Anthropological demography in Europe

This paper offers a descriptive account of the methods used to conduct a comparative ethnographic study of below-replacement fertility in Athens, Greece and London, UK. It argues that in order for anthropology and demography to forge a closer relationship each discipline first needs to gain a deeper appreciation of the other’s methodological perspectives. The following discussion presents the key anthropological approaches employed to realize a research project on low fertility in Europe, and provides justification for their use. While the practices described in this paper might be familiar to anthropologists and qualitative demographers, they are less well-known in the wider demographic community. Those convinced of the benefits of the ethnographic approach to the study of fertility are also invited to consider the specific obstacles encountered in the course of this enquiry. This paper reaches the following methodological conclusions: 1) Findings from two ethnographic studies of low fertility can be compared and generalised if such concepts as ‘comparison’ and ‘generalisation’ are understood in the anthropological sense. 2) Those investigating fertility in Europe must remain critical of their position relative to their study participants, even if they are undertaking research ‘at home’. 3) Exploring attitudes towards reproduction and experiences of family-formation in an urban setting presents unique challenges as does 4) asking women about their childbearing beliefs and practices. 5) Analysing press perspectives on low fertility must involve treating media representations as ‘discourse’ and 6) qualitative studies are invaluable to the low fertility debate because of their thematic contributions.anthropological demography, below-replacement fertility, comparison, ethnography, Europe, methodology

Efficiency Wages and the Economic Effects of the Minimum Wage: Evidence from a Low-Wage Labour Market

We exploit a natural experiment provided by the 1990 introduction of the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) to investigate the relationship between wages and monitoring and to test for Efficiency Wages considerations in a low-wage sector, the UK residential care homes industry. Our findings seem to support the wage-supervision trade-off prediction of the shirking model, and that employers didn't dissipate minimum wage rents by increasing work intensity or effort requirements on the job. Estimation results suggest that higher wage costs were more than offset by lower monitoring costs, and thus the overall evidence imply that the NMW may have operated as an Efficiency Wage. These findings support Efficiency Wage models used to explain a non-negative employment effect of the Minimum Wage and provide an explanation of recent evidence from the care homes sector that although the wage structure was heavily affected by the NMW introduction, there were moderate employment effects.Efficiency Wages, National Minimum Wage, Wage-supervision trade-off

Parameterized Synthetic Image Data Set for Fisheye Lens

Based on different projection geometry, a fisheye image can be presented as a parameterized non-rectilinear image. Deep neural networks(DNN) is one of the solutions to extract parameters for fisheye image feature description. However, a large number of images are required for training a reasonable prediction model for DNN. In this paper, we propose to extend the scale of the training dataset using parameterized synthetic images. It effectively boosts the diversity of images and avoids the data scale limitation. To simulate different viewing angles and distances, we adopt controllable parameterized projection processes on transformation. The reliability of the proposed method is proved by testing images captured by our fisheye camera. The synthetic dataset is the first dataset that is able to extend to a big scale labeled fisheye image dataset. It is accessible via: http://www2.leuphana.de/misl/fisheye-data-set/.Comment: 2018 5th International Conference on Information Science and Control Engineerin

Is there a Wage-Supervision Trade-Off? Efficiency Wages Evidence From the 1990 British Workplace Industrial Relations Survey

Efficiency Wages cannot be ruled out on a priori theoretical grounds and evidence is needed. Direct evidence on the effects of wages on productivity and indirect evidence from the wage structure does not seem persuasive. In this paper we offer an indirect test of the efficiency wage theory, by testing the prediction of the ‘shirking’ and ‘gift-exchange’ models of efficiency wages of a wage-supervision trade-off, using data from the 1990 British Workplace Industrial Relations Survey. We highlight the main empirical problems that hinder the estimation of the wage-supervision relationship, and we offer a novel theoretical explanation of the wagesupervision trade-off in terms of union bargaining power. We find evidence that wages and supervision are substitutes in eliciting effort for unskilled manual workers. This evidence supports principal-agent models, many of which do not have the efficiency wage property. Finally, after we test whether wages are set optimally above the market clearing level we fail to find any evidence that can rule out efficiency wages in favour of incentive contracts.Efficiency Wages, Wage-supervision trade-off, Endogeneity bias, private and Non-Unionised establishments