Living Wage Ordinances

Since 1994, 130 municipalities have adopted living wage ordinances, which mandate that covered workers receive an hourly wage providing enough income to keep the individual above the poverty line. This study identifies what factors have lead to the proliferation of living wage laws across the United States while also determining what characteristics have prompted some municipalities to pass living wage ordinances while others have not. This research also considers the impact of living wages on municipalities that have adopted such laws. To further elucidate the issues associated with living wage ordinances, two cities—Baltimore and Los Angeles—are examined as case studies. Ultimately, this study concludes that municipalities that have adopted living wage laws share several characteristics and that living wage ordinances have provided significant benefits at relatively small costs

Improving Reading Skills by Encouraging Children to Read: A Randomized Evaluation of the Sa Aklat Sisikat Reading Program in the Philippines

We evaluate a program that aims to improve children's reading skills by providing classes with age-appropriate reading material and incentivizing children to read through a 31 day read-a-thon. During the read-a-thon, the program significantly increases the propensity of children to read, causing 20 percent more children to have read a book in the last week at school and increasing the number of books read by 2.3 in the last week and 7.2 in the last month. These increases extend both after the end of the program and outside of school, although at lower rates. The program also increased students’ scores on a reading assessment, causing students’ scores to improve by 0.13 standard deviations immediately after the program. The effect persisted even after the program ended with an effect of 0.06 standard deviations three months later.education, reading, development

The Impact of Foreign Aid on Development and Aggregate Welfare in Developing Countries

Over one billion people across the globe live in extreme poverty, struggling to survive on less than one U.S. dollar per day. The persistently low levels of aggregate welfare and human development in developing countries have recently caught the attention of many politicians and social observers. As the developed nations and multinational organizations of the world are called upon to increase development assistance to these impoverished countries, a question must be asked: Will increased foreign aid effectively raise human development in developing countries? While many studies have analyzed the impact of development aid on economic growth in developing nations, few have addressed the impact of development aid on more comprehensive areas of development. Analyzing data on 87 developing countries from 1980 to 2000, this study employs two-stage least squares estimation to evaluate the impact of foreign aid on the Human Development Index (HDI), a composite index of development and aggregate welfare, while controlling for the level of pro-poor public expenditure within a developing country. In addition, an interaction term between foreign aid and a measure of macroeconomic policies is utilized to determine if economic policy has an impact on the effectiveness of development assistance. This study finds that greater foreign aid is associated with lower levels of HDI after controlling for GDP and pro-poor public expenditure. In addition, the study concludes that macroeconomic policies do not influence the level of HDI in developing countries

Improving Reading Skills by Encouraging Children to Read in School: A Randomized Evaluation of the Sa Aklat Sisikat Reading Program in the Philippines

We show that a short-term (31 day) reading program, designed to provide age-appropriate reading material, to train teachers in their use, and to support teachers’ initial efforts for about a month improves students’ reading skills by 0.13 standard deviations. The effect is still present three months after the program but diminishes to 0.06 standard deviations, probably due to a reduced emphasis on reading after the program. We find that the program also encourages students to read more on their own at home. We find no evidence that improved reading ability improves test scores on other subjects.

A large field CCD system for quantitative imaging of microarrays

We describe a charge-coupled device (CCD) imaging system for microarrays capable of acquiring quantitative, high dynamic range images of very large fields. Illumination is supplied by an arc lamp, and filters are used to define excitation and emission bands. The system is linear down to fluorochrome densities ≪1 molecule/µm(2). The ratios of the illumination intensity distributions for all excitation wavelengths have a maximum deviation ∼±4% over the object field, so that images can be analyzed without computational corrections for the illumination pattern unless higher accuracy is desired. Custom designed detection optics produce achromatic images of the spectral region from ∼ 450 to ∼750 nm. Acquisition of a series of images of multiple fluorochromes from multiple arrays occurs under computer control. The version of the system described in detail provides images of 20 mm square areas using a 27 mm square, 2K × 2K pixel, cooled CCD chip with a well depth of ∼10(5) electrons, and provides ratio measurements accurate to a few percent over a dynamic range in intensity >1000. Resolution referred to the sample is 10 µm, sufficient for obtaining quantitative multicolor images from >30 000 array elements in an 18 mm × 18 mm square

Modelling the spatial distribution of DEM Error

Assessment of a DEM’s quality is usually undertaken by deriving a measure of DEM accuracy – how close the DEM’s elevation values are to the true elevation. Measures such as Root Mean Squared Error and standard deviation of the error are frequently used. These measures summarise elevation errors in a DEM as a single value. A more detailed description of DEM accuracy would allow better understanding of DEM quality and the consequent uncertainty associated with using DEMs in analytical applications. The research presented addresses the limitations of using a single root mean squared error (RMSE) value to represent the uncertainty associated with a DEM by developing a new technique for creating a spatially distributed model of DEM quality – an accuracy surface. The technique is based on the hypothesis that the distribution and scale of elevation error within a DEM are at least partly related to morphometric characteristics of the terrain. The technique involves generating a set of terrain parameters to characterise terrain morphometry and developing regression models to define the relationship between DEM error and morphometric character. The regression models form the basis for creating standard deviation surfaces to represent DEM accuracy. The hypothesis is shown to be true and reliable accuracy surfaces are successfully created. These accuracy surfaces provide more detailed information about DEM accuracy than a single global estimate of RMSE

Vitrification and Glass Transition of Water: Insights from Spin Probe ESR

Three long standing problems related to the physics of water viz, the possibility of vitrifying bulk water by rapid quenching, its glass transition, and the supposed impossibility of obtaining supercooled water between 150 and 233 K, the so-called 'no man's land'of its phase diagram, are studied using the highly sensitive technique of spin probe ESR. Our results suggest that water can indeed be vitrified by rapid quenching, it undergoes a glass transition at \~ 135 K, and the relaxation behavior studied using this method between 165 K and 233 K closely follows the predictions of the Adam-Gibbs model.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures; results on slow cooled water added; four figures compressed in to thre

An open software development-based ecosystem of R packages for metabolomics data analysis

A frequent problem with scientific research software is the lack of support, maintenance and further development. In particular, development by a single researcher can easily result in orphaned software packages, especially if combined with poor documentation or lack of adherence to open software development standards. The RforMassSpectrometry initiative aims to develop an efficient and stable infrastructure for mass spectrometry (MS) data analysis. As part of this initiative, a growing ecosystem of R software packages is being developed covering different aspects of metabolomics and proteomics data analysis. To avoid the aforementioned problems, community contributions are fostered, and open development, documentation and long-term support emphasized. At the heart of the package ecosystem is the Spectra package that provides the core infrastructure to handle and analyze MS data. Its design allows easy expansion to support additional file or data formats including data representations with minimal memory footprint or remote data access. The xcms package for LC-MS data preprocessing was updated to reuse this infrastructure, enabling now also the analysis of very large, or remote, data. This integration simplifies in addition complete analysis workflows which can include the MsFeatures package for compounding, and the MetaboAnnotation package for annotation of untargeted metabolomics experiments. Public annotation resources can be easily accessed through packages such as MsBackendMassbank, MsBackendMgf, MsBackendMsp or CompoundDb, the latter also allowing to create and manage lab-specific compound databases. Finally, the MsCoreUtils and MetaboCoreUtils packages provide efficient implementations of commonly used algorithms, designed to be re-used in other R packages. Ultimately, and in contrast to a monolithic software design, the package ecosystem enables to build customized, modular, and reproducible analysis workflows. Future development will focus on improved data structures and analysis methods for chromatographic data, and better interoperability with other open source softwares including a direct integration with Python MS libraries