Negotiating the Great Recession: How Teacher Collective Bargaining Outcomes Change in Times of Financial Duress

This article examines how teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), teacher salaries, and class sizes changed during the Great Recession. Using a district-level data set of California teacher CBAs that includes measures of subarea contract strength and salaries from 2005–2006 and 2011–2012 tied to district-level longitudinal data, we estimate difference-in-difference models to examine bargaining outcomes for districts that should have been more or less fiscally constrained. We find that unions and administrators change critical elements of CBAs and district policy during times of fiscal duress. This includes increasing class sizes, reducing instructional time, and lowering base salaries to relieve financial pressures and negotiating increased protections for teachers in areas with less direct financial implications, including grievance procedures and nonteaching duties

Please Hold me Up: Why Firms Grant Exclusive Dealing Contracts

Why do irreplaceable firms with a choice of suppliers or customers deliberately expose themselves to the threat of hold up by contracting ex ante to deal with only one of them? Our explanation revolves around the multiple equilibria intrinsic to situations of unverifiable investment and many traders. Exclusive dealing eliminates inefficient equilibria in which too many firms invest too little. The enhanced ex post bargaining power of the chosen firm is beneficial for incentives whilst the distributional impact is more than offset in the ex ante negotiations over which this firm obtains the access privilege.exclusive dealing, hold-up, renegotiation

Pharmacoeconomics as a Management and Financial Strategy in Healthcare and Simulation as a Decision Making Tool for it: The Case of Ozone Therapy

Pharmacoeconomics can play a very important role in decision-making for healthcare structures. In fact, it consists of economic evaluation of drugs and treatments for specific diseases. Several techniques exist for this, mainly based on traditional management and financial methods as, for example: cost-minimization analysis, cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis or cost-utility analysis. The present paper proposes the use of agent based process simulation as an additional tool to assess the pharmacoeconomic analysis, in which to incorporate traditional financial tools. This technique allows to compare different treatments ceteris paribus, that is by simulating the effects of different drugs and treatments on the same patient, by comparing both the medical effects and the economic and financial effects. Last, the paper proposes the case of ozone therapy as a powerful use case for this simulative approach, since ozone, a natural gas with antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties, can successfully be used to treat many diseases as an alternative to other drugs and treatment

Remote Laboratory for Nuclear Security Education

Laboratory experiences for online students are very limited. To fill this gap, educators in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University developed a series of radiation detection experiments for their remote students. Radiation detection is only one piece of nuclear security. The objective of the current research is to describe the development and execution of three online laboratories that investigate the basic application of physical security sensors that use light, ultrasonics, and heat to detect adversaries. This laboratory complements lecture material from the department’s Nuclear Security System and Design course. Using the Remote Desktop Application, students connect to a laboratory computer at Texas A&M to control the apparatus and record data. The sensors from a LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Education Core set were employed because of their ease of connectivity and their ability to show in a simplistic way how more complex security systems use light, ultrasonics, and heat. Additionally, LabVIEW software was used to control ethernet stepper motors for lateral and rotary motion to move sensors and other apparatus. The three laboratories are described in detail in addition to their learning objectives and results

Pharmacoeconomic analysis of ozone therapy supported by agent based process simulation and data mining

Pharmacoeconomics is the set of methods applied to the economic evaluation of pharmacological treatments. Its goal is to determine the best possible health outcome with the available resources by comparing costs (inputs) and the consequences/benefits (outcomes) of one or more alternative choices. Ozone therapy can be considered as a powerful alternative to traditional methods in the management and treatment of several diseases, like, e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, lumbago, disc hernia, knee and hip disease, fibromyalgia, stroke outcomes, neurodegenerative syndromes and more. It is thus a very interesting topic to compare the costs and outcomes of ozone based treatments with those coming from other alternative methods, with the perspective of pharmacoeconomics. Several methods have been proposed for pharmacoeconomical analysis, including statistical and simulation tools. The purpose of this research paper is to review some of the simulation tools that could be used in this field and in particular to propose a hybrid simulation method, defined as agent based process simulation, which considers not only the involved costs, but also other non-monetary outcomes. In the same vein, a data mining set of techniques is proposed to collect data and to feed the simulation model

Luz Para As Nações! Aportes do Dêutero-Isaías em tempos pandêmicos

O objetivo deste estudo é apresentar algumas ideologias fecundas em contextosde crise bem como os caminhos alternativos a partir destas ideologias.Falaremos da composição do Dêutero Isaías, contexto, disputas retóricasentre profetas, quando estas ideologias encontram adesão ou são refutadase quando são fecundadas nos corações de pessoas confinadas a lugares denão-pertencimento. Finalizaremos com expectativas de retorno ao “nov

Experiences with Teaching Nuclear Security Professional Development Courses for Health Physicists

Health physicists are professionals that are experts in the recognition, evaluation, and control of health hazards to permit the safe use and application of radiation. They typically have broad knowledge in radiation (ionizing and non-ionizing), biology, ecology and safety. With this wealth expertise we believe the health physicists would be useful partners in an effective security culture. As such over three years, a total of seven professional enrichment courses have been offered by the authors to health physics and radiation protection professionals, both nationally and internationally. Five have been through the Health Physics Society meetings, one through the International Radiation Protection Association meeting, and one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This paper will briefly introduce these courses and will include learning objectives and descriptions of courses’ content. There was limited documented course participant feedback with only 1 of the 7 courses having documented course evaluations. Through both written and verbal feedback to the instructors it was clear the courses were well received

Parking Garage Measurements Indicating a Gamma Spectrometer-Neutron Counter Background Correlation

Gamma spectroscopy and gross neutron counting systems are commonly employed together during nuclear security operations, particularly mobile searches. The data from these systems are typically analyzed independently; however, operational data suggest a relationship between the background signals from both systems. This relationship appears to occur between the neutron count rate and the high energy (greater than 3 MeV) gamma spectrometer count rate for background conditions. To verify the presence of this correlation, high energy gamma ray and neutron count rates were measured in five parking garages on the Texas A&M University campus. These measurements employed one 4” x 4” x 16” NaI detector with an Ortec digiBASE MCA, four moderated 1” x 18” 3He tubes (part of the Ortec NAI-SS system), and two unmoderated 2” x 15” 3He tubes (part of a Thermo PackEye system). The NaI detector was calibrated to a 50 MeV scale and ignored signals less than 4 MeV. Results show a decrease in the count rate of each detector as the systems were moved further below the roof of each garage. These decreases appear linear, but exponential relationships are plausible. More importantly, the data also show that the count rates from the two different detector types are linearly related. The linear relationships are strong, and the slopes vary depending on which neutron counter is considered against the gamma spectrometer. While it is possible that these relationships are the result of the NaI system detecting 4-50 MeV (or even higher energy) gamma rays, it is more likely that this system is detecting charged particles: muons generated by cosmic ray interactions with the atmosphere or protons produced by the decay of free neutrons. All three of these particles would be produced proportionally to the neutrons that the 3He tubes would detect, either from the decay of the neutrons themselves or by being produced from the same cosmic ray interactions that produce the neutrons

Exercises Abroad: How Differing National Experiences are Reflected in Emergency Response Planning and Exercises

Recently a member of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Consequence Management Response Team took part in outreaches and an exercise in different foreign countries. In Brazil and South Korea, the outreaches revolved around a nuclear power plant exercise. In Canada, participation was limited to a table top Consequence Management exercise. This talk will briefly discuss each event and resulting pertinent observations. In each case, it became evident that governments respond to disasters very differently, and that these differences are not only culturally based, but also influenced by each government’s respective experience in dealing with natural disasters