Interest Arbitration Impasse Rates

Interest arbitration is an important tool in public sector bargaining, since public safety workers are prohibited from striking. There is concern, however, over the effects of interest arbitration on impasse rates, most notably theorized by the so-called “chilling” and “narcotic” effects. Overall, interest arbitration has been associated with an increase in impasse rates compared to situations where workers are allowed to go on strike, but the reasons and extent to which this is the case are debatable. Previous theoretical work suggests a strong chilling effect on negotiations when interest arbitration is an option, but the empirical support for this theory is limited. As well, empirical support for a narcotic effect is weak, at least after the first three years of bargaining under interest arbitration. Although we are generally in a period retrenchment of bargaining rights, this issue remains an important one, particularly in states where the extension of interest arbitration to new groups (e.g. teachers) is being debated and in light of the interest arbitration provisions of recent Employee Free Choice Act

Improving the Boosted Correlogram

Introduced seven years ago, the correlogram is a simple statistical image descriptor that nevertheless performs strongly on image retrieval tasks. As a result it has found wide use as a component inside larger systems for content-based image and video retrieval. Yet few studies have examined potential variants of the correlogram or compared their performance to the original. This paper presents systematic experiments on the correlogram and several variants under different conditions, showing that the results may vary significantly depending on both the variant chosen and its mode of application. As expected, the experimental setup combining correlogram variants with boosting shows the best results of those tested. Under these prime conditions, a novel variant of the correlogram shows a higher average precision for many image categories than the form commonly used