The Growing Importance of Cognitive Skills in Wage Determination

Using data from two longitudinal surveys of American high school seniors, we show that basic cognitive skills had a larger impact on wages for 24-year-old men and women in 1986 than in 1978. For women, the increase in the return to cognitive skills between 1978 and 1986 accounts for all of the increase in the wage premium associated with post-secondary education. We also show that high school seniors' mastery of basic cognitive skills had a much smaller impact on wages two years after graduation than on wages six years after graduation.

Equilibrium orbit analysis in a free-electron laser with a coaxial wiggler

An analysis of single-electron orbits in combined coaxial wiggler and axial guide magnetic fields is presented. Solutions of the equations of motion are developed in a form convenient for computing orbital velocity components and trajectories in the radially dependent wiggler. Simple analytical solutions are obtained in the radially-uniform-wiggler approximation and a formula for the derivative of the axial velocity $v_{\|}$ with respect to Lorentz factor $\gamma$ is derived. Results of numerical computations are presented and the characteristics of the equilibrium orbits are discussed. The third spatial harmonic of the coaxial wiggler field gives rise to group $III$ orbits which are characterized by a strong negative mass regime.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, to appear in phys. rev.

Color Removal From Pulp Mill Effluent Using Coal Ash Produced From Georgia Power Coal Combustion Plants

Two environmental concerns currently face Georgia: coal fly ash (CFA) waste from coal power plants, and the effluent generated by pulp mills. Pulp mill effluent discolors surface waters into which it is discharged, and has been proven to negatively impact the dissolved oxygen and carbon necessary for aquatic life. The proposed solution is a cost-effective adsorption treatment using an inexpensive but abundantly available waste material: CFA. CFA possesses beneficial properties that allow it to effectively remove contaminants, and is available at significantly reduced cost. The primary research objective was to define treatment parameters that would result in the maximum removal of effluent color at the lowest CFA dosage and process cost. Experimentation consisted of batch adsorption studies and several test parameters were varied to determine their effect on removal. Kinetic and isotherm studies were also conducted using the optimal conditions, and the data was fitted to existing adsorption models. In addition, a column study was completed to observe CFA in a continuous flow setting. The research produced a cost-effective adsorption process resulting in 80% color removal, and required no effluent pH adjustment. Color removal by CFA was observed to occur primarily in the first hour, with the adsorption achieving equilibrium at 24 hours. Additionally, the Ho et al. kinetic model and the Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models best described the observed adsorption phenomena. Overall, this research found CFA to be a promising low-cost adsorbent for the removal of color from pulp mill effluent

Do Teacher Absences Impact Student Achievement? Longitudinal Evidence from One Urban School District

Rates of employee absences and the effects of absences on productivity are topics of conversation in many organizations in many countries. One reason is that high rates of employee absence may signal weak management and poor labor-management relations. A second reason is that reducing rates of employee absence may be an effective way to improve productivity. This paper reports the results of a study of employee absences in education, a large, labor-intensive industry. Policymakers' concern with teacher absence rests on three premises: (1) that a significant portion of teachers' absences is discretionary, (2) that teachers' absences have a nontrivial impact on productivity, and (3) that feasible policy changes could reduce rates of absence among teachers. This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation of the first two of these premises; it discusses the third premise. We employ a methodology that accounts for time-invariant differences among teachers in skill and motivation. We find large variation in adjusted teacher absence rates among schools. We estimate that each 10 days of teacher absences reduce students' mathematics achievement by 3.3 percent of a standard deviation.

Do the Cognitive Skills of School Dropouts Matter in the Labor Market?

Does the U.S. labor market reward cognitive skill differences among high school dropouts, the members of the labor force with the least educational attainments? This paper reports the results of an exploration of this question, using a new data set that provides information on the universe of dropouts who last attempted the GED exams in Florida and New York between 1984 and 1990. The design of the sample reduces variation in unmeasured variables such as motivation that are correlated with cognitive skills. We examine the labor market returns to basic cognitive skills as measured by GED test scores. We explore whether the returns differ by gender and race. The results indicate quite large earnings returns to cognitive skills for both male and female dropouts, and for white and non-white dropouts. The earnings payoff to skills increases with age.

Who Benefits from Obtaining a GED? Evidence from High School and Beyond

This paper examines the value of the GED credential and the conventional high school diploma in explaining the earnings of 27-year-old males in the early 1990s. The data base is the High School & Beyond sophomore cohort. We replicate the basic findings of prior studies that implicitly assume the labor market value of the GED credential does not depend on the skills with which dropouts left school. We show that these average effects mask a more complicated pattern. Obtaining a GED is associated with higher earnings at age 27 for those male dropouts who had very weak cognitive skills as tenth graders, but not for those who had stronger cognitive skills as tenth graders.

Research

This chapter provides an overview of the research in librarianship and information science (hereafter LIS) carried out in the UK in the period 2011-2015, complementing the analogous British Librarianship and Information Work chapters by Nicolas for the periods 1991-2000 and 2001-2005 and by Sen and Willett for the period 2006-2010. More specifically, we consider first the funding environment for LIS research in the UK, and then the process and outcome of REF2014, a nationwide evaluation of the quality of research conducted by UK universities. The next, and largest, section discusses the range of LIS research being conducted in the UK as reflected in both the academic and the professional literatures, the latter including a brief discussion of the perceived value of different media to the research process, and the chapter concludes by summarising important characteristics, both positive and negative, of the current state of LIS research in the UK

Composite Fermions in Modulated Structures: Transport and Surface Acoustic Waves

Motivated by a recent experiment of Willett et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 4478 (1997)], we employ semiclassical composite-fermion theory to study the effect of a periodic density modulation on a quantum Hall system near Landau level filling factor nu=1/2. We show that even a weak density modulation leads to dramatic changes in surface-acoustic-wave (SAW) propagation, and propose an explanation for several key features of the experimental observations. We predict that properly arranged dc transport measurements would show a structure similar to that seen in SAW measurements.Comment: Version published in Phys. Rev. Lett. Figures changed to show SAW velocity shift. LaTeX, 5 pages, two included postscript figure

Indigenous knowledge and its implication for agricultural development and agricultural education: a case study of the Vedic tradition in Nepal

This dissertation is about the meaning and relevance, in today\u27s world, of indigenous knowledge, and particularly the traditional cosmologies and sacred beliefs that underly this knowledge. The case of Vedic knowledge in Nepal is studied to illustrate traditional agriculture within a cosmological framework and to provide an holistic, indigenous perspective on development with emphasis on sustainable, indigenous approaches to agriculture and related sectors in Nepal. Indigenous knowledge is defined from an indigenous perspective and an alternative, emic approach to understanding the role of indigenous knowledge in development and the synthesis of modern and indigenous knowledge systems is proposed. Implications are drawn for agricultural education philosophy in Nepal, and conclusions are reached and recommendations made for the global approach to indigenous knowledge in light of the indigenous perspective

Expanding School Enrollment by Subsidizing Private Schools: Lessons from Bogotá

Many countries use tax revenues to subsidize private schools. Whether these policies meet social objectives depends, in part, on the relative quality of education provided by the two types of schools. We use data on elementary school students and their teachers in Bogotá, Colombia to examine difference in resource mixes and differences in the relative effectiveness of public and private schools. We find that, on average, the schools in the two sectors are equally effective. However, they produce education using very different resource combinations. Moreover, there are large differences in the effectiveness of schools in both sectors, especially in the private sector. The results of our analysis shed light on the quantity-quality tradeoff that governments in many developing countries face in deciding how to use scarce educational resources.