53,693 research outputs found
Informal Workers and Collective Action: A Global Perspective
[Excerpt] Around the world, in countries as far flung as Cambodia and Brazil and in industries as diverse as transportation and hospitality, workers in informal employment, who labor every day with no legal or social protection, are organizing and negotiating for better conditions. Some of them are self-employed; others work for wages in either formal or informal enterprises. Some used to have jobs in the formal sector with a union contract; others have always worked informally. To achieve their goals they are mounting collective action campaigns that draw on the repertoire of past generations of workers, but they often recombine them or innovate to fit their unique contexts. Informal workers, their organizations and their campaigns, represent the leading edge of the most significant change in the global labor movement in more than a century. This book tells the story of nine such campaigns
The Global Employer: The Employment Law Review and Reform Issue
[Excerpt] Although the economies of many jurisdictions are improving, there is still some lingering global economic uncertainty. It is no surprise that governments the world over continue to revisit their employment laws to see what else, if anything, can be done to further stimulate their economies. 2013 was another busy year for employment law reform.
Baker & McKenzie’s Global Employment Practice Group is pleased to present its 55th issue of The Global Employer™ entitled “The Employment Law Review and Reform Issue.” In this issue, we review changes to the law in 2013 and a look at pending changes for 2014.
Included, you will find information pertaining to the leasing of employees in Germany; new measures in Spain intended to promote employment among young people under 30 and employee privacy rights over employers\u27 controls; challenges to the applicable interest rate to worker\u27s claims in Argentina; how employment law reforms will significantly impact employers in Mexico and in some specific cases, may considerably elevate increase the cost of formal employment; and controversy around making the Colombian Social Security System more progressive.
We also review several significant legal developments in China during 2013 that impact employers operating there; legislative changes that were expected in Hong Kong in 2013 that may be implemented in 2014 including a focus on discrimination in the coming years; and welcome changes to TUPE and automatic pension plan enrollment in the United Kingdom
Employee Ownership and Shared Capitalism: New Directions in Research
[Excerpt] This book showcases the diverse state of cutting-edge academic work on shared capitalism. More specifically, this book attempts to illuminate a representative cross section of current research about shared capitalism, enliven academic debates about it, and embolden new research initiatives. The works in this volume do not provide a complete picture of the current state of employee ownership or research about it, but by showcasing a representative sample of work, they illuminate shared capitalism\u27s complexity as an organizational, psychological, sociological, and economic phenomenon that requires deep interdisciplinary understanding.
Another goal of this volume is to demonstrate to broader groups of policy makers, shareholder activists, journalists, business intellectuals, economic and social justice activists, and citizens the ongoing relevance of shared capitalism and its potential for improving broader social and economic outcomes beyond employee well-being and firm productivity, such as promoting economic growth, innovation, and employment stability, as well as addressing the alarming growth in wealth inequality that has occurred in the last two decades. Although this book and its introduction focus primarily on employee ownership in the United States and, to a lesser extent, western Europe, it is important to note that shared capitalism can be found in all parts of the globe, from broad-based employee stock options in Korea, to the privatization of formerly state-owned industries in eastern Europe, to worker cooperatives in Argentina that were created in response to the financial crisis of the early 2000s. This diversity provides a rich set of experiences on which we can draw to assess the potential offered by shared capitalism and to inform policies to encourage it. This volume represents a modest step in that direction
Real-to-Virtual Domain Unification for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
In the spectrum of vision-based autonomous driving, vanilla end-to-end models
are not interpretable and suboptimal in performance, while mediated perception
models require additional intermediate representations such as segmentation
masks or detection bounding boxes, whose annotation can be prohibitively
expensive as we move to a larger scale. More critically, all prior works fail
to deal with the notorious domain shift if we were to merge data collected from
different sources, which greatly hinders the model generalization ability. In
this work, we address the above limitations by taking advantage of virtual data
collected from driving simulators, and present DU-drive, an unsupervised
real-to-virtual domain unification framework for end-to-end autonomous driving.
It first transforms real driving data to its less complex counterpart in the
virtual domain and then predicts vehicle control commands from the generated
virtual image. Our framework has three unique advantages: 1) it maps driving
data collected from a variety of source distributions into a unified domain,
effectively eliminating domain shift; 2) the learned virtual representation is
simpler than the input real image and closer in form to the "minimum sufficient
statistic" for the prediction task, which relieves the burden of the
compression phase while optimizing the information bottleneck tradeoff and
leads to superior prediction performance; 3) it takes advantage of annotated
virtual data which is unlimited and free to obtain. Extensive experiments on
two public driving datasets and two driving simulators demonstrate the
performance superiority and interpretive capability of DU-drive
Dispersants and Risk Communication
Risk communications is a research area of the social sciences which is closely associated with human dimensions and external communications. External communications, traditionally in the purview of public affairs, may have multiple purposes including influencing public beliefs, opinions, and judgments about the incident.
