The Composition of Strike Activity in the Construction Industry

This study shows that strikes in construction have, by most measures, increased during the years since 1949, a period during which strike activity tended to decline in American industry as a whole. The authors demonstrate that this increase has resulted not from an increase in the number of wage disputes but from a growing number of jurisdictional strikes and the increasing severity of economic and union-organizing strikes. They also show that the number of strikes in construction does not vary significantly with the unemployment rate in that industry nor with the presence of wage controls, but both of those factors have a significant impact on the composition of strike activity in construction

Innovation in the Wireless Ecosystem: A Customer-Centric Framework

The Federal Communications Commission’s Notice of Inquiry in GN 09-157 Fostering Innovation and Investment in the Wireless Communications Market is a significant event at an opportune moment. Wireless communications has already radically changed the way not only Americans but people the world over communicate with each other and access and share information, and there appears no end in sight to this fundamental shift in communication markets. Although the wireless communications phenomenon is global, the US has played and will continue to play a major role in the shaping of this market. At the start of a new US Administration and important changes in the FCC, it is most appropriate that this proceeding be launched.

Spectrum Management: Property Rights, Markets, and The Commons

Gerald Faulhaber and David Farberconsider alternatives to the current licensing regime for spectrum, which appears to lead to substantial inefficiencies in spectrum allocation.Specifically, they examine two property rights regimes and a commons regime.Theynote that economists have favored a market-based regime while engineers have favored a commons-based regime to promote new technologies. Mr. Faulhaber and Mr. Farbershow that thereis aproperty rights market-based regime that unleashes the power of the market andthe power of the new technologies to efficiently allocate spectrum, and that is likely to meet our needs for the near-term future. This regime resolves the presumed dichotomy between the market-based and the commons-based views, so that both objectives can be realized.The authorsalso outline a transition processfor achieving the desired regime outcome that is a "win-win" for all stakeholders, and that could be politically feasible. The change to a property rights regime is likely to lower the cost of spectrum substantially, in many cases to zero.Mr. Faulhaber and Mr. Farberassert that a commons model and a market model can co-exist, at least until spectrum becomes truly scarce.

Self-Invention in the Realm of Production: Craft, Beauty, and Community in the American Counterculture, 1964–1978

In the 1960s and 1970s, self-avowed members of the counterculture, often based on the west coast and in the Rocky Mountain West, eschewed critics’ stereotypical notions of stoned and indolent hippies and struggled to build an alternative economic system. While rejecting corporate capitalism and consumer acquisitiveness, they built new enterprises, new institutions, new organizational forms, and new practices that gave proof of the possibility of creating economically sustainable, alternative lives. Do-it-yourself practices, especially building one’s own home or repairing one’s own vehicle, promised to free practitioners from working for wages in order to afford consumer goods—even as DIY culture often promoted traditional gender roles. While many of the counterculture’s attempts at escaping the employee-consumer nexus failed or were short-lived, it did succeed in outlining an alternative approach to both production and consumption that has had a continuing impact on American capitalist development

A distributed computer system

The goal of this project Is to plan and develop a computing system that will provide interactive computing services with a high degree of reliability, a variety of language systems, incremental expansion capability, competitive costs, a respect for human factors considerations; and the project will require only a modest amount of system programming resources

The Fighting Man as Tourist: The Politics of Tourist Culture in Hawaii during World War II

During World War II roughly a million soldiers, sailors, and war workers spent time in the territory of Hawaii. In order to mediate the potentially explosive tensions produced by this influx of homesick and battle weary men into an unfamiliar and highly diverse society, the U.S. military command and Hawaii's ruling elites tried to cast wartime visitors in a carefully constructed role-that of tourists.1 Tourists, as sociologist Dean MacCannell has pointed out, see difference as pleasurable, rather than threatening, and the unusual as affirming their own way of life rather than challenging it. 2 The paradigm of the fighting-man-as-tourist enabled wartime visitors to consume the "otherness" of Hawaii without risking loss of primary identity and without needing to directly confront or reject the "other." At least this was what military and civilian authorities hoped would occur. As they and the soldiers themselves discovered, the role of tourist was a contested one. While elites might proffer a certain model of tomistic behavior, it could be rejected or adapted to other purposes. During World War II, the paradigm of "tourism" in Hawaii was hotly contested and carried surprising political import

Congestion Control by Bandwidth-Delay Tradeoff in Very High-Speed Networks: The Case of Window-Based Control

Increasing bandwidth-delay product of high-speed wide-area networks is well-known to make conventional dynamic traffic control schemes sluggish . Still, most existing schemes employ dynamic control, among which TCP and ATM Forum\u27s rate-based flow control are prominent examples. So far, little has been investigated as to how the existing schemes will scale as bandwidth further increases up to gigabit speed and beyond. Our investigation in this paper is the first to show that dynamic control has a severe scalability problem with bandwidth increase, and to propose an entirely new approach to traffic control that overcomes the scalability problem. The essence of our approach is in exercising control in bandwidth domain rather than time domain, in order to avoid time delay in control. This requires more bandwidth than the timed counterpart, but achieves a much faster control. Furthermore, the bandwidth requirement is not excessively large because the bandwidth for smaller control delay and we call our approach Bandwidth-Latency Tradeoff (BLT). While the control in existing schemes are bound to delay, BLT is bound to bandwidth. As a fallout, BLT scales tied to bandwidth increase, rather than increasingly deteriorate as conventional schemes. Surprisingly, our approach begins to pay off much earlier than expected, even from a point where bandwidth-delay product is not so large. For instance, in a roughly AURORA-sized network, BLT far outperforms TCP on a shared 150Mbps link, where the bandwidth-delay product is around 60KB. In the other extreme where bandwidth-delay product is large, BLT outperforms TCP by as much as twenty times in terms of network power in a gigabit nationwide network. More importantly, BLT is designed to continue to scale with bandwidth increase and the performance gap is expected to widen further