Viking planetary quarantine procedures and implementation

Some of the techniques and methodology that were used on Viking to implement planetary quarantine requirements are reported. Special attention was given to techniques and approaches used to implement sterilization of the Viking probe. Quarantine procedures for unmanned planetary missions and procedures for microbiological contamination of space hardware are included. A probability of contamination of the biological instruments onboard by terrestrial organisms was examined

Do Surges in Less-Skilled Immigration Have Important Wage Effects? A Review of the U.S. Evidence

This paper reviews a small part of a vast professional literature on the labor market effects of new immigrants. It focuses on recent studies that have employed econometric techniques to estimate wage effects of less-skilled immigrants during the two great American immigration surges (roughly 1870-1914 and 1980 to the present). � The literature is fairly consistent in finding that large long-term immigrant surges have at least small negative wage effects for less-advantaged members of the labor force, and that these are likely to be largest for foreign-born workers and less-educated African-Americans in major immigrant-receiving regions. While this is consistent with the simple textbook prediction in a largely deregulated labor market, we might have expected more robust negative effects. The explanation may be that these effects are inherently difficult to isolate, especially given the quality of the data. Many less-skilled new immigrants are undocumented workers who are employed by individuals or small family businesses under-the-table and are either not counted or counted poorly. � The paper concludes that, while all consumers and many employers (both as households and as firms) have undoubtedly benefited substantially from the surge in undocumented low-skilled workers since the early 1980s, there are also some losers, and there is consequently a need for policy interventions designed to ensure that socially-acceptable wage levels, employment opportunities, and working conditions are maintained for our least advantaged workers, native- and foreign-born alike.�� David Howell is�a professor at Milano The New School for Management & Urban Policy. He is the editor of Fighting Unemployment: The Limits of Free Market Orthodoxy.immigration, wages, labor markets, labor supply

"Technological Change and the Demand for Skills in the 1980s: Does Skill Mismatch Explain the Growth of Low Earnings?"

The earnings of low-skill workers have suffered substantial declines since the mid 1970’s. The conventional explanation is that a technology-induced increase in skill requirements has resulted in a growing mismatch between the skills demanded by firms and those supplied by the workforce: declining demand for low-skill workers led to falling relative (and real) wages. But neither statistical nor case study evidence indicates that this period was characterized by a fundamental, economy-wide transformation in production technology or by a shift in the longterm upward trend in skill requirements whose timing and magnitude could account for the wage restructuring. What the evidence does suggest is that the collapse in wages was largely unrelated to skill restructuring. In the face of sharply increasing competition, employers adopted a “low-road” strategy aimed above all at reducing labor costs, through wage concessions from workers, the replacement of full-time with part-time and temporary workers, an increased reliance on low-wage outside contractors, and relocation to low-wage sites - a human resource strategy that was facilitated by rising supplies of workers willing to accept low wages (e.g., displaced high-wage workers and low-skill immigrants) and a variety of government policies. The mismatch appears to be less between skills demanded and skills supplied than between skills demanded and wages paid. This suggests that while there is a need to improve our education and training system, improving worker skills will not, by itself, have much impact on the distribution of earnings.

Device for directionally controlling electromagnetic radiation Patent

Concentrator device for controlling direction of solar energy onto energy converter

Directional control of radiant heat

Surface with grooves having flat bases gives directional emissivities and absorptivities that can be made to approximate a perfect directional surface. Radiant energy can then be transferred in desired directions

Fringe Science: Defringing CCD Images with Neon Lamp Flat Fields

Fringing in CCD images is troublesome from the aspect of photometric quality and image flatness in the final reduced product. Additionally, defringing during calibration requires the inefficient use of time during the night to collect and produce a "supersky" fringe frame. The fringe pattern observed in a CCD image for a given near-IR filter is dominated by small thickness variations across the detector with a second order effect caused by the wavelength extent of the emission lines within the bandpass which produce the interference pattern. We show that essentially any set of emission lines which generally match the wavelength coverage of the night sky emission lines within a bandpass will produce an identical fringe pattern. We present an easy, inexpensive, and efficient method which uses a neon lamp as a flat field source and produces high S/N fringe frames to use for defringing an image during the calibration process.Comment: accepted to PAS

Hydrogen production econometric studies

The current assessments of fossil fuel resources in the United States were examined, and predictions of the maximum and minimum lifetimes of recoverable resources according to these assessments are presented. In addition, current rates of production in quads/year for the fossil fuels were determined from the literature. Where possible, costs of energy, location of reserves, and remaining time before these reserves are exhausted are given. Limitations that appear to hinder complete development of each energy source are outlined

By What Measure? A Comparison of French and U.S. Labor Market Performance with New Indicators of Employment Adequacy

The unemployment rate is conventionally relied upon to measure national employment performance, and has been the main indicator justifying comprehensive labor market reforms, generally in the direction of deregulation and benefit reduction. The starting point of this working paper is that a well-functioning labor market should produce not just enough jobs, but enough “decent” jobs. We compare U.S. and French performance according to three indicators, calculated from each country’s main household survey for 1993-2005 by age, gender and education group. With low wages defined as less than 2/3 of the full-time median and inadequate hours defined as working involuntarily part-time, we calculate: 1) the low-wage share of employment; 2) the underemployed share of the labor force; and 3) the adequately employed share of the working age population. France performs well above the U.S. on all three indicators, particularly for less-educated workers, and the French advantage has grown substantially since the late 1990s. In 2005 the underemployed share of the male labor force with less than a high school degree was 64% in the U.S. and just 23% in France; for the female labor force, these figures were 84% in the U.S. and 41% in France. The adequately employed share of the prime-age (25-54) population with just a high school degree was 64% for U.S. men and 80% for French men; among women, these rates were 39% for the U.S. and 63% for France. These results indicate that accounting for adequate pay and hours of work has large effects on the measurement of labor market performance. The authors conclude by recommending that indicators such as these, and not just the unemployment rate, should have a central place in discussions of national labor market reform.This paper was revised in November 2008.labor supply, labor demand, wages, unemployment,

Unemployment Compensation and High European Unemployment: A Reassessment with New Benefit Indicators

Generous unemployment benefits lie at the heart of the conventional explanation for persistent high unemployment. The effects of benefit generosity are more ambiguous in a broader behavioral framework in which workers get substantial disutility from unemployment controlling for income, and know that unemployment has scarring effects in the future. The micro evidence suggests modest effects of changes in generosity, but there are reasons to doubt that the impacts on national unemployment rates are consequential. The strongest evidence for the orthodox prediction comes from cross-country regressions on the OECD’s gross replacement rate (GRR), but we find little support in the pattern of annual changes in the GRR and the unemployment rate for OECD countries over the last three decades. We take advantage of newly released and much improved net replacement rate indicators from the OECD, which show little correlation with either the GRRs or with unemployment and employment rates. The evidence does not offer compelling support for the view that benefit generosity is at the root of high European unemployment. ��