Earning Income in the Sharing/On-Demand Economy

Until 2015, we knew very little about the work and workers in the sharing/on-demand economy. Indeed, the last official government survey of the broader contingent workforce was conducted in 2005 -- long before most of these new platforms or apps even existed. However, in the last year, our understanding has advanced dramatically, thanks to the release of a few key pieces of research, including: the JPMorgan Chase Institute study, "Paychecks, Paydays and the Online Platform Economy;" Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger's "The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015;" work by Intuit and Emergent Research, "Dispatches from the New Economy: The On-Demand Economy Workforce;" and others. However, while these and other studies have revealed a great deal about the work and workers in the sharing/on-demand economy, there is still much we need to understand. This paper aims to lay out what we know about the sharing/on-demand economy and define questions for additional research. This paper is meant to be a resource for public and private research organizations, foundations, government agencies, and other parties interested in promoting a more thorough understanding of the sharing/on-demand economy workforce, including its relationship to the broader contingent workforce

An Africa at every turn : Nathaniel Mackey’s layered landscapes and puns of place

As that complex of developments that we now call “globalisation” continues to shrink and collapse our sense of planetary Place, serial poet and epistolary novelist Nathaniel Mackey’s works can be read as ongoing critiques of utopian “One World” dogmas. In Mackey’s Cubistic approach to locale, wordplay (as world-play) allows several sites to overlap and inhabit a single node on a trans-historic map. His jerry-rigged journeys ‘put one place/atop another’ so that history doesn’t merely repeat, but engages in counter-point and co-existence. For Mackey, “elsewhere” is an ever-advancing horizon, a site that never stands still for complete nomenclature, and an Africa scattered and felt primarily as a mocking residue and a womb turned inside out. Suitably, a large portion of his poetic energies are spent discovering new ways to merge sites together. In his page-layout itself, a ceaseless enjambment causes the poetic line to be forever ‘round[ing] the bend’. In an interlinked saga that connects over a dozen volumes of poetry and prose, Mackey’s layered landscapes treat Setting like an ‘Inn of Many Monikers’ in which Locale and History are vertically stacked chords, the African scattering-of-tribes is treated as a primal scenario, and linear time is collapsed into a singular Present.peer-reviewe

Framing Preglimony: Exploring the Implications of Pregnancy Support Models through Family Law Values

The author discusses preglimony and the rights and responsibilities of expecting parents

Framing Preglimony: Exploring the Implications of Pregnancy Support Models through Family Law Values

