Empire State\u27s Cultural Capital at Risk? Assessing Challenges to the Workforce and Educational Infrastructure of Arts and Entertainment in New York

New York State is a world center for the arts and entertainment industry and its vast and uniquely diversified workforce is its main competitive advantage. Commissioned by the New York Empire State Development Corporation, this report examines the strengths and the challenges facing this industry and its workforce in the state, providing an assessment of the education and training infrastructure that supports this vital industry, and identifying issues that offer a potential role for public and private policy

Community Workforce Provisions in Project Labor Agreements: A Tool for Building Middle-Class Careers

[Excerpt] Project Labor Agreements are comprehensive contracts between a construction client and a consortium of unions. They have been used in the construction industry for over 60 years to achieve uniform labor standards, stability and high quality for large construction projects, and are currently evolving to address broader social and community issues. Community Workforce Agreements are PLAs that contain social investment or targeted hiring provisions to create employment and career path opportunities for individuals from low income communities. Pioneering examples of CWAs included the Los Angeles Community College District PLA (signed in April of 2001), providing for 30 percent of local resident workforce (20 percent of which should be individuals from economically disadvantaged and at-risk populations); and the Port of Oakland (California) PLA (implemented from 2001 to 2008), setting goals for employment of disadvantaged populations and utilization of minority-owned businesses. The first agreements on the West Coast were developed in response to communities’ demands for increased opportunities in the construction industry. To address these demands Building Trades Councils began negotiating PLAs with local hiring provisions. Other successfully implemented CWAs in the West include the Los Angeles Unified School District PLA (2003) and the City of Los Angeles Public Works construction projects (2006). Studies by the Partnership for Working Families and by UCLA found that these CWAs resulted in increased employment and retention of local workers, middle-class career paths and poverty reduction in Los Angeles communities, and that they currently constitute “the basis on which the city can monitor and assess the number of local residents working on its projects.” This report profiles the wide range of PLA/CWA provisions that have been designed and implemented during the last 15 years to establish goals and structures that assist in the creation of new standards and the implementation of new and existing laws and regulations related to the labor and employment rights of low income communities, women, and minorities

State of the Artist: Challenges to the New York State Arts & Entertainment Industry and its Workforce

[Excerpt] In 2009, with support from Empire State Development (ESD), the Cornell University ILR School published its first report on the state of the New York arts and entertainment (A&E) workforce, Empire State’s Cultural Capital at Risk? Assessing Challenges to the Workforce and the Educational Infrastructure for New York State’s Arts and Entertainment Industry. The report analyzed a number of key characteristics of the A&E workforce across electronic media, live performing, and visual arts, identifying the most pressing issues for New York A&E workers and the support structures in place to protect their interests. The report concluded by proposing a number of questions to policymakers to be considered in future legislation. State of the Artist both updates this analysis of the State A&E workforce and analyzes trends in recent years based on comparable data presented in the 2009 report. The current report draws from government surveys, industry reports, and interviews with key stakeholders to assess the condition of the NYS A&E industry and its workforce, identifying key issues faced by workers in each sector of the industry. In addition to an extensive review of current literature, data from primary and secondary sources was analyzed to assess the state of the industry and major trends by sector. Survey data from the US Census Bureau and Department of Labor, notably from the American Community Survey (ACS), were retrieved to isolate trends in A&E workforce employment patterns, demographics, and income by occupational group. This analysis, including a conference attended by industry leaders and representatives to assess reactions to preliminary findings, served to identify current challenges facing this vital workforce to the state economy. Often left out of discussions about precarious workers, many working within the A&E industry continue to face high rates of contingent and project-based employment, low average income, and inadequate employment protections—all of which are explored here. State of the Artist concludes with a summary of public policies currently in place as well as those under consideration, providing an updated set of questions for New York policymakers

OOPS! – OntOlogy Pitfalls Scanner!