There are many approaches toward risk communications. Some of them focus on improving the way external communications about risks are conducted, e.g., developing better messages, and some focus on the content of risk communications, that is, sharing technical information to support the assessment of the potential for risks
Projection volumes of hyperplane arrangements
We prove that for any finite real hyperplane arrangement the average
projection volumes of the maximal cones is given by the coefficients of the
characteristic polynomial of the arrangement. This settles the conjecture of
Drton and Klivans that this held for all finite real reflection arrangements.
The methods used are geometric and combinatorial. As a consequence we determine
that the angle sums of a zonotope are given by the characteristic polynomial of
the order dual of the intersection lattice of the arrangement
Public Jobs and Public Agendas: The Public Sector in an Era of Economic Stress
[Excerpt] The issues described in this volume\u27s chapters remained in flux as this book was being completed. The U.S. economy was in a recovery phase, albeit a recovery at a rather lackluster pace. Because of the lags in adjustment in state and local governments, the public sector was coping with prior circumstances even as the private sector resumed an economic expansion. At the international level, some European elections in the aftermath of the Great Recession have suggested that there is public frustration with austerity policies.
The Great Recession occurred in an era of political polarization, which the sharp downturn exacerbated. As a result, resolving the issues related to public sector employment was complicated by an infusion of ideology. Working out the problems that remain unresolved is likely to be marked by continued partisan struggles in state and local affairs, and in similar conflicts around the world
Food safety in food security and food trade:
CONTENTS: Overview / Laurian J. Unnevehr; Food Safety as a Public Health Issue for Developing Countries / Fritz K. K�ferstein; Mycotoxin Food Safety Risk in Developing Countries / Ramesh V. Bhat and Siruguri Vasanthi; Trends in Food Safety Standards and Regulation: Implications for Developing Countries / Julie A. Caswell; Food Safety Issues in International Trade / Spencer Henson; Balancing Risk Reduction and Benefits from Trade in Setting Standards / John Wilson and Tsunehiro Otsuki; Case Study: Guatemalan Raspberries and Cyclospora / Linda Calvin, Luis Flores, and William Foster; Case Study: Kenyan Fish Exports / Richard O. Abila; Case Study:The Shrimp Export Industry in Bangladesh / James C. Cato and S. Subasinge; Case Study: Reducing Pesticide Residues on Horticultural Crops / George W. Norton, Guillermo E. Sanchez, Dionne Clarke-Harris, and Halimatou Koné Traoré; Case Study: India Responds to International Food Safety Requirements / Shashi Sareen; Case Study: Supermarkets and Quality and Safety Standards for Produce in Latin America / Julio A. Berdegué, Fernando Balsevich, Luis Flores, Denise Mainville, and Thomas Reardon; Case Study: Beef industry in China / Colin G. Brown and Scott A.Waldron; Case Study:The Poultry Industry in Colombia / Miguel I. Gómez, Diego M. Sierra, and Daisy Rodriguez; Case Study: Reducing Mycotoxins in Brazilian Crops / Elisabete Salay; Food Safety and GM Crops: Implications for Developing-Country Research / Joel I. Cohen, Hector Quemada, and Robert Frederick; Food Safety Policy Issues for Developing Countries / Laurian J. Unnevehr, Lawrence Haddad, and Christopher Delgado.food security, Food safety, trade, health,
Optimality program in segment and string graphs
Planar graphs are known to allow subexponential algorithms running in time
or for most of the paradigmatic
problems, while the brute-force time is very likely to be
asymptotically best on general graphs. Intrigued by an algorithm packing curves
in by Fox and Pach [SODA'11], we investigate which
problems have subexponential algorithms on the intersection graphs of curves
(string graphs) or segments (segment intersection graphs) and which problems
have no such algorithms under the ETH (Exponential Time Hypothesis). Among our
results, we show that, quite surprisingly, 3-Coloring can also be solved in
time on string graphs while an algorithm running
in time for 4-Coloring even on axis-parallel segments (of unbounded
length) would disprove the ETH. For 4-Coloring of unit segments, we show a
weaker ETH lower bound of which exploits the celebrated
Erd\H{o}s-Szekeres theorem. The subexponential running time also carries over
to Min Feedback Vertex Set but not to Min Dominating Set and Min Independent
Dominating Set.Comment: 19 pages, 15 figure
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