Online banking : customer satisfaction rises, but privacy concerns remain

Banks and banking

From the classroom to the workplace. So where are the jobs?

Employment ; Job hunting ; College graduates

Above the minimum : living-wage statutes are designed to help low-income workers in Baltimore and other Fifth District communities, but do they get the job done?

Wages ; Cost and standard of living

Can ‘New Welfare’ Address Poverty through More and Better Jobs?

New welfare has been prominent in recent European social policy debates. It involves mobilising more people into paid work, improving human capital and ensuring fairer access to opportunities. This programme is attractive to business (more workers, better human capital and reduced social conflict to enhance productivity and profitability) and to citizens (more widely accessible job-opportunities with better rewards): a relatively low-cost approach to the difficulties governments face in maintaining support and meeting social goals as inequalities widen. The general move towards ‘new welfare’ gathered momentum during the past two decades, given extra impetus by the 2007-9 recession and subsequent stagnation. While employment rates rose during the prosperous years before the crisis, there was no commensurate reduction in poverty. Over the same period the share of economic growth returned to labour fell, labour markets were increasingly de-regulated and inequality increased. This raises the question of whether new welfare’s economic (higher employment, improved human capital) and social (better job quality and incomes) goals may come into conflict. This paper examines data for 17 European countries over the period 2001 to 2007. It shows that new welfare is much more successful at achieving higher employment than at reducing poverty, even during prosperity, and that the approach pays insufficient attention to structural factors, such as the falling wage share, and to institutional issues, such as labour market deregulation

Making Patriots of Pupils: Colonial Education in Micronesia from 1944-1980

This article explores American colonial education in Micronesia from the final months of World War Two to the late 1970s. The primary research question concerns American usage of education to pursue political and military goals, and how this affected multiple dimensions of Indigenous life. Although the dominant narrative at the time blamed Indigenous people for difficulties in implementing American education, the Western values permeating the American consciousness significantly inhibited the possibility of success as Americans defined it. This article details American motivations and efforts to implement an educational system as part of a larger goal of “economic development” and analyzes the effects that this imposition had on Indigenous populations, particularly in consideration of the fact that the creation of “Americanized” Micronesians and a cooperative political unit in the Pacific were highly desirable for American strategic interests. Indigenous adoption of American education demonstrated that they were active participants in this process, though, and adoption of foreign institutions secured avenues of advancement for many Micronesians. This ability to use education for their own means ultimately became a centerpiece of both cultural and political independence movements. The number of concerned parties and players coupled with the realities of globalization and peripheralization make this story complex, if not paradoxical, at times. As a result, the role of education in the region is still contested today and the various effects that it had on Indigenous peoples make it a living remnant of the colonial past

The Role of Histone Variant H2A.Z During the Oxidative Stress in Budding Yeast

Organization of the genome in eukaryotes has long been a mystery, and while we have furthered our knowledge in recent years, there is still much that remains unknown. We are particularly interested in the function of one of the histone variants of H2A, H2A.Z. Its presence in a gene promoter can coincide with especially high or low levels of transcription. The mechanism by which this occurs - and why it occurs - is unknown. Here, we seek to understand whether the presence of the variant at several genes is helpful in the context of oxidative stress. We found no transcriptional upregulation or downregulation effect due to deletion of HTZ1, the gene encoding the histone variant H2A.Z, leading us to believe that the variant is not very influential at the three oxidative stress response genes we tested: CYC1, FLR1, or GTT2. However, although our results did not reveal a large role for H2A.Z in expression of these genes, they did reveal other key insights into the oxidative stress response in yeast

Synthesis of an Indolocarbazole Based Small Molecule: Towards Donor-Acceptor Type Ladder Polymers

The use of donor-acceptor (D-A) type ladder polymers as p-type semiconducting materials in optoelectronic devices has received significant attention recently due to the possibilities of increasing the efficiency of organic solar cell devices, while simultaneously decreasing the cost required for device fabrication. As such, the synthesis of an acceptor-donor-acceptor (A-D-A) type small molecule comprised of indolo[3,2-b]carbazole donor units and benzo[c][1, 2, 5]thiadiazole acceptor units is reported. The structure-property relationships of two types of solubilizing alkyl chains were investigated. The resulting A-D-A small molecule provides a general strategy for the synthesis of indolo[3,2-b]carbazole and benzo[c][1, 2, 5]thiadiazole based D-A ladder polymers, which possess significant potential as an electron donor material for organic photovoltaic devices. The synthesis reported here is a facile and versatile method utilizing Suzuki coupling reactions, followed by highly efficient ring closing metathesis reactions to construct a defect-free small molecule, and in the future, D-A type ladder polymers

State v. Louisiana Land & Exploration Co.: Louisiana Revised Statutes Section 30:29 and Its Effect on the Amount of Remediation Damages Available to Plaintiffs

The article discusses land contamination litigation at oil and gas exploration sites State v. Louisiana Land & Exploration Co. Topics discussed include claims for remediation of environmental damages, laws for mineral leases and remediation damages, and the judicial opinion of the Supreme Court of Louisiana on the cases related to environmental damages