The State of Working America

[Excerpt] Like its predecessors, this edition of The State of Working America digs deeply into a broad range of data to answer a basic question that headline numbers on gross domestic product, inflation, stock indices, productivity, and other metrics can\u27t wholly answer: How well has the American economy worked to provide acceptable growth in living standards for most households? According to the data, the short answer is, not well at all. The past 10 years have been a lost decade of wage and income growth for most American families. A quarter century of wage stagnation and slow income growth preceded this lost decade, largely because rising wage, income, and wealth inequality funneled the rewards of economic growth to the top. The sweep of the research in this book shows that these trends are the result of inadequate, wrong, or absent policy responses. Ample economic growth in the past three-and-a-half decades provided the potential to substantially raise living standards across the board, but economic policies frequently served the interests of those with the most wealth, income, and political power and prevented broad-based prosperity

Dose Selection Balancing Efficacy and Toxicity Using Bayesian Model Averaging

Successful pharmaceutical drug development requires finding correct doses that provide an optimum balance between efficacy and toxicity. Competing responses to dose such as efficacy and toxicity often will increase with dose, and it is important to identify a range of doses to provide an acceptable efficacy response (minimum effective dose) while not causing unacceptable intolerance or toxicity (maximum tolerated dose). How this should be done is not self-evident. Relating efficacy to dose conditionally on possible toxicity may be problematic because whether toxicity occurs will not be known when a dose for a patient needs to be chosen. Copula models provide an appealing approach for incorporating an efficacy-toxicity association when the functional forms of the efficacy and toxicity dose-response models are known but may be less appealing in practice when the functional forms of the dose-response models and the particular copula association model are unknown. This paper explores the use of the BMA-Mod Bayesian model averaging framework that accommodates efficacy and toxicity responses to provide a statistically valid, distributionally flexible, and operationally practical model-agnostic strategy for predicting efficacy and toxicity outcomes both in terms of expected responses and in terms of predictions for individual patients. The performance of the approach is evaluated via simulation when efficacy and toxicity outcomes are considered marginally, when they are associated via gaussian and Archimedean copulas, and when they are expressed in terms of clinically meaningful categories. In all cases, the BMA-Mod strategy identified consistent ranges of acceptable doses.Comment: 23 pages, 14 figures. R code, annotated session log, and datasets available from [email protected]

President Trump and the Media

Dr. Larry Gould and Dr. Dan Kulmala discuss President Donald Trump\u27s relationship with the media and how both sides benefit

Whither of the Electoral College?

America\u27s Electoral College: Origins, Logic and Implication

Preliminary Investigation of the Supersonic Flow Field Downstream of Wire-mesh Nozzles in a Constant-area Duct / Lawrence I. Gould

An investigation was conducted in a 3.4- by 3.4-inch duct to determine the characteristics of the supersonic flow downstream of four wire-mesh screen nozzles with nominal design Mach numbers in the range between 1.97 and 2.58. Two types of disturbances were observed in the flow field: a fine network of interacting expansion and compression waves which were formed immediately downstream of the screens and appeared to dissipate within 25 to 40 wave intersections; and relatively strong oblique shock waves that originated at the junctions of the screens and the walls and were reflected throughout the length of the duct. Regions of fairly uniform flow were found to exist. The total-pressure loss across the screens varied from 22 percent at Mach number 1.58 to 43 percent at Mach number 2.06

Preliminary Study of the Relationship Between Undergraduate Learning Outcome Assessment and Estimated Earnings of Graduates

The primary motivation for exploring the relationship between learning outcomes assessment and graduate earnings is to simply document the assumed link so that educators have some basis for claiming long-term benefits of outcomes assessment. Furthermore, the scope of the project was limited to exploring learning outcomes assessment in the state of Kansas as this was deemed a preliminary inquiry. Specifically, this article seeks to address the following three questions: 1. Have academic programs in Kansas adopted assessment plans? 2. Does student ability play a role in earnings differentiation upon graduation? 3. Is there a difference in earnings between the highest, moderate, and lowest performing graduates