The acquisition and labor market value of four English skills: new evidence from NALS

This study investigates the factors related to proficiency in understanding, speaking, reading, and writing English among immigrants using data from the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). It also investigates the earnings-English relationship for each of these four skills to establish which is more valuable in the labor market. English as a Second Language (ESL) courses, education, and years in the United States are found especially to affect English proficiency. Furthermore, the returns on oral proficiency are greater than the returns on literacy skills, although writing skills are more valuable than reading skills. The study concludes that English acquisition is a dynamic process, rather than static as argued by supporters of English-only legislation. An increased role for ESL courses in the acquisition of English is suggested as an alternative policy to English-only laws as long as the marginal cost is less than the marginal benefit. Copyright 2000 Western Economic Association International.

View Invariant Gait Recognition

Recognition by gait is of particular interest since it is the biometric that is available at the lowest resolution, or when other biometrics are (intentionally) obscured. Gait as a biometric has now shown increasing recognition capability. There are many approaches and these show that recognition can achieve excellent performance on large databases. The majority of these approaches are planar 2D, largely since the early large databases featured subjects walking in a plane normal to the camera view. To extend deployment capability, we need viewpoint invariant gait biometrics. We describe approaches where viewpoint invariance is achieved by 3D approaches or in 2D. In the first group the identification relies on parameters extracted from the 3D body deformation during walking. These methods use several video cameras and the 3D reconstruction is achieved after a camera calibration process. On the other hand, the 2D gait biometric approaches use a single camera, usually positioned perpendicular to the subject’s walking direction. Because in real surveillance scenarios a system that operates in an unconstrained environment is necessary, many of the recent gait analysis approaches are orientated towards viewinvariant gait recognition