THE AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT

Public Economics,

Why Volunteer? Evidence on the Role of Altruism, Reputation, and Incentives

Volunteering plays a prominent role in the charitable provision of goods and services, yet we know relatively little about why people engage in such prosocial acts. The list of possible motivations is long, but recent research has focused on altruism, reputational concerns, and material incentives. We present an analysis of a unique data set that combines an experimental measure of altruism, surveyed measures of other factors including reputational concerns, and call records from volunteer firefighters that provide an objective measure of the hours volunteered. Controlling for a variety of other explanations, we find that altruism and reputational concerns are positively associated with the decision to volunteer. Moreover, by utilizing variation in the presence and level of small stipends paid to the firefighters, we find that the positive effect of monetary incentives declines with reputational concerns, supporting a prediction that extrinsic incentives can crowd out prosocial behavior.volunteer, altruism, reputation, firefighter JEL Classification: C93, D12, J22, D64, D82

Why Volunteer? Evidence on the Role of Altruism, Image, and Incentives

We examine motivations for prosocial behavior using new data on volunteer firefighters that contain a dictator-game based measure of altruism, surveyed measures of other behavioral factors, and call records that provide an objective measure of time spent volunteering. Controlling for a variety of other explanations, we find that the decision to volunteer is positively correlated with altruism as well as with concern for social reputation or image.” Moreover, by utilizing variation in the presence and level of small stipends paid to the firefighters, we find that the positive effect of monetary incentives declines with image concerns, supporting a prediction that extrinsic incentives can crowd out image motivation for prosocial behavior.volunteer, altruism, reputation, extrinsic motivation, firefighter

Improving the Retention of United States (U.S.) Government Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Employees

The U.S. government workforce has been consistently shrinking since a peak in the 1990s. At the same time, the need for technologically-savvy government workers has dramatically risen in this same period. This divergence in the demand for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) employees challenges government leaders to retain these highly demanded workers in the public sector. Decades of psychological research across many industries has investigated what motivates workers and how best to incentivize them to increase productivity. Maslow and Herzberg, among others, theorized that adult workers have both intrinsic and extrinsic needs that drive their behaviors and resultant productivity. Following from those early psychological explorations, extensive Public Service Motivation theory and Job Design studies provide the scaffolding on which management of federal government employees is built. A number of themes emerged from these studies which affect public service personnel: competitive pay and benefits, bureaucracy, human resources, career options, personnel development. These themes are used to develop human capital policies that drive managerial incentives intended to motivate their employees. Traditionally, these studies focus only on groups of current civil servants. This dissertation was a two-phased explanatory sequential mixed-method investigation into STEM workers who departed federal service. The first phase was a quantitative examination into former employees’ motivations and decisions leading up to their departure; sample size = 73. Phase 2 qualitatively inquired into eight intentionally selected interviewees about the factors that influenced their decision-making process. Regression analysis of the responses showed a significant positive correlation between Years of Government Service with Decision Making Autonomy and Task Significance. In short, this means that if a person has meaningful work and the self-authority to complete it, they will stay working longer. The Phase 2 interviews brought one additional important piece to the conclusions which is that supervisors are the key factor in motivation and retention. The results are in line with predictions of Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene approach to motivation. Recommendations were made to improve the control and impact of first-line supervisors; such as to standardize and monitor supervisor training; and, to implement a talent management program

Index Bucketing: A Novel Approach to Manipulating Data Structures

Handling nested data collections in large-scale distributed systems poses considerable challenges in query processing, often resulting in substantial costs and error susceptibility. While substantial efforts have been directed toward overcoming computation hurdles in querying vast data collections within relational databases, scant attention has been devoted to the manipulation and flattening procedures necessary for unnesting these data collections. Flattening operations, integral to unnesting, frequently yield copious duplicate data and entail a loss of information, devoid of mechanisms for reconstructing the original structure. These challenges exacerbate in scenarios involving skewed, nested data with irregular inner data collections. Processing such data demands an extravagant number of operations, leading to extensive data duplication and imposing challenges in ensuring balanced distribution across partitions. Consequently, these factors impede performance and scalability. This research introduces a pioneering approach that amalgamates upfront computations with data manipulation techniques, specifically focusing on flattening procedures. This methodology aims to mitigate the adverse implications of data duplication and information loss while effectively addressing both skewed and irregular nesting structures. The efficacy of the proposed approach is assessed through comprehensive evaluations conducted on prominent datasets such as SQuAD, QuAC, and NewsQA, comparing its performance against existing methods like Pandas and recursive, iterative flattening implementations. These evaluations serve as a critical yardstick for gauging the effectiveness and viability of this novel approach in realworld scenarios

Economic Analysis of Alexander County

Since 2020, economies across the country and world have been recovering from one of the most unique and impactful events in modern history, COVID-19. The pandemic had an impact on both regional economies and national economies alike. Unlike most counties, Alexander County, Illinois was struggling before the pandemic. There were plans in place by the state government to hopefully improve the economic well-being of the area, but most of those projects were paused in the wake of COVID-19. This paper will examine the history of the county, various economic sectors, and the challenges faced ahead. The paper will conclude with a recommendation for the county’s economic strategy, as well as external assistance that could potentially reverse the decline of the county’s economic well-being

Nonlinear Dynamics of Particles Excited by an Electric Curtain

The use of the electric curtain (EC) has been proposed for manipulation and control of particles in various applications. The EC studied in this paper is called the 2-phase EC, which consists of a series of long parallel electrodes embedded in a thin dielectric surface. The EC is driven by an oscillating electric potential of a sinusoidal form where the phase difference of the electric potential between neighboring electrodes is 180 degrees. We investigate the one- and two-dimensional nonlinear dynamics of a particle in an EC field. The form of the dimensionless equations of motion is codimension two, where the dimensionless control parameters are the interaction amplitude ($A$) and damping coefficient ($\beta$). Our focus on the one-dimensional EC is primarily on a case of fixed $\beta$ and relatively small $A$, which is characteristic of typical experimental conditions. We study the nonlinear behaviors of the one-dimensional EC through the analysis of bifurcations of fixed points. We analyze these bifurcations by using Floquet theory to determine the stability of the limit cycles associated with the fixed points in the Poincar\'e sections. Some of the bifurcations lead to chaotic trajectories where we then determine the strength of chaos in phase space by calculating the largest Lyapunov exponent. In the study of the two-dimensional EC we independently look at bifurcation diagrams of variations in $A$ with fixed $\beta$ and variations in $\beta$ with fixed $A$. Under certain values of $\beta$ and $A$, we find that no stable trajectories above the surface exists; such chaotic trajectories are described by a chaotic attractor, for which the the largest Lyapunov exponent is found. We show the well-known stable oscillations between two electrodes come into existence for variations in $A$ and the transitions between several distinct regimes of stable motion for variations in $\beta$

A Duality Theory for the Algebraic Invariants of Substitution Tiling Spaces

We present here a method for computing the homology of a substitution tiling space. There is a well established cohomology theory that uses simple matrix computations to determine if two tiling spaces are dierent. We will show how to compute Putnam\u27s homology groups for these spaces using simple linear algebra. We construct a Markov Partition based on the substitution rules, and exploit the properties of this partition as a shift of finite type to construct algebraic invariants for the tiling space. These invariants form a chain complex, of which we can compute the homology. In our examples we will demonstrate an interesting duality between the cohomology and homology of these spaces. This leads to a conjecture relating the two theories to each other and we present the reasoning behind the conjecture

Interacting with Your Gay and Lesbian Colleague

A diversity subject, rarely discussed, is how we interact with our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered colleagues. While it is a very uncomfortable subject for many, we can only begin to grow in our awareness if we begin the dialog. This article brings a voice to this topic with the hope to facilitate this journey of acceptance and inclusion

Orbiter Flying Qualities (OFQ) Workstation user's guide

This project was devoted to the development of a software package, called the Orbiter Flying Qualities (OFQ) Workstation, for working with the OFQ Archives which are specially selected sets of space shuttle entry flight data relevant to flight control and flying qualities. The basic approach to creation of the workstation software was to federate and extend commercial software products to create a low cost package that operates on personal computers. Provision was made to link the workstation to large computers, but the OFQ Archive files were also converted to personal computer diskettes and can be stored on workstation hard disk drives. The primary element of the workstation developed in the project is the Interactive Data Handler (IDH) which allows the user to select data subsets from the archives and pass them to specialized analysis programs. The IDH was developed as an application in a relational database management system product. The specialized analysis programs linked to the workstation include a spreadsheet program, FREDA for spectral analysis, MFP for frequency domain system identification, and NIPIP for pilot-vehicle system parameter identification. The workstation also includes capability for ensemble analysis over groups of missions