Live-in domestic workers : overworked, underpaid and overlooked

Live-in domestics are the housekeepers, nannies and home health care workers that live with the families they work for five to seven nights a week. Like other domestics, the live-in domestics interviewed for this report suffered restriction of movement, isolation, inadequate nutrition, physical violence, wage theft and excessive overtime, all in Texas. Moreover, live-ins are more reluctant than other domestics to exercise their rights because they may automatically find themselves homeless. Nobody knows exactly how many live-in domestic workers are in the U.S. because of the secluded nature of their work, but experts and advocates agree that many live-in domestic workers are victims of human trafficking. There are more than 300,000 victims of human trafficking in Texas, nearly 234,000 of those were adult victims of labor trafficking, according to reports. The same reports found that traffickers exploit approximately $600 million per year from victims of labor trafficking in Texas only. Since 2012, domestic work has represented the largest sector of all labor trafficking cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Texas is the second state with the most cases of human trafficking reported to the Hotline, second only to California. Like other states, these reported cases are growing every year. Reports also show that 85 percent of domestic worker trafficking survivors said having pay withheld or being paid well below minimum wage; 81 percent have lived in abusive living conditions; and 80 percent have been tricked with false or otherwise deceptive contracts. Through the lives of four present and former live-in domestic workers, these numbers come to life and live-in domestic workers stay in the shadows no more.Journalis

So, Why Furry?

A short discussion regarding and discussing why people choose to become or be part of the furry community.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/illustrationstudents/1031/thumbnail.jp

Stability of quasi-linear hyperbolic dissipative systems

In this work we want to explore the relationship between certain eigenvalue condition for the symbols of first order partial differential operators describing evolution processes and the linear and nonlinear stability of their stationary solutions.Comment: 16 pages, Te

Cot in the Act: Speaker Ethnicity Conditions Lexical Identification in the Context of the Low-Back Merger in New York City English

This paper reports on an experiment designed to measure how listeners\u27s perceptions of speaker age and ethnicity condition identification of lexical items with THOUGHT/LOT vowels in New York City English (NYCE). Several independent studies have recently reported evidence of THOUGHT-lowering and/or LOT/THOUGHT merging in NYCE led by younger non-White speakers. Spoken corpus data by Wong (2012), Becker (2010) and Haddican et al. (2021) suggest rapid THOUGHT lowering, particularly in Asian and Latinx communities. Similarly, younger Asian and Latinx NYCE speakers favor merged LOT/THOUGHT responses in controlled homophony judgment tasks (Johnson 2010, Haddican et al. 2016). Moreover, matched-guise results by Becker (2014) suggest that raised THOUGHT is associated mainly with older White speakers. Unaddressed in this literature is whether listeners use perceived social information about the speaker--i.e. perceptions of age and ethnicity--in their phonemic categorization of low back vowels in comprehension of NYCE (Rubin 1992, Hay, Warren and Drager 2006, Koops 2011). Here, we report results from a forced-choice lexical identification experiment intended to investigate this. Consistent with previous production and matched guise results, judges tended to misidentify LOT auditory stimulus items as THOUGHT more often when the item was accompanied by a photo of an Asian speaker than a White speaker. The analysis revealed no effect for the age comparison. The results suggest that NYCE-native listeners actively use social information about speaker ethnicity in the categorization of LOT/THOUGHT items in comprehension

Global existence and exponential decay for hyperbolic dissipative relativistic fluid theories

We consider dissipative relativistic fluid theories on a fixed flat, compact, globally hyperbolic, Lorentzian manifold. We prove that for all initial data in a small enough neighborhood of the equilibrium states (in an appropriate Sobolev norm), the solutions evolve smoothly in time forever and decay exponentially to some, in general undetermined, equilibrium state. To prove this, three conditions are imposed on these theories. The first condition requires the system of equations to be symmetric hyperbolic, a fundamental requisite to have a well posed and physically consistent initial value formulation. The second condition is a generic consequence of the entropy law, and is imposed on the non principal part of the equations. The third condition is imposed on the principal part of the equations and it implies that the dissipation affects all the fields of the theory. With these requirements we prove that all the eigenvalues of the symbol associated to the system of equations of the fluid theory have strictly negative real parts, which in fact, is an alternative characterization for the theory to be totally dissipative. Once this result has been obtained, a straight forward application of a general stability theorem due to Kreiss, Ortiz, and Reula, implies the results above mentioned.Comment: 10 pages, Late

Subsidios y Estrategias de Producción Campesina : el caso de Casas Blancas, México

El análisis del metabolismo social brinda los elementos para comprender las interacciones que mantiene la sociedad con la naturaleza. Bajo esta perspectiva este artículo analiza a diferentes las relaciones sociales y económicas de tres sistemas de manejo de recursos naturales (SMRN) en una comunidad rural de México. Se construyó una tipología de sistemas basada en los componentes productivos y las instituciones locales asociadas a estos. Cada sistema se analizó considerando tres tipos de flujos: i) flujos monetarios provenientes de los subsidios; ii) flujos materiales de la producción agrícola y pecuaria y iii) flujos de mano de obra. Se hizo una caracterización a tres escalas: componente productivo, sistema y comunidad. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que existe una interacción negativa entre los subsidios y la diversificación productiva y una interacción positiva entre el número de componentes y la demanda de mano de obra. Se asocian los subsidios de plantaciones comerciales y las formas de organización social con la disminución de superficie agrícola y aumento de la superficie forestal. Estos resultados permiten conocer los factores internos y externos del sistema que afectan las estrategias campesinas de manejo de recursos naturales vinculadas con la autosuficiencia alimentaria.Social metabolism analysis gives the conceptual basis to understand interactions between society and nature. Beyond this perspective and the systems theory, this article analyzes at different scales social and economic relations of three natural resources management systems in a rural community from Mexico. A system typology was constructed based on the productive components and local institutions. Each system was studied considering three types of fluxes: i) monetary fluxes from subsidies; ii) material fluxes from agricultural and livestock production and iii) labour fluxes. A characterization of these fluxes was made at three scales: i) productive component (maize, livestock and forest); ii) parcels (system) and iii) community. The results showed that there is a negative interaction between subsidies and productive diversification and a positive interaction between number of components and labour demand. Subsidies for commercial forest plantations and social organization are associated with the diminution of agricultural area and an increase of forest cultivated surface. These results had shown some of the internal and external factors that affect peasant strategies of natural resources management and its implications with self sufficiency

Geometrical constraints on dark energy models

This contribution intends to give a pedagogical introduction to the topic of dark energy (the mysterious agent supposed to drive the observed late time acceleration of the Universe) and to various observational tests which require only assumptions on the geometry of the Universe. Those tests are the supernovae luminosity, the CMB shift, the direct Hubble data, and the baryon acoustic oscillations test. An historical overview of Cosmology is followed by some generalities on FRW spacetimes (the best large-scale description of the Universe), and then the test themselves are discussed. A convenient section on statistical inference is included as well.Comment: 28 pages, 15 pages, lecture notes prepared for the ``Advanced Summer School in Physics 2007" organized by Cinvestav (Mexico DF