Criminal Convictions and Employment Rights In New York State

New York has a strong policy toward preventing discrimination based on prior criminal convictions and its progressive policy outlook should encouraged. In 2007 a report concluded that New York employees were largely unfamiliar with State laws regulating an employer’s use of prior criminal convictions for employment-related decisions, and in response, the legislature amended Section 296 of New York Executive Law to require employers to post and disseminate information regarding a job applicant’s or current employee’s rights with respect to an employer’s use of prior criminal convictions. With one in five adults having a criminal record in the United States, legislation such as this is vital to keeping the work force in New York strong

Thermodynamics and renormalized quasi-particles in the vicinity of the dilute Bose gas quantum critical point in two dimensions

We use the functional renormalization group (FRG) to derive analytical expressions for thermodynamic observables (density, pressure, entropy, and compressibility) as well as for single-particle properties (wavefunction renormalization and effective mass) of interacting bosons in two dimensions as a function of temperature $T$ and chemical potential $\mu$. We focus on the quantum disordered and the quantum critical regime close to the dilute Bose gas quantum critical point. Our approach is based on a truncated vertex expansion of the hierarchy of FRG flow equations and the decoupling of the two-body contact interaction in the particle-particle channel using a suitable Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation. Our analytic FRG results extend previous analytical renormalization group calculations for thermodynamic observables at $\mu =0$ to finite values of $\mu$. To confirm the validity of our FRG approach, we have also performed quantum Monte Carlo simulations to obtain the magnetization, the susceptibility, and the correlation length of the two-dimensional spin-$1/2$ quantum $XY$ model with coupling $J$ in a regime where its quantum critical behavior is controlled by the dilute Bose gas quantum critical point. We find that our analytical results describe the Monte Carlo data for $\mu \leq 0$ rather accurately up to relatively high temperatures $T \lesssim 0.1 J$.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figure

Dishwashers: Workers in a Low-Wage Occupation

There are no educational or licensing requirements to become a dishwasher. Typically, dishwashers are trained on the job by experienced co-workers. Some employers require employees to complete educational materials addressing issues including safety guidelines, equipment maintenance, and cleansing procedures

A phytochemical comparison of saw palmetto products using gas chromatography and (1) H nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy metabolomic profiling

© 2014 The Authors. Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Pharmaceutical Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedPreparations containing saw palmetto berries are used in the treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). There are many products on the market, and relatively little is known about their chemical variability and specifically the composition and quality of different saw palmetto products notwithstanding that in 2000, an international consultation paper from the major urological associations from the five continents on treatments for BPH demanded further research on this topic. Here, we compare two analytical approaches and characterise 57 different saw palmetto products.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

La TVA en France et en RFA : un révélateur des différences de politique fiscale

La TVA est un prélèvement symbolique à plusieurs égards. Créée en France au début des années 1950, elle est depuis 1967 le principal impôt ayant fait l’objet d’une harmonisation au niveau européen. Son efficacité en termes de rendement et sa relative neutralité économique en ont fait l’une des ressources fiscales principales des Etats membres de l’Union européenne. La TVA joue donc en Europe un rôle économique et budgétaire de premier plan. Bien ancrée dans le paysage fiscal et économique des pays européens, la TVA continue pourtant de susciter des débats passionnés. Le contexte de la mondialisation a contribué à renforcer sa place dans les ressources fiscales. Elle repose en effet sur une assiette – la consommation – difficilement délocalisable. C’est pourquoi l’OCDE recommande régulièrement d’en augmenter le poids pour diminuer celui des impôts portant sur des assiettes plus mobiles : capital ou travail hautement qualifié. C’est ce qu’ont fait les économies du nord de l’Europe, comme la Suède ou le Danemark, en augmentant massivement leur taux de TVA dès les années 1990. En France, le débat s’est plutôt porté sur les vertus supposées de la TVA pour renforcer la compétitivité des entreprises : la « TVA sociale », qui désigne la substitution de la TVA aux cotisations sociales pour le financement de l’Etat Providence, est évoquée depuis le début des années 1980. Pour autant, une telle évolution suscite bien des résistances, au regard notamment des conséquences d’une augmentation de la TVA sur le pouvoir d’achat des ménages les plus modestes.L’une des curiosités du débat français sur la TVA est de mentionner régulièrement le « modèle allemand ». La réussite à l’exportation de l’Allemagne est ainsi souvent rapprochée de sa politique en matière de TVA, et notamment du choix fait en 2007 par le gouvernement d’Angela Merkel d’augmenter de 3 points le taux de ce prélèvement. L’invocation du « modèle allemand » est devenue tellement courante en France que l’on peut se demander si elle est toujours pertinente. L’objet du présent article est, à travers l’exemple de la TVA, d’illustrer les différences de politique fiscale entre la France et l’Allemagne. Il sera montré que derrière les convergences formelles se cachent en réalité des orientations, des priorités mais aussi des résultats très différents.

Is RobustBench/AutoAttack a suitable Benchmark for Adversarial Robustness?

Recently, RobustBench (Croce et al. 2020) has become a widely recognized benchmark for the adversarial robustness of image classification networks. In its most commonly reported sub-task, RobustBench evaluates and ranks the adversarial robustness of trained neural networks on CIFAR10 under AutoAttack (Croce and Hein 2020b) with l-inf perturbations limited to eps = 8/255. With leading scores of the currently best performing models of around 60% of the baseline, it is fair to characterize this benchmark to be quite challenging. Despite its general acceptance in recent literature, we aim to foster discussion about the suitability of RobustBench as a key indicator for robustness which could be generalized to practical applications. Our line of argumentation against this is two-fold and supported by excessive experiments presented in this paper: We argue that I) the alternation of data by AutoAttack with l-inf, eps = 8/255 is unrealistically strong, resulting in close to perfect detection rates of adversarial samples even by simple detection algorithms and human observers. We also show that other attack methods are much harder to detect while achieving similar success rates. II) That results on low-resolution data sets like CIFAR10 do not generalize well to higher resolution images as gradient-based attacks appear to become even more detectable with increasing resolutions.Comment: AAAI-22 AdvML Workshop ShortPape