Prevailing Wage Laws and Construction Labor Markets

Prevailing wage laws, which require that construction workers employed by private contractors on public projects be paid at least the wages and benefits that are "prevailing" for similar work in or near the locality in which the project is located, have been the focus of an extensive policy debate. We find that the relative wages of construction workers decline slightly after the repeal of a state prevailing wage law. However, the small overall impact of law repeal masks substantial differences in outcomes for different groups of construction employees. Repeal is associated with a sizeable reduction in the union wage premium and a significant narrowing of the black/nonblack wage differential for construction workers.

Exploiting Non-Markovianity of the Environment for Quantum Control

When the environment of an open quantum system is non-Markovian, amplitude and phase flow not only from the system into the environment but also back. Here we show that this feature can be exploited to carry out quantum control tasks that could not be realized if the system was isolated. Inspired by recent experiments on superconducting phase circuits, we consider an anharmonic ladder with resonant amplitude control only. This restricts realizable operations to SO(N). The ladder is immersed in an environment of two-level systems. Strongly coupled two-level systems lead to non-Markovian effects, whereas the weakly coupled ones result in single-exponential decay. Presence of the environment allows for implementing diagonal unitaries that, together with SO(N), yield the full group SU(N). Using optimal control theory, we obtain errors that are solely $T_1$-limited

Electoral Competitiveness and Turnout in British Elections, 1964-2010

This is the author version accepted for publication in Political Science Research and Methods. The final version is forthcoming and will be available on the Publisher's website via http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=RAMAnalyzing the British Election Study from 1964 to 2010, we examine the influence of electoral context on turnout, focusing on the closeness of elections in terms of lagged seat and constituency-level winning margins. Using cross-classified multilevel models to account for individual and contextual factors and disentangle life-cycle, cohort- and election-specific effects, we find that closeness strongly affects voting behavior, particularly among new electors. Widening seat margins in British elections over the last decades have had a persistent impact on turnout. Respondents who faced less competitive environments when young are more likely to abstain in subsequent elections than those reaching voting age after close-fought races. We conclude that variations in competitiveness have had both short- and long-term effects on turnout

A First Estimate of the Baryonic Mass Function of Galaxies

We estimate the baryonic (stellar+cold gas) mass function of galaxies in the local Universe by assigning a complete sample of Two Micron All Sky Survey and Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies a gas fraction based on a statistical sample of the entire population, under the assumption of a universally-applicable stellar initial mass function. The baryonic mass function is similar to the stellar mass function at the high mass end, and has a reasonably steep faint-end slope owing to the typically high cold gas fractions and low stellar mass-to-light ratios characteristic of low-mass galaxies. The Schechter Function fit parameters are phi* = 0.0108(6) per cubic Mpc per dex of mass, M* = 5.3(3)x10^10 solar masses, and alpha = -1.21(5), with formal error estimates given in parentheses (for a Hubble constant of 100 km/s per Mpc). We show that the neutral and molecular hydrogen mass functions derived using this indirect route are in agreement with direct estimates, validating our indirect method. Integrating under the baryonic mass function and incorporating all sources of uncertainty, we find that the baryonic (stellar+cold gas) mass density implied by this estimate is Omega_cold baryon = 0.0024+0.0007-0.0014, or 8% +4% -5% of the Big Bang nucleosynthesis expectation.Comment: ApJ Letters, accepted. 4 pages, 2 embedded figure

Whole fentanyl patch ingestion: a multi-center case series.

BACKGROUND: Fentanyl is a potent synthetic opioid with large abuse potential. A common preparation of fentanyl is a sustained-release transdermal patch. To our knowledge, there are only two published case reports of whole patch ingestion. A case series of 76 patients with a history of whole patch ingestion is reported. STUDY OBJECTIVES: To characterize whole fentanyl patch ingestion to develop a clinical guideline for management. METHODS: This was a retrospective review of all patients who ingested intact fentanyl patches as reported to three regional poison information centers (RPIC) from 2000 to 2008. The three RPIC medical record databases were queried for all exposures with a substance code matching the Micromedex® (Thomson Reuters, New York, NY) fentanyl product codes. Collected data included: age, gender, reason for the exposure, number of patches ingested, dose (μg/h), symptoms, symptom onset and duration, treatment hospital flow (level of care), and outcome. RESULTS: A total of 76 patients met the inclusion criteria. Two patients had both time of onset and symptom duration documented. In both patients, the signs and symptoms developed within 2 h of the exposure, and the patients were asymptomatic at 6½ and 9 h, respectively. Fifty-eight (78.3%) patients were admitted. Of those patients who were admitted, 56 (96.5%) were admitted to a critical care unit. Fourteen patients required intubation, and naloxone infusions were documented in eight cases. CONCLUSION: Ingestion of whole fentanyl patches may lead to prolonged and significant toxicity based on these poison center data

Addressing Research Software Sustainability via Institutes

Research software is essential to modern research, but it requires ongoing human effort to sustain: to continually adapt to changes in dependencies, to fix bugs, and to add new features. Software sustainability institutes, amongst others, develop, maintain, and disseminate best practices for research software sustainability, and build community around them. These practices can both reduce the amount of effort that is needed and create an environment where the effort is appreciated and rewarded. The UK SSI is such an institute, and the US URSSI and the Australian AuSSI are planning to become institutes, and this extended abstract discusses them and the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.Comment: accepted by ICSE 2021 BokSS Workshop (https://bokss.github.io/bokss2021/

Software Citation Implementation Challenges

The main output of the FORCE11 Software Citation working group (https://www.force11.org/group/software-citation-working-group) was a paper on software citation principles (https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86) published in September 2016. This paper laid out a set of six high-level principles for software citation (importance, credit and attribution, unique identification, persistence, accessibility, and specificity) and discussed how they could be used to implement software citation in the scholarly community. In a series of talks and other activities, we have promoted software citation using these increasingly accepted principles. At the time the initial paper was published, we also provided guidance and examples on how to make software citable, though we now realize there are unresolved problems with that guidance. The purpose of this document is to provide an explanation of current issues impacting scholarly attribution of research software, organize updated implementation guidance, and identify where best practices and solutions are still needed