De senaste decenniernas forskning har påvisat att en omfattande bildning och nedbrytning av klororganiska föreningar sker i mark. Bildning av sådana föreningar sker genom att klorid binds in i organiskt material. Denna naturliga bildning har rönt uppmärksamhet dels för att många klorerade ämnen är giftiga och dels för man tidigare trott att alla klororganiska ämnen uteslutande kommer från mänsklig verksamhet. Huvudmålet för föreliggande avhandling var att (i) uppskatta transporten av klorerade föreningar i nederbörd och avrinningsvatten, (ii) diskutera de klorerade föreningarnas ursprung med utgångspunkt från hur deras förekomst varierar i avrinningsvatten, (iii) undersöka hur transporten av klorid (salt) påverkas av olika faktorer och (iv) studera hur frisättningen av flyktiga klorerade föreningar från mark påverkas av kväve. Avhandlingen bygger på en klorbudget som konstruerats utifrån fältstudier som genomförts i ett litet skogsbeklätt avrinningsområde i sydöstra Sverige. Dessutom har laboratoriestudier genomförts med jord som inhämtats från samma område. Resultaten visar att lagret av klor i marken är betydligt större än flödena och att det främst består av organiska ämnen medan flödet domineras av klorid (salt). Detta tyder på att en stor del av kloriden deltar i en biogeokemisk cykel vilket strider mot gängse uppfattning att klorid rör sig opåverkat genom mark. Hypotesen är att de översta marklagren fungerar som en sänka för klorid genom att omvandlas till organiskt bundet klor. De djupare jordlagren fungerar däremot som en kloridkälla genom att det klorerade organiska materialet transporterats med regnvatten från de ytligare till de djupare liggande lagren för att så småningom brytas ner, varvid klorid frisätts. Ovan beskrivna hypotes stöds av laboratoriestudierna där man kunnat notera att det sker såväl en fastläggning som en frisättning av klorid i mark. Resultaten från avhandlingen tillsammans med resultat från tidigare studier tyder på att en stor del av den klorid som finns i avrinningsvatten kommer från förmultnande organiskt material och att klorid med andra ord inte följer regnvattnets väg genom marken, vilket man tidigare trott. Studierna tyder alltså på att klorid till viss del ”gör en omväg” med en tidsfördröjning på troligen åtskilliga upp till hundratals år. Vidare tyder studierna på att flyktiga klorerade föreningar som kloroform och tetraklormetan bildas i mark och att tillsats av kväve orsakar en minskning av kloroform och en ökning av tetraklormetan. Avhandlingen visar tydligt att det är nödvändigt att rikta uppmärksamhet mot klors biogeokemi i mark och då inte minst mot de processer som påverkar transporten av klor från de övre marklagren till grundvatten och ytvatten om vi ska öka förståelsen av hur klorerade ämnen som tillförts naturen genom mänskliga aktiviteter beter sig.It is generally known that chlorine compounds are ubiquitous in the environment. In recent years, researchers have concluded that chlorine is part of a biogeochemical cycle in soil involving an interaction between chloride (Clin) and organic-matter-bound chlorine (Clorg). Even though there is indisputable evidence that Clorg is formed naturally, there are actually few simultaneous field measurements of Clorg and Clin. Previously stipulated conclusions with respect to underlying processes and transport estimates have thus been deduced from rather few concentration measurements. It is well known that the chemical composition in soil and runoff water varies widely over time and in space. The main objective of the thesis is to investigate the on-site variation of Clin, Clorg and VOCls in runoff water in order to (i) construct a chlorine budget on a catchment scale to visualize the relative contribution of Clin, Clorg, and VOCls; (ii) more reliably estimate how and why the concentrations of Clin, Clorg, and VOCls in runoff water vary; and (iii) analyze the influence of various environmental variables on the transport. The present thesis highlights the on-site variation and fluxes of Clin, Clorg, and VOCls in a small forested catchment in southeast Sweden. Field flux data collected during a twoyear period and a constructed overall chlorine budget were evaluated. The results show that the storage is dominated by Clorg whereas the transport is dominated by Clin and that the storage is far much larger than the transport. Still, input and output is nearly in balance for all investigated chlorine species. It is interesting to note that these observations resemble observations made for carbon, nitrogen and sulphur; i.e. a large storage, small transport, complex biogeochemical cycling processes at hand but still close to steady state conditions with respect to output-input balances. It appears as if topsoil acts as a sink for Clin, while deeper soil acts as a source of Clin. In addition, the results of the thesis suggest that on-site variation depend on seasonal variations. These variations are to some extent caused by water discharge, but also by water residence time, internal chlorination/dechlorination of organic matter, and different soil water origins. Furthermore, both a net retention and a net release of Clin were observed in laboratory studies. The study indicates that simultaneous retention and release of Clin takes place in soil, which probably has an impact on the Clin import and export fluxes. Finally, the results show for the first time that tetrachloromethane can be emitted from laboratory incubated soil, and that soil nitrogen concentrations has quite different effects on the emission rates of chloroform and tetrachloromethane. The results of the thesis, considered together with results of previous research, suggest that the turnover of chlorine in soils is extensive and potentially important for chlorine cycling in general, which must be taken into account if one wishes to increase the understanding of the cycling of anthropogenic chlorine compounds in the environment.On the day of the public defence the status of article IV was: Accepted.</p

Citizen Rights and the Cost of Law Enforcement

There is an inherent tension between the idea that individuals have certain inalienable (natural) rights and the economist's postulate that the rate if utilization of anything whose production requires scarce resources must be limited by considerations of opportunity cost. Remarks about rights to life, liberty, health, justice and the like are readily inserted into political pronouncements, legislative preambles and court decisions, but they (should) cause economists to raise questions about costs and quantities. Unfortunately, neither in ordinary language nor in the jargon of moral philosophy can such ultimate desiderata as liberty and justice be related to costs or quantities. Hence in the first section we sketch a model of social choice in which the necessary relationships can be defined. In section II, we give instances where, despite protestations to the contrary, the Law Enforcement System (LES) has made de facto reductions of citizen rights (liberties) in order to increase the efficiency if law enforcement. The final section considers some of the normative implications suggested by the positive arguments of section II.

Change it Now: eBay v. MercExchange-Business Method Patent Litigation Reaches Critical Juncture Concerning Remedies for Infringement

Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) as field has been researched for ten years, but with recent advances in mobile performance visual SLAM is entering the consumer market in a completely new way. A visual SLAM system will however be sensitive to non cautious use that may result in severe motion, occlusion or poor surroundings in terms of visual features that will cause the system to temporarily fail. The procedure of recovering from such a fail is called relocalization. Together with two similar problems localization, to find your position in an existing SLAM session, and loop closing, the online reparation and perfection of the map in an active SLAM session, these can be grouped as visual location recognition (VLR). This thesis presents novel results by combining the scalability of FabMap and the precision of 13th Lab's tracking yielding high-precision VLR, +/- 10 cm, while maintaining above 99 % precision and 60 % recall for sessions containing thousands of images. Everything functional purely on a normal mobile phone. The applications of VLR are many. Indoors, where GPS is not functioning, VLR can still provide positional information and navigate you through big complexes like airports and museums. Outdoors, VLR can improve the precision of GPS tenfold yielding a new level of navigational experience. Virtual and augmented reality applications are other areas that benefit from improved positioning and localization