The Living Wage: In the Public Interest? Increasing the Quality of Life for Families and Communities

This report explores the relationship among minimum wage income, government subsidies, and workers' tax contributions. The report provides a snapshot of current minimum wage income relative to basic need household expenses and includes relevant income-tested government entitlement subsidies. A companion snapshot for a living wage1 provides a point of comparison

Remarks on the McKay Conjecture

The McKay Conjecture (MC) asserts the existence of a bijection between the (inequivalent) complex irreducible representations of degree coprime to $p$ ($p$ a prime) of a finite group $G$ and those of the subgroup $N$, the normalizer of Sylow $p$-subgroup. In this paper we observe that MC implies the existence of analogous bijections involving various pairs of algebras, including certain crossed products, and that MC is \emph{equivalent} to the analogous statement for (twisted) quantum doubles. Using standard conjectures in orbifold conformal field theory, MC is \emph{equivalent} to parallel statements about holomorphic orbifolds $V^G, V^N$. There is a uniform formulation of MC covering these different situations which involves quantum dimensions of objects in pairs of ribbon fusion categories

Culture matters: America’s African Diaspora and labor market outcomes

This paper contrasts the explanatory power of the mono-cultural and diversity models of racial disparity. The mono-cultural model ignores nativity and ethnic differences among African Americans. The diversity model assumes that culture affects both intra- and interracial labor market disparity. The diversity model seeks to enhance our ability to understand the relative merits of culture versus market discrimination as determinants of racial inequality in labor market outcomes. Our results are consistent with the diversity model of racial inequality. Specifically, racial disparity consists of the following outcomes: 1) persistent racial wage and employment effects between both native and immigrant African Americans and whites, 2) limited ethnicity effects among African Americans, 3) diverse employment and wage effects among native and immigrant African Americans, 4) intra-racial wage penalties (premiums) for immigrant (native) African Americans, and 5) evidence of relatively higher unobserved productivity-linked attributes among Caribbean-English immigrants. There are regional and intertemporal variations in these inequalities

Electronic evidence and the meaning of "original"

Article based on a paper given at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Graduate School of Decision Science and Technology, Ookayama-campus, Tokyo.Article by Stephen Mason published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London

Keynote address: Is there a distinctive Māori psychology?

Many of the theoretical paradigms that underpin the study of psychology pay marginal attention to culture as a determinant of psychology. While there are some aspects of human experience that are universal, patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving are by no means divorced from specific cultural influence. A challenge for Māori psychologists is to re-examine psychological theory from a Māori perspective. In attempting to identify the psychological distinctiveness underlying a Māori perspective, this paper has introduced marae encounters as a rich source of information within which distinctive psychological characteristics can be identified

The problem of misrepresentation meets connectionist representations : a thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy

Page 162 is missing from the original copyTheories of semantics try to explain the relationship between a mental representation and the thing it represents; to explain, for instance, how my coffee representation represents coffee. (Here and in the rest of this thesis, I use the convention of writing the label for a representation in bold type.) In many traditional theories of semantics, the relationship between my coffee representation and coffee is usually explained by recourse to causal relations between coffee and this representation. But attempts at explanations along these lines have many problems, among them the problem that it is difficult to find a plausible way of accounting for the fact that representations are able to misrepresent-or have false content. Sometimes I can think "that's coffee" when what's actually in the cup being handed to me is tea. Getting this fact to sit happily with accounts of the relation between my coffee representation and coffee hasn't been an easy task. Traditional approaches to this problem haven't had a lot of success so far in explaining how a representation can misrepresent. In this thesis I aim to avoid the problems with these traditional approaches, and find a causally-based, biologically realistic way to explain semantic relations between mental representations and objects in the world, which is also capable of explaining misrepresentation. The best place to start such an endeavour is to examine what the problem of representation and misrepresentation is, and the general tactics used in traditional attempts to solve this problem. This will illustrate why misrepresentation appears to be so intractable. Through such an examination we can get a close look at the traditional approaches, and their assumptions about what representations are, what sorts of things they represent, and how they can represent what they represent. We can also get a good view of the unquestioned assumptions these traditional theories are based on. This will give us a good place to start. I'm going to argue that if we want to achieve our aim of a biologically realistic theory of semantics which shows how representations can misrepresent, we'll need an approach to the problem which does not take these assumptions as foundations. In this thesis I aim to construct an account which isn't based on these assumptions.[FROM INTRODUCTION