San Francisco Predictable Scheduling and Fair Treatment for Formula Retail Employees Ordinance

Economic and labor force changes since the Great Recession of 2007 have changed the way many American workers support themselves and their families. Today, Americans who would prefer full-time stable work are more likely to work in part-time jobs, and have little control over their work schedules. As employers seek new ways to maximize scheduling efficiency and profit, worker advocate groups have raised concerns about the implications of these scheduling practices on the lives of employees. This issue brief highlights some of the research on the growth of unstable work schedules, and describes the provisions of recently introduced legislation in San Francisco that seeks to increase predictable scheduling among certain retail and food service workers. San Francisco's is the first such legislation to be introduced at the local level in the natio

Regional growth disparities in Vietnam.

Growth inequality is a pressing issue for Vietnam, one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia. This dissertation examines potential factors contributing to the regional economic growth disparities of Vietnam and their effects on the development process. The Extreme Bound Analysis approach was used for estimating growth equations to identify the robust determinants of the model. Using the data from 42 provinces in Vietnam from 1998 to 2003, the analysis confirms the importance of good economic governance, initial GDP level, human capital, and population. The analysis suggests that provincial governance such as State Sector Bias and Proactivity of Provincial Leadership are robust and economically important factors related to regional economic growth

Framing and fundraising: Emotional language and money raised in a Vietnamese newspaper column

This exploratory study examined Vuot Len So Phan , a Vietnamese philanthropy newspaper column in Sai Gon Tiep Thi, a Vietnamese newspaper from April to December 2009. Guided by framing literatures, 39 episodic frames stories portraying financially disadvantaged people were content analyzed in terms of demographics of the featured subjects and emotional phrases used in the stories. The hypothesis predicting a positive correlation between emotional phrases and money raised was supported. This means the more emotional phrases used in an episodically framed story, the more money it was likely to raise. This study found an unexpected result that donations were declining over time and stories that ran earlier in the series had a tendency to receive more donations than stories that ran later on. Photographs and demographics variables of featured subjects did not have a significant relationship with money raised with the exception of the variable of ethnicity. A moderate, positive correlation between the number of donors and the amount of donations received was found

ESTIMATING THERMAL STABILITY OF PHOSPHATED AND PHOSPHATED SULFATED MESOPOROUS ZIRCONIA

Mesoporous phosphated zirconia (m-PZ) and mesoporous phosphated sulfated zirconia (m-PSZ) were synthesized through condensation methods using Zr3(PO4)4 and Zr(SO4)2 as precursors respectively. The precursors, solvents with suitable molar or mass ratios were mixed at 100oC for 48 hours to obtain the mesoporous channels. An oxophosphate process was used to synthesize the m-PSZ material for improving its thermal stability. Some techniques was used to characterize the materials such as SAXRD, TG-DTA and TEM

Perturbative approach to f(R)f(R)-gravitation in FLRW cosmology

The $f(R)$ theory of gravitation developed perturbatively around the general theory of relativity with cosmological constant (the \text{$\Lambda$}CDM model) in a flat FLWR geometry is considered. As a result, a general explicit cosmological solution that can be used for any model with an arbitrary, but well-defined, $f(R)$ function (just satisfying given perturbation conditions) is derived. This perturbative solution shows how the Hubble parameter $H (t)$ depends on time (along with the cosmological constant and the matter density) to adapt to the evolution of the Universe. To illustrate, this approach is applied to some specific test models. One of these models appears to be more realistic as it could describe three phases of the Universe's evolution. Despite the fact that the perturbation is applied for a flat FLWR geometry (according to the current cosmological observation) indicates that the obtained solution can mainly describe the evolution of the late Universe, it may also work for an early Universe. As a next step, the present method can be applied to the case with a more general FLRW geometry to increase the precision of the description of different stages in the evolution of the Universe. Finally, it is shown that in a desription of the Universe's evolution the perturbative $f(R)$-theory can be considered as an effective GR with the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ replaced by an effective parameter $\Lambda_{eff}[\rho(t)]$. This trick leads to a simpler way of solving an $f(R)$-theory regardless its specific form

Persistence probability of a random polynomial arising from evolutionary game theory

In this paper, we obtain an asymptotic formula for the persistence probability in the positive real line of a random polynomial arising from evolutionary game theory. It corresponds to the probability that a multi-player two-strategy random evolutionary game has no internal equilibria. The key ingredient is to approximate the sequence of random polynomials indexed by their degrees by an appropriate centered stationary Gaussian process.Comment: revised versio