Essays on archaic institutions and modern technology

I present three essays discussing the impact of archaic institutions and technology on inequality in wages and political participation. First I examine a modern facet of the Indian caste system: political quotas for disadvantaged minorities and their impact on political participation. I find that aggregate turnout falls by 9% of the baseline and right-wing parties win 50% more often, but electoral competition is not significantly affected. Detailed individual-level data for one state suggests that voter participation falls among women and minorities. This suggests that restricting candidate identity to minorities may cause some bias in voter participation. Next, I study caste and human capital: specifically why workers remain in lowpaying hereditary occupations, providing an explanation for both occupational specialization and hereditary occupations. I use a simple model of insurance provision in which parents pass on human capital to their children in return for insurance in the event of sickness, and find that workers with low human capital are likelier to participate in the arrangement, and that a higher cost of sickness can sustain higher human capital transfers. I conclude by studying human capital and technology- the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on wage inequality. We tested the hypothesis that information and communication technologies (ICT) polarize labour markets, by increasing demand for the highly educated at the expense of the middle educated, with little effect on low-educated workers. Using data on the US, Japan, and nine European countries from 1980-2004, we find that industries with faster ICT growth shifted demand from middle educated workers to highly educated workers, consistent with ICT-based polarization. Trade openness is also associated with polarization, but this is not robust to controlling for Research and Development. Technologies account for up to a quarter of the growth in demand for highly educated workers

Impact of academic hospitalists on American medical education : A compact review

Hospitalists are physicians whose medical practice focuses on general medical inpatient care. (1) Wachter and Goldman first used the term Hospitalist in 1996 to describe a new type of physician in the United States. (2) Initially, the concept of the Hospitalist was not widely accepted and faced significant resistance from many physicians. (3) However, Hospitalists now constitute a major force in the healthcare industry, providing inpatient care in both non-teaching settings as well as teaching hospitals ranging from small community hospitals to large academic centers. This article will discuss the role of academic Hospitalists in medical education in the United States

Has ICT Polarized Skill Demand? Evidence from Eleven Countries over 25 Years

OECD labor markets have become more "polarized" with employment in the middle of the skill distribution falling relative to the top and (in recent years) also the bottom of the skill distribution. We test the hypothesis of Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) that this is partly due to information and communication technologies (ICT) complementing the analytical tasks primarily performed by highly educated workers and substituting for routine tasks generally performed by middle educated workers (with little effect on low educated workers performing manual non-routine tasks). Using industry level data on the US, Japan, and nine European countries 1980-2004 we find evidence consistent with ICT-based polarization. Industries with faster growth of ICT had greater increases in relative demand for high educated workers and bigger falls in relative demand for middle educated workers. Trade openness is also associated with polarization, but this is not robust to controls for technology (like R&D). Technologies can account for up to a quarter of the growth in demand for the college educated in the quarter century since 1980.Technology, trade, skill demand, wage inequality

The shrinking middle

Guy Michaels and colleagues show how new technologies are polarising the labour market, with the middle-skilled losing out mostproductivity, technology

Thiamine deficiency : A case presentation and literature review

This case examines the complicated hospital course of a patient ultimately diagnosed with thiamine deficiency. The presentation, diagnostic work up, and treatment of a 53-year-old male with a history of schizoaffective disorder, pituitary adenoma status post trans-sphenoidal adenectomy, GERD, hyperlipidemia, and glaucoma are evaluated. He had lived at a care facility for over 10 years, and he was brought to an outside hospital after members of the staff found him in bed, unresponsive. They also had concerns about a one-day history of inability to sit or stand up straight and gait abnormalities. An extensive work up with chest x-ray, EKG, urinalysis, routine CBC and CMP, blood and urine cultures, head CT, MRI of the brain and spine, lumbar puncture, EEG, and various miscellaneous labs ensued. Urinalysis and urine cultures revealed evidence of Enterococcus urinary tract infection. EEG revealed evidence of encephalopathy. The patient was also hyponatremic with thiamine and pyridoxine deficiency. Thiamine deficiency was diagnosed after a dramatic improvement in gait and mentation after administration of thiamine

Action recognition in depth videos using nonparametric probabilistic graphical models

Action recognition involves automatically labelling videos that contain human motion with action classes. It has applications in diverse areas such as smart surveillance, human computer interaction and content retrieval. The recent advent of depth sensing technology that produces depth image sequences has offered opportunities to solve the challenging action recognition problem. The depth images facilitate robust estimation of a human skeleton’s 3D joint positions and a high level action can be inferred from a sequence of these joint positions. A natural way to model a sequence of joint positions is to use a graphical model that describes probabilistic dependencies between the observed joint positions and some hidden state variables. A problem with these models is that the number of hidden states must be fixed a priori even though for many applications this number is not known in advance. This thesis proposes nonparametric variants of graphical models with the number of hidden states automatically inferred from data. The inference is performed in a full Bayesian setting by using the Dirichlet Process as a prior over the model’s infinite dimensional parameter space. This thesis describes three original constructions of nonparametric graphical models that are applied in the classification of actions in depth videos. Firstly, the action classes are represented by a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with an unbounded number of hidden states. The formulation enables information sharing and discriminative learning of parameters. Secondly, a hierarchical HMM with an unbounded number of actions and poses is used to represent activities. The construction produces a simplified model for activity classification by using logistic regression to capture the relationship between action states and activity labels. Finally, the action classes are modelled by a Hidden Conditional Random Field (HCRF) with the number of intermediate hidden states learned from data. Tractable inference procedures based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are derived for all these constructions. Experiments with multiple benchmark datasets confirm the efficacy of the proposed approaches for action recognition

Hypermucoviscous Klebsiella pneumoniae liver abscess in a previously healthy Burmese male

We report the case of a 38 year-old previously healthy Burmese man who presented with abdominal pain, headache, myalgia, and back pain. He was found to have leukocytosis, transaminitis, hyperbilirubinemia, and evidence of systemic inflammation. A hypodense hepatic mass was identified with a CT of the abdomen. The patient was ultimately diagnosed with hypermucoviscous K. pneumoniae CA-PLA. This case provides additional evidence for the emergence of hypermucoviscous K. pneumoniae CA-PLA outside of East Asia and supports the need for continued research to gain a better understanding of its pathogenesis predilection for individuals of Asian decent. This report also delineates the importance of acknowledging the dynamic state of infectious disease, the shifting racial demographics in the Western world, and the ever-present potential for antibiotic resistance. With this information clinicians will be more equipped to identify and treat a potentially fatal disease in individuals with symptoms of a seemingly self-limiting infection

A 41 year-old man with gastrointestinal symptoms and an unusual exposure history

Case Report: A 41 year-old previously healthy man was admitted with chief complaints of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and headache