Are affirmative action hires less qualified? Evidence from employer-employee data on new hires

In this paper we use micro-level data on employers and employees to investigate whether Affirmative Action procedures lead firms to hire minority or female employees who are less qualified than workers who might otherwise be hired. Our measures of qualifications include the educational attainment of the workers hired (both absolute and relative to job requirements), skill requirements of the job into which they are hired, and a variety of outcome measures that are presumably related to worker performance on the job. The analysis is based on a representative sample of over 3,200 employers in four major metropolitan areas in the United States. Our results show some evidence of lower educational qualifications among blacks and Hispanics hired under Affirmative Action, but not among white women. Further, our results show little evidence of substantially weaker job performance among most groups of minority and female Affirmative Action hires.

Distributed Exact Shortest Paths in Sublinear Time

The distributed single-source shortest paths problem is one of the most fundamental and central problems in the message-passing distributed computing. Classical Bellman-Ford algorithm solves it in $O(n)$ time, where $n$ is the number of vertices in the input graph $G$. Peleg and Rubinovich (FOCS'99) showed a lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}(D + \sqrt{n})$ for this problem, where $D$ is the hop-diameter of $G$. Whether or not this problem can be solved in $o(n)$ time when $D$ is relatively small is a major notorious open question. Despite intensive research \cite{LP13,N14,HKN15,EN16,BKKL16} that yielded near-optimal algorithms for the approximate variant of this problem, no progress was reported for the original problem. In this paper we answer this question in the affirmative. We devise an algorithm that requires $O((n \log n)^{5/6})$ time, for $D = O(\sqrt{n \log n})$, and $O(D^{1/3} \cdot (n \log n)^{2/3})$ time, for larger $D$. This running time is sublinear in $n$ in almost the entire range of parameters, specifically, for $D = o(n/\log^2 n)$. For the all-pairs shortest paths problem, our algorithm requires $O(n^{5/3} \log^{2/3} n)$ time, regardless of the value of $D$. We also devise the first algorithm with non-trivial complexity guarantees for computing exact shortest paths in the multipass semi-streaming model of computation. From the technical viewpoint, our algorithm computes a hopset $G"$ of a skeleton graph $G'$ of $G$ without first computing $G'$ itself. We then conduct a Bellman-Ford exploration in $G' \cup G"$, while computing the required edges of $G'$ on the fly. As a result, our algorithm computes exactly those edges of $G'$ that it really needs, rather than computing approximately the entire $G'$

What Does Affirmative Action Do?

We use data from a survey of employers to investigate how Affirmative Action in recruiting and hiring influences hiring practices, personnel policies, and ultimately employment out- comes. Our results show that Affirmative Action increases the number of recruitment and screening practices used by employers, raises their willingness to hire stigmatized applicants, increases the number of minority and female applicants as well as employees, and increases employers’ tendencies to provide training and to formally evaluate employees. When Affirmative Action is used in recruiting, it does not lead to lower credentials or performance of women and minorities hired. When it is also used in hiring, it yields female and minority employees whose credentials are somewhat weaker, though performance generally is not. Overall, then, the more intensive search, evaluation, and training that accompany Affirmative Action appear to offset any tendencies of the policy to lead to hiring of less-qualified or less-productive women and minorities.

First Evaluation of Dynamic Aperture at Injection for FCC-hh

In the Hadron machine option, proposed in the context of the Future Circular Colliders (FCC) study, the dipole field quality is expected to play an important role, as in the LHC. A preliminary evaluation of the field quality of dipoles, based on the Nb$_{3}$Sn technology, has been provided by the magnet group. The effect of these field imperfections on the dynamic aperture, using the present lattice design, is presented and first tolerances on the b$_3$ and b$_5$ multipole components are evaluated

ARE YOU TALKING TO ME? WHY BIM ALONE IS NOT THE ANSWER

In contemporary building practice, the hegemony of 2D-based design communication is gradually being challenged by the possibilities offered by integrated 3D design environments and digital interfaces. The upcoming application of building information modeling (BIM) offers a way out of the current Babylonian plurality of non-compatible modeling-languages in order to push software developers and users to convert towards one common industry standard for data exchange. It is a clear aim of those propagating the use of BIM to strengthen the interaction of design teams and to assist facilities management through common standards for increased interoperability and data-management from the early design stage to completion and operation of a building. Current BIM capabilities rather seem to lie in the area of design documentation and post-design rationalization than triggering new design solutions. This paper sheds light on the status-quo of BIM and questions how designers can complement the current BIM capabilities to increase design-communication and a more seamless flow of information between various parties in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC)

Observations of shallow convective clouds generated by solar heating of dark smoke plumes

The SEVIRI instrument on the Meteosat Second Generation satellite with both fine spatial and temporal resolution allows to detect and follow the dynamics of fast developing meteorological events like spreading smoke plumes and the lifecycles of convective clouds. Smoke plumes have the ability to change the atmospheric heat content due to absorption and reduced reflection of solar radiation. By these means they can trigger formation of shallow convective clouds at their edge. A heavy smoke plume emerging from burning Lebanese oil tanks and spreading over adjacent deserts on 17 July 2006 has been observed as an example of such an effect. This study suggests a physical explanation of the observed convection along the edge of the smoke plume, namely the strong thermal contrast resulting from solar heating of the smoke layer

Rabies prophylaxis after an animal attack that caused a ruptured eye and traumatic cataract: a case report

Introduction: We report on a patient with an animal bite eye injury, his surgical treatment and proper rabies immunoglobulin administration. Case presentation: A 33-year-old Turkey hunter was attacked by a bobcat and his injuries included a ruptured globe with corneal laceration, two iris sphincter tears, and a ruptured anterior capsule with a traumatic cataract. Rabies vaccination was started, primary closure of the corneal laceration, an anterior chamber washout and one week later cataract surgery were performed. Three months postoperatively he achieved an uncorrected visual acuity of 20/50 and a best corrected visual acuity of 20/20. Conclusion: Bobcat attacks on humans are very rare and extremely suspicious for rabies infection of the animal. Ophthalmologists need to be aware of the importance of immediate and appropriate post exposure rabies vaccination. Proper rabies immunoglobulin administration in the setting of globe injuries is challenging and we report on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations for globe injuries

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

Low temperature dynamics of kinks on Ising interfaces

The anisotropic motion of an interface driven by its intrinsic curvature or by an external field is investigated in the context of the kinetic Ising model in both two and three dimensions. We derive in two dimensions (2d) a continuum evolution equation for the density of kinks by a time-dependent and nonlocal mapping to the asymmetric exclusion process. Whereas kinks execute random walks biased by the external field and pile up vertically on the physical 2d lattice, then execute hard-core biased random walks on a transformed 1d lattice. Their density obeys a nonlinear diffusion equation which can be transformed into the standard expression for the interface velocity v = M[(gamma + gamma'')kappa + H]$, where M, gamma + gamma'', and kappa are the interface mobility, stiffness, and curvature, respectively. In 3d, we obtain the velocity of a curved interface near the orientation from an analysis of the self-similar evolution of 2d shrinking terraces. We show that this velocity is consistent with the one predicted from the 3d tensorial generalization of the law for anisotropic curvature-driven motion. In this generalization, both the interface stiffness tensor and the curvature tensor are singular at the orientation. However, their product, which determines the interface velocity, is smooth. In addition, we illustrate how this kink-based kinetic description provides a useful framework for studying more complex situations by modeling the effect of immobile dilute impurities.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

Towards Collaborative Conceptual Exploration

In domains with high knowledge distribution a natural objective is to create principle foundations for collaborative interactive learning environments. We present a first mathematical characterization of a collaborative learning group, a consortium, based on closure systems of attribute sets and the well-known attribute exploration algorithm from formal concept analysis. To this end, we introduce (weak) local experts for subdomains of a given knowledge domain. These entities are able to refute and potentially accept a given (implicational) query for some closure system that is a restriction of the whole domain. On this we build up a consortial expert and show first insights about the ability of such an expert to answer queries. Furthermore, we depict techniques on how to cope with falsely accepted implications and on combining counterexamples. Using notions from combinatorial design theory we further expand those insights as far as providing first results on the decidability problem if a given consortium is able to explore some target domain. Applications in conceptual knowledge acquisition as well as in collaborative interactive ontology learning are at hand.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure