Gender Discrimination Across U.S. States: What Has Changed Over the Past Thirty Years?

This study examines changes in the gender wage gap and level of gender discrimination in the United States over the period1980-2010 at the national and state levels. Using data from the U.S. Current Population Survey, this study applies the Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition to separate the explained and unexplained variations in the gender pay gap. The unexplained variation proxies the level of gender discrimination faced by U.S. workers. The wage equation estimated utilizes the Heckman methodology to control for sample selection bias. Results with and without sample selectivity controls are included in this paper. This study reports the gender pay gap in the United States fell from 0.4357 log points over the period 1980-1984 to 0.2673 log points over the period 2005-2010. The narrowing in the gender pay gap is mainly attributable to a reduction in the level of gender discrimination, which decreased by 0.1539 log points in the United States over the thirty year period. Estimations conducted at the state level show the gender pay gap also narrowed for all states over the period 1980-2010. This study finds wide variations in the gender pay gap and level of discrimination at the state level. However, the variance in the gender pay gap and level of discrimination across U.S. states decreased significantly over the thirty year period, providing evidence that convergence is underway

A computational corpus study of harmony in the music of Anton Webern

This thesis sets out to apply digital analysis to the music of Anton Webern, with the aim of quantifying elements of his harmonic style, and tracing their change across his practice. It is a corpus study, taking Webern’s 31 works with Opus numbers as its subject, and uses music21 for the data collection. Analytical subjects include distributions of pitch classes, intervals, and pitch-class sets; techniques for assessing these include clustering, regression analysis, and the Discrete Fourier Transform. Along the way, the thesis interrogates commonly-held assumptions about Webern’s music for which there is often little empirical evidence, and provides a multi-level perspective on the corpus, from the wide angle of whole-movement macroharmonies to the close-up detail of individual pitch-class sets. Chronologically, the results suggest that the advent of dodecaphony in Webern’s music had a limited effect on the surface features of the music he presented; rather that the major shift in his practice happened in his mid-period Lieder. Contra Allen Forte, I downplay the importance of octatonicism in his harmonic language in favour of a quartal quality, but in the process I explore the differing features between the various harmonic levels of Webern’s music

The development and validation of a scoring tool to predict the operative duration of elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: The ability to accurately predict operative duration has the potential to optimise theatre efficiency and utilisation, thus reducing costs and increasing staff and patient satisfaction. With laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide, a tool to predict operative duration could be extremely beneficial to healthcare organisations. Methods: Data collected from the CholeS study on patients undergoing cholecystectomy in UK and Irish hospitals between 04/2014 and 05/2014 were used to study operative duration. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was produced in order to identify significant independent predictors of long (> 90 min) operations. The resulting model was converted to a risk score, which was subsequently validated on second cohort of patients using ROC curves. Results: After exclusions, data were available for 7227 patients in the derivation (CholeS) cohort. The median operative duration was 60 min (interquartile range 45–85), with 17.7% of operations lasting longer than 90 min. Ten factors were found to be significant independent predictors of operative durations > 90 min, including ASA, age, previous surgical admissions, BMI, gallbladder wall thickness and CBD diameter. A risk score was then produced from these factors, and applied to a cohort of 2405 patients from a tertiary centre for external validation. This returned an area under the ROC curve of 0.708 (SE = 0.013, p  90 min increasing more than eightfold from 5.1 to 41.8% in the extremes of the score. Conclusion: The scoring tool produced in this study was found to be significantly predictive of long operative durations on validation in an external cohort. As such, the tool may have the potential to enable organisations to better organise theatre lists and deliver greater efficiencies in care

Gender Discrimination: What Factors Influence the Level of Gender Discrimination Facing U.S. Workers?

This paper uses previous research conducted by the author which analyzes gender discrimination at the state level. Using state level discrimination coefficients, this paper looks to analyze why discrimination varies significantly across the United States. The empirical model is constructed using a panel data set over the past twenty years to develop a model that explains why variations in the level of gender discrimination faced by U.S. workers has persisted despite the fact that the level of gender discrimination has decreased over this period