Statement of Bruce H. Simon Before the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations

Testimony_Simon_022494.pdf: 204 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Landslide Denied: Exit Polls vs. Vote Count 2006

There was an unprecedented level of concern approaching the 2006 Election ("E2006") about the vulnerability of the vote counting process to manipulation. With questions about the integrity of the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections remaining unresolved, with e-voting having proliferated nationwide, and with incidents occurring with regularity through 2005 and 2006, the alarm spread from computer experts to the media and the public at large. It would be fair to say that America approached E2006 with held breath.For many observers, the results on Election Day permitted a great sigh of relief -- not because control of Congress shifted from Republicans to Democrats, but because it appeared that the public will had been translated more or less accurately into electoral results, not thwarted as some had feared. There was a relieved rush to conclude that the vote counting process had been fair and the concerns of election integrity proponents overblown.Unfortunately the evidence forces us to a very different and disturbing conclusion: there was gross vote count manipulation and it had a great impact on the results of E2006, significantly decreasing the magnitude of what would have been, accurately tabulated, a landslide of epic proportions. Because much of this manipulation appears to have been computer-based, and therefore invisible to the legions of at-the-poll observers, the public was informed of the usual "isolated incidents and glitches" but remains unaware of the far greater story: The electoral machinery and vote counting systems of the United States did not honestly and accurately translate the public will and certainly can not be counted on to do so in the future

Wind turbine condition assessment through power curve copula modeling

Power curves constructed from wind speed and active power output measurements provide an established method of analyzing wind turbine performance. In this paper it is proposed that operational data from wind turbines are used to estimate bivariate probability distribution functions representing the power curve of existing turbines so that deviations from expected behavior can be detected. Owing to the complex form of dependency between active power and wind speed, which no classical parameterized distribution can approximate, the application of empirical copulas is proposed; the statistical theory of copulas allows the distribution form of marginal distributions of wind speed and power to be expressed separately from information about the dependency between them. Copula analysis is discussed in terms of its likely usefulness in wind turbine condition monitoring, particularly in early recognition of incipient faults such as blade degradation, yaw and pitch errors

Locating Local Education Funds: A Conceptual Framework for Describing LEFs' Contribution to Public Education

With support and leadership from the Public Education Network (PEN), local education funds (LEFs) have worked for two decades to 1) educate and mobilize their communities so that citizen voices are influential in education policy discussions; and 2) support effective partnerships between school district insiders and outsiders to improve the quality of children's education. However, as Useem's study of local education funds points out, it has been difficult to identify the many roles that LEFs play in their communities, the work that they undertake, the obstacles that they encounter, and the contributions that they make. Useem also suggests why the work of LEFs defies simple description. As brokers, LEFs work behind the scenes and in partnership with others, which contributes to their invisibility as catalysts and supporters of educational improvement. LEFs also are highly adaptive organizations that typically customize their change strategies to particular communities. Such attention to local context results in tremendous variation in the organization, work, and accomplishments of LEFs. At the same time, the highly individual nature of each LEF often obscures the overarching values, purposes, and goals that these organizations share, thus obscuring a collective identity.As they mark 20 years of work in public education, LEF and PEN leaders are prescient in their insistence on further research into the role and accomplishments of local education funds in shaping the landscape of public schooling. In August 2003, at the request of PEN, Research for Action (RFA) began work on developing a conceptual framework for: 1) understanding the role and work of LEFs and the many factors that influence what they do and how they do it; and 2) assessing their contributions to public education.This framework will be used to guide future empirical research on LEFs and to develop tools that LEFs themselves can use in a process of self-assessment. Continued research and assessment will provide public education stakeholders with credible evidence and a deeper understanding about how LEFs carry out their missions and demonstrate successes. At the same time, it will provide firm ground for LEF and PEN leaders to chart the next generation of work. This report was prepared for Public Education Network by Research for Action

Sport and the social contract

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Removal of disinfection by-product precursors by coagulation and an innovative suspended ion exchange process

This investigation aimed to compare the disinfection by-product formation potentials (DBPFPs) of three UK surface waters (1 upland reservoir and 2 lowland rivers) with differing characteristics treated by (a) a full scale conventional process and (b) pilot scale processes using a novel suspended ion exchange (SIX) process and inline coagulation (ILCA) followed by ceramic membrane filtration (CMF). Liquid chromatography-organic carbon detection analysis highlighted clear differences between the organic fractions removed by coagulation and suspended ion exchange. Pretreatments which combined SIX and coagulation resulted in significant reductions in dissolved organic carbon (DOC), UV absorbance (UVA), trihalomethane and haloacetic acid formation potential (THMFP, HAAFP), in comparison with the SIX or coagulation process alone. Further experiments showed that in addition to greater overall DOC removal, the processes also reduced the concentration of brominated DBPs and selectively removed organic compounds with high DBPFP. The SIX/ILCA/CMF process resulted in additional removals of DOC, UVA, THMFP, HAAFP and brominated DBPs of 50, 62, 62, 62% and 47% respectively compared with conventional treatment

Sets invariant under projections onto two dimensional subspaces

summary:The Blaschke--Kakutani result characterizes inner product spaces $E$, among normed spaces of dimension at least 3, by the property that for every 2 dimensional subspace $F$ there is a norm 1 linear projection onto $F$. In this paper, we determine which closed neighborhoods $B$ of zero in a real locally convex space $E$ of dimension at least 3 have the property that for every 2 dimensional subspace $F$ there is a continuous linear projection $P$ onto $F$ with $P(B)\subseteq B$