EMPLOYMENT AND EARNINGS OF THE WORKING POOR IN RURAL AND URBAN LABOR MARKETS

We use a unique administrative database to analyze the impact of labor market conditions on the employment outcomes of working poor adults in Oregon. Stronger labor demand conditions are associated with better employment outcomes. Lower earnings and less steady employment in rural areas are largely explained by higher unemployment rates.Labor and Human Capital,

THE IMPACT OF THE 1990s ECONOMIC BOOM ON LESS-EDUCATED WORKERS IN RURAL AMERICA

This article uses National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) data to investigate the impact of local labor market conditions on the employment and earnings of rural non-college-educated workers. The results suggest that local economic conditions in the late 1990s did have a positive impact on wages, and the effect is larger for workers with no more than a high school degree compared to their college-educated counterparts. Further, there is evidence of a difference between rural and urban labor markets, suggesting that the 1990s boom helped urban less-educated workers but not those in rural areas. The rural/urban difference is most apparent for male workers.employment, local labor markets, NLSY79, rural, unemployment, wages, wage curve, Labor and Human Capital,

Local Labor Market Conditions and the Jobless Poor: How Much Does Local Job Growth Help in Rural Areas?

The employment outcomes of a group of jobless poor Oregonians are tracked in order to analyze the relative importance of local labor market conditions on their employment outcomes. Local job growth increases the probability that a jobless poor adult will get a job and shortens the length of time until she finds a job. After accounting for both the effects of personal demographic characteristics and local job growth, there is little evidence that the probability of employment or the duration of joblessness differs in rural compared with urban areas.employment, local labor markets, rural labor markets, rural poverty, unemployment, welfare reform, Labor and Human Capital,

How School-Delivered, Non-Instructional Services Become Formalized:One School System\u27s History

Public schooling in the Unites States of America has long been the site of more than just meeting the academic needs of the country’s youth. Among the many roles the school house has played in the history of public schooling in the United States is the mechanism to deliver non-instructional services to students. School-delivered, non-instructional services are those services that extend beyond addressing the academically-disposed, educational needs of children and aim to meet the social, emotional, and physical needs of young people while they are in the care of educators. Through an historical example grounded primarily in archival research, I establish a genealogy of school-delivered, non-instructional services by examining how staffing developed in the Cobb County School District in Cobb County, Georgia during the 1938-39 to 1976-77 time period. I will point to the role of federal involvement in public education and the professionalization of social services during this time period to connect the changes that occur in the instructional employees and non-instructional employees, with a specific examination of lunchroom employees and counselors, in one school system

EMPLOYMENT OUTCOMES FOR LOW-INCOME ADULTS IN RURAL AND URBAN LABOR MARKETS

This study analyzes the impact of local labor market conditions on the probability of employment and duration of employment for low-income adults in Oregon. We find that economic conditions (lower employment growth and higher unemployment rates) help to explain the less successful employment outcomes for low-income adults in non-metro areas.rural labor markets, employment, low-income workers, Labor and Human Capital,

Numerical algebraic geometry for model selection and its application to the life sciences

Researchers working with mathematical models are often confronted by the related problems of parameter estimation, model validation, and model selection. These are all optimization problems, well-known to be challenging due to non-linearity, non-convexity and multiple local optima. Furthermore, the challenges are compounded when only partial data is available. Here, we consider polynomial models (e.g., mass-action chemical reaction networks at steady state) and describe a framework for their analysis based on optimization using numerical algebraic geometry. Specifically, we use probability-one polynomial homotopy continuation methods to compute all critical points of the objective function, then filter to recover the global optima. Our approach exploits the geometric structures relating models and data, and we demonstrate its utility on examples from cell signaling, synthetic biology, and epidemiology.Comment: References added, additional clarification

Using Educative Curriculum Materials to Support Preservice Elementary Teachers' Curricular Planning: A Comparison Between Two Different Forms of Support

Educative curriculum materials—materials designed to promote both teacher and student learning—may help novice teachers learn how to engage in productive curricular planning. However, little is known about how educative supports within these materials should be written to best support teachers. This quasi-experimental study examines the affordances and constraints of two different forms of educative support, general supports and lesson-specific supports, in helping preservice elementary teachers critique and adapt science curriculum materials. The lesson-specific narrative supports helped the preservice teachers identify specific adaptations that they could make to lesson plans. They also led the preservice teachers to view the educative supports as useful and relevant, motivating them to use the supports in their analysis. In contrast, the general expository supports helped the preservice teachers identify principles of practice to use in their analysis of lesson plans. Implications for teacher education and curriculum materials design are discussed, including the need to provide a blend of both forms of support to help teachers make productive design decisions when planning with curriculum materials.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78681/1/j.1467-873X.2009.00464.x.pd

Product Market Competition and Human Resource Practices: An Analysis of the Retail Food Sector

The rise of super-centers and the entry of Wal-Mart into food retailing have dramatically altered the competitive environment in the industry. This paper explores the impact of such changes on the labor market practices of traditional food retailers. We use longitudinal data on workers and firms to construct new measures of compensation and employment, and examine how these measures evolve within and across firms in response to changes in product market structure. An additional feature of the analysis is to combine rich case study knowledge about the retail food industry with the new matched employer-employee data from the Census Bureau.supermarkets, human resource practices, competition, internal labor market, wage growth, Labor and Human Capital, Marketing,

Knowledge Integration in Science Teaching: Analysing Teachers' Knowledge Development

This paper tests the utility of a new sociocognitive frame for analysing the development of teachers' knowledge – the knowledge integration perspective (Linn, Eylon, & Davis, in press; Linn & Hsi, 2000). In doing so, the paper describes one prospective elementary teacher's developing knowledge and highlights its complexity. The prospective teacher demonstrates relatively well-integrated science subject matter knowledge, but she makes some problematic links to lessons and develops some instructional representations that show where she needs to distinguish between different scientific ideas. She also, however, links science concepts to appropriate real-world experiences, indicating that she has nascent useful pedagogical content knowledge. The paper discusses what teacher educators can learn about their learners from this analysis, argues for the utility of the knowledge integration perspective for conducting similar analyses, provides ideas to help science teacher educators apply the perspective easily as they teach their students, and points to areas ripe for future research.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43637/1/11165_2004_Article_5257276.pd

Investigation of non-traditional roles of the neural gut-brain axis

The neural gut-brain axis is an important bidirectional pathway through which the gastrointestinal (GI) tract communicates with the central nervous system (CNS). This axis includes sensory nerves that send information from the GI tract to the brain and motor nerves that transmit descending information from the brain to the GI tract. Traditional research has focused on nutrient-induced changes in sensory neural signaling and the subsequent motor response altering muscular and secretory functions. These nerves, though, may also play novel, non-traditional roles in the function of the gut-brain axis. Just as nutrients have been shown to induce neuroplasticity of CNS neurons, long-term alterations in nutrition may do more than just change signaling, and ultimately lead to modifications in fiber density, branching, and terminal morphology. These neuroplastic changes may underlie aberrant signaling and could be associated with GI diseases, as has been found with CNS-associated neuroplasticity and disease. The GI tract also has to perform many functions beyond muscular contraction/relaxation and secretion. One essential function in maintaining GI homeostasis is the constant renewal of the cells lost due to normal apoptosis, a process whereby entire GI tissues can be replaced every few days. Because loss of the motor nerves of the gut-brain axis results in changes in the rate of tissue renewal and the location of the nerves are in close contact with the GI stem cells responsible for cell renewal, these motor nerves may play a direct role in inducing proliferation and differentiation of the GI tissue. I hypothesized that there are indeed new, non-traditional roles of the sensory and motor nerves of the gut-brain axis in neuroplasticity and tissue regeneration and tested the mechanisms underlying these processes. Specifically, I used rodents and swine mammalian models to develop new methods by which to investigate multiple hypotheses about nutrient-induced vagal sensory neuroplasticity and found a direct mechanism by which the autonomic motor nerves induce changes in intestinal epithelial renewal. The results of the experiments included in this dissertation establish roles for the neural gut-brain axis that are outside those that are traditionally studied, which can expand the available methods to manipulate gut-brain system for therapeutic purposes