The application of methodologies for building ontologies has improved the ontology quality. However, such a quality is not totally guaranteed because of the difficulties involved in ontology modelling. These difficulties are related to the inclusion of anomalies or worst practices in the modelling. Several authors have provided lists of typical anomalies detected in ontologies during the last decade. In this context, our aim in this technical report is to describe OOPS! (OntOlogy Pitfalls Scanner!), a tool for pitfalls detection in ontology developments

How Labor-Management Partnerships Improve Patient Care, Cost Control, and Labor Relations: Case Studies of Fletcher Allen Health Care, Kaiser Permanente, and Montefiore Medical Center’s Care Management Corporation

[Excerpt] This paper explores the ways in which healthcare unions and their members are strategically engaging with management through partnership to control costs and improve the patient experience, clinical outcomes, workplace environment, and labor relations. These initiatives depend on making use of the knowledge of front-line healthcare workers, improving communication between all staff members, and increasing transparency. In turn, these initiatives can also lead to more robust and dynamic local unions. Through participating in joint work activities, many union members note feeling more respected in their workplace and more connected to their union. Unions can benefit from these activities by offering their members the ability to inform decisions about how work gets done

Cultural Capital: Challenges to New York State’s Competitive Advantages in the Arts and Entertainment Industry

This is a report on the findings of the Cornell University ILR planning process conducted with support of a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to investigate trends in the arts and entertainment industry in New York State and assess industry stakeholders’ needs and demand for industry studies and applied research. Building on a track record of research and technical assistance to arts and entertainment organizations, Cornell ILR moved toward a long-term goal of establishing an arts and entertainment research center by forging alliances with faculty from other schools and departments in the university and by establishing an advisory committee of key players in the industry. The outcome of this planning process is a research agenda designed to serve the priority needs and interests of the arts and entertainment industry in New York State

Integrative Model-based clustering of microarray methylation and expression data

In many fields, researchers are interested in large and complex biological processes. Two important examples are gene expression and DNA methylation in genetics. One key problem is to identify aberrant patterns of these processes and discover biologically distinct groups. In this article we develop a model-based method for clustering such data. The basis of our method involves the construction of a likelihood for any given partition of the subjects. We introduce cluster specific latent indicators that, along with some standard assumptions, impose a specific mixture distribution on each cluster. Estimation is carried out using the EM algorithm. The methods extend naturally to multiple data types of a similar nature, which leads to an integrated analysis over multiple data platforms, resulting in higher discriminating power.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS533 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A Double Classification of Common Pitfalls in Ontologies

The application of methodologies for building ontologies has improved the ontology quality. However, such a quality is not totally guaranteed because of the difficulties involved in ontology modelling. These difficulties are related to the inclusion of anomalies or worst practices in the modelling. In this context, our aim in this paper is twofold: (1) to provide a catalogue of common worst practices, which we call pitfalls, and (2) to present a double classification of such pitfalls. These two products will serve in the ontology development in two ways: (a) to avoid the appearance of pitfalls in the ontology modelling, and (b) to evaluate and correct ontologies to improve their quality

A fluorometric method for the assay of protein kinase activity

Protein kinases constitute one of the largest protein families in nature. Current methods to assay their activity involve the use of radioactive ATP or very expensive reagents. In this work, we developed a highly sensitive, cost-effective and straightforward protocol to measure protein kinase activity using a microplate layout. Released ADP is converted into NAD+, which is quantified by its fluorescent properties after alkaline treatment (linear range 0–10 nmol ADP). To validate our protocol, we characterized a recombinant calcium-dependent protein kinase from potato. Overall, this tool represents a critical step forward in the functional characterization of protein kinases.Fil: Rojas, Bruno Ezequiel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral; ArgentinaFil: Santin, Franco. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; ArgentinaFil: Ulloa, Rita Maria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; ArgentinaFil: Iglesias, Alberto Alvaro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral; ArgentinaFil: Figueroa, Carlos Maria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral; Argentin

The impact of structural capital on the firm Innovativeness, the Galician Northern Portugal automotive industries reality

The intellectual capital is increasingly considered a major issue on the management and organization research and a source of competitive advantage. Although there are different models and approaches that try to identify the effect of intellectual capital on firm performance, there’s, also a lack of evidence and consensus. Based on that evidence, this paper focuses on the influence of the structural capital on the product- process and management innovativeness of the firm. A global model including the variables used in the previous literature is used and we establishes hypotheses for testing this model and use statistic technique to estimate the parameters of the model in a sample. To do so, we use a survey from 68 firms working on the auto components sector, established in the Northern Spain and Northern Portugal. We found firstly, that innovativeness has two main dimensions, perfectly differentiated, the product-process innovation and the management innovation; secondly that the structural capital dimensions influences differently each type of innovation capacity (innovativeness). We also concluded that the structural capital of the automotive firms based on the euro region Galicia (Spain) Northern Portugal influences positive and directly the management innovativeness. These results highlight the importance of the structural capital as well as highlight the main dimensions that influence the innovativeness, and more broadly, the value of intellectual capital as a competitive advantage in contemporary time. Moreover, point out the different character of product-process and management innovativeness.