Unintended Consequences Of Equal Employment Opportunity: Unequal Parties In The Selection Process?

There arevarious regulations that are intended to promote equal employment opportunityand avoid illegal discrimination in the employment process. These regulationsdetermine what information employers may seek, and require that informationsought be job-related or it is illegal to seek such information as age, maritalstatus, or religion. Information that is not a bona fide occupationalqualification (BFOQ) is usually out of bounds as employers gather informationto determine the suitability of applicants for employment.  Since one of thebedrock laws affecting the employment relationship is the “at will” doctrinethat assumes both employer and applicant come together as equal partners in theformation of the employment contract, this paper raises the issues aboutwhether such regulations unintentionally leave the employer at an informationdisadvantage by negating the concept of equality assumed by the “at will”doctrine. Some suggestions for practical ways of reducing the identifiedemployer information disadvantages are provided

Late Pliocene-Pleistocene stress field in the Teruel grabens (eastern Spain): Contribution of a new method of stress inversion

Samples of non-striated fracture surfaces within clastic materials of Late Pliocene–Pleistocene age from the Teruel grabens (eastern Spain) have been analysed using a stress inversion method based on observations of slip sense. The results obtained at 21 sites are compared with Late Miocene–Early Pliocene extensional stress tensors previously inferred from striated faults in the same area. The similarity between both sets of stress states suggests that the extensional Miocene–Pliocene stress field essentially continues (with minor changes) into Pliocene–Pleistocene times. The main changes involve (a) the dominant trend of σ3 trajectories, which evolve from ESE to ENE; (b) the waning of the compressional component caused by Europe–Iberia–Africa convergence; and (c) the progressive trend towards a multidirectional extension regime. Stress deflection caused by large-scale extensional faults as well as switching of σ2 and σ3 axes induced by fracture development are common within this stress field. They produce groups of local stress ellipsoids with σ3 axes orthogonal to each other and either orthogonal or parallel to the faults bounding the grabens. The regional consistency of the new results gives support to the new inversion method and demonstrates its utility in research on young sedimentary rocks, where ‘gaps’ in palaeostress records may exist due to absence of striated faults

Analysis of non-striated faults in a recent extensional setting: the Plio-Pleistocene Concud fault (Jiloca graben, eastern Spain)

The integration of palaeostress results obtained from the analysis of non-striated faults and joints affecting Plio-Pleistocene deposits near the Concud fault (southern Jiloca graben, eastern Spain) yields a multidirectional tension stress field (vertical s1, s2zs3) where the primary s3 trajectories trend ENE. The results also show strong deflections of stress trajectories, with many local s3 axes being either orthogonal or parallel to the trace of the Concud fault. The stress field persisted throughout the period of activity of the fault, i.e. Late Pliocene and Pleistocene. The agreement between the present results and the regional picture gives support to the stress inversion method and shows its usefulness in palaeostress analysis of young, poorly lithified rocks

Favoured states of palaeostress in the Earth's crust: evidence from fault-slip data

In a major survey of published palaeostress estimates obtained by the use of fault-slip data, over 2000 stress tensors from shallow crustal levels have been compiled. The results are derived from regions where deformation is dominated by brittle processes, and consist of incomplete stress tensors in which the orientations of the principal stresses (σ1≧ σ2≧ σ3) are known, together with the stress ratio, φ=(σ2-σ3)/(σ1-σ3). The orientations of the stress axes display a preferred orientation, with a tendency for one of the axes to be vertical. This accords with Anderson's assumed 'standard state' stress configuration near to the Earth's free surface. Although the tendency is strong, there are frequent deviations from the arrangement; in 25% of cases the steepest stress axis deviates by more than 25° from the vertical. In undertaking studies of palaeostress it would be therefore unwise to use methods that assume a priori one vertical stress axis unless previous local results indicate this to be the case. Normal, strike-slip and thrust stress arrangements (with σ1, σ2 and σ3 as the steepest stress, respectively) occur in the database with frequencies approximately in the ratio 2:2:1. In the compiled results, the raw stress ratios, φ, which have a theoretical range from 0 to 1, show a lack of very high values and, to a lesser extent, very low values. This suggests that triaxial stress states are more common than axial compression deviatoric stress and axial tension deviatoric stress. However, this relative abundance of triaxial stress states is considered to be a natural feature of a uniform distribution of stress tensors. In addition, there is a marked bias in the collated ratios towards values less than 0.5 and this is expressed by an overall mean φ of 0.39. Several possible explanations for the distribution of stress ratios are discussed. These explanations are related to the tendency for tectonic deformation to be of plane strain type coupled with volume change and to the fact that gravitational loading makes an important contribution to the state of stress in the crust

A Generalized Bandsplit Neural Network for Cinematic Audio Source Separation

Cinematic audio source separation is a relatively new subtask of audio source separation, with the aim of extracting the dialogue, music, and effects stems from their mixture. In this work, we developed a model generalizing the Bandsplit RNN for any complete or overcomplete partitions of the frequency axis. Psychoacoustically motivated frequency scales were used to inform the band definitions which are now defined with redundancy for more reliable feature extraction. A loss function motivated by the signal-to-noise ratio and the sparsity-promoting property of the 1-norm was proposed. We additionally exploit the information-sharing property of a common-encoder setup to reduce computational complexity during both training and inference, improve separation performance for hard-to-generalize classes of sounds, and allow flexibility during inference time with detachable decoders. Our best model sets the state of the art on the Divide and Remaster dataset with performance above the ideal ratio mask for the dialogue stem