-industry applications differentials and inter-industry wage differentials. In addition, our results indicate that employer size has a sizeable positive effect on the job application rate even after controlling for the wage rate. The paper considers several possible explanations for these findings.

A Roundtable Conversation: Feminist Collaborative Ethos in International Law

This roundtable discussion focuses on the collective commitment and the praxis of a feminist collaborative ethos in international law to imagine and centre alternative futures in the field. This discussion took place as part of the virtual workshop ‘International Law Dis/Oriented: Queer Legacies, and Queer Futures Workshop’ from which this special issue emerged. In this transcript of the roundtable, Shaimaa Abdelkarim, Farnush Ghadery, and Rohini Sen discuss with Lena Holzer how turning to feminist collectivity – focused on care, collaboration, and solidarity – can help to disrupt and push against gendered, racialised, and colonial power structures embedded in academic spaces. They examine their intertwined positionalities along with various pedagogical and methodological approaches to determine the functions of critical feminist and queer thoughts in international law. Inculcating a praxis of feminist collaborative ethos in the scholarship and teaching of international law, they hope to present a challenge to the artificial individualisation of the profession and its increasing neoliberalisation

The FCC-ee Interaction Region Magnet Design

The design of the region close to the interaction point of the FCC-ee experiments is especially challenging. The beams collide at an angle (+-15 mrad) in the high-field region of the detector solenoid. Moreover, the very low vertical beta_y* of the machine necessitates that the final focusing quadrupoles have a distance from the IP (L*) of around 2 m and therefore are inside the main detector solenoid. The beams should be screened from the effect of the detector magnetic field, and the emittance blow-up due to vertical dispersion in the interaction region should be minimized, while leaving enough space for detector components. Crosstalk between the two final focus quadrupoles, only about 6 cm apart at the tip, should also be minimized.Comment: Poster presented at IPAC16, May 8-13, Busan, Kore

The Magic Number Problem for Subregular Language Families

We investigate the magic number problem, that is, the question whether there exists a minimal n-state nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) whose equivalent minimal deterministic finite automaton (DFA) has alpha states, for all n and alpha satisfying n less or equal to alpha less or equal to exp(2,n). A number alpha not satisfying this condition is called a magic number (for n). It was shown in [11] that no magic numbers exist for general regular languages, while in [5] trivial and non-trivial magic numbers for unary regular languages were identified. We obtain similar results for automata accepting subregular languages like, for example, combinational languages, star-free, prefix-, suffix-, and infix-closed languages, and prefix-, suffix-, and infix-free languages, showing that there are only trivial magic numbers, when they exist. For finite languages we obtain some partial results showing that certain numbers are non-magic.Comment: In Proceedings DCFS 2010, arXiv:1008.127

Learning cover context-free grammars from structural data

We consider the problem of learning an unknown context-free grammar when the only knowledge available and of interest to the learner is about its structural descriptions with depth at most $\ell.$ The goal is to learn a cover context-free grammar (CCFG) with respect to $\ell$, that is, a CFG whose structural descriptions with depth at most $\ell$ agree with those of the unknown CFG. We propose an algorithm, called $LA^\ell$, that efficiently learns a CCFG using two types of queries: structural equivalence and structural membership. We show that $LA^\ell$ runs in time polynomial in the number of states of a minimal deterministic finite cover tree automaton (DCTA) with respect to $\ell$. This number is often much smaller than the number of states of a minimum deterministic finite tree automaton for the structural descriptions of the unknown grammar

A comparative investigation of the efficacy of CO2 and high power diode lasers for the forming of EN3 mild steel sheets

A comparative investigation of the effectiveness of a high power diode laser (HPDL) and a CO2 laser for the forming of thin section EN3 mild steel sheet has been conducted. The buckling mechanism was identified as the laser forming mechanism responsible for the induced bending. For both lasers it was found that the induced bending angles increased with an increasing number of irradiations and high laser powers, whilst decreasing as the traverse speed was increased. Also, it was apparent from the experimental results that the laser bending angle was only linearly proportional to the number of irradiations when the latter was small due to local material thickening along the bend edge with a high number of irradiations. Owing to the mild steel’s greater beam absorption at the HPDL wavelength, larger bending angles were induced when using the HPDL. However, under certain conditions the performance of the CO2 laser in terms of induced bending angle was seen to approach that of the HPDL. Nevertheless, similar results between the two lasers were only achieved with increasing irradiations, thus it was concluded that the efficacy of the HPDL was higher than that of the CO2 laser insofar as it was more efficient. From graphical results and the employment of an analytical procedure, the laser line energy range in which accurate control of the HPDL bending of the mild steel sheets could be exercised efficiently was found to be 53 J mm-1 < P/v < 78 J mm-1, whilst for the CO2 laser the range was 61 J mm-1 < P/v < 85 J mm-1

Analytical solution for the Fermi-sea energy of two-dimensional electrons in a magnetic field: lattice path-integral approach and quantum interference

We derive an exact solution for the total kinetic energy of noninteracting spinless electrons at half-filling in two-dimensional bipartite lattices. We employ a conceptually novel approach that maps this problem exactly into a Feynman-Vdovichenko lattice walker. The problem is then reduced to the analytic study of the sum of magnetic phase factors on closed paths. We compare our results with the ones obtained through numerical calculations.Comment: 5 pages, RevTe

Poxviral/Retroviral Chimeric Vectors Allow Cytoplasmic Production of Transducing Defective Retroviral Particles

AbstractDefective vaccinia viruses were constructed that express functional Moloney murine leukemia virus-based vector genomes, giving rise to substantial titers of transduction-competent retrovirus particles after infection of a retroviral packaging cell line. For this purpose, the proviral retrovirus genome, engineered into the vaccinia virus mutant, was subjected to several modifications, including the replacement of retroviral promoter sequences by vaccinia virus sequences and the precise fusion of the transcription stop signal downstream of and the removal of such signals within the transcription unit, allowing cytoplasmic transcription of distinct full-length retroviral transcripts. Vaccinia-mediated expression of retroviral vector particles could be observed as early as 3 h postinfection and resulted in stable transduction of NIH/3T3 target cells at higher titers than the control performed by conventional plasmid transfections. Thus at least part of the vaccinia life cycle and retroviral assembly can occur concomitantly. Due to the favorable properties of vaccinia vectors, including high coding capacity, stability, and wide host range, defective vaccinia viral/retroviral chimeric vectors are promising tools for gene therapy applications

Plasma wave measurements for the Mariner to Venus and Mercury Final report of the Plasma Wave Instrument Science Advisory Team for the 1973 Mercury/Venus mission design

Very low frequency electric and magnetic wave measurements for Mariner Venus Mercury 1973 missio

On the Necessary Memory to Compute the Plurality in Multi-Agent Systems

We consider the Relative-Majority Problem (also known as Plurality), in which, given a multi-agent system where each agent is initially provided an input value out of a set of $k$ possible ones, each agent is required to eventually compute the input value with the highest frequency in the initial configuration. We consider the problem in the general Population Protocols model in which, given an underlying undirected connected graph whose nodes represent the agents, edges are selected by a globally fair scheduler. The state complexity that is required for solving the Plurality Problem (i.e., the minimum number of memory states that each agent needs to have in order to solve the problem), has been a long-standing open problem. The best protocol so far for the general multi-valued case requires polynomial memory: Salehkaleybar et al. (2015) devised a protocol that solves the problem by employing $O(k 2^k)$ states per agent, and they conjectured their upper bound to be optimal. On the other hand, under the strong assumption that agents initially agree on a total ordering of the initial input values, Gasieniec et al. (2017), provided an elegant logarithmic-memory plurality protocol. In this work, we refute Salehkaleybar et al.'s conjecture, by providing a plurality protocol which employs $O(k^{11})$ states per agent. Central to our result is an ordering protocol which allows to leverage on the plurality protocol by Gasieniec et al., of independent interest. We also provide a $\Omega(k^2)$-state lower bound on the necessary memory to solve the problem, proving that the Plurality Problem cannot be solved within the mere memory necessary to encode the output.Comment: 14 pages, accepted at CIAC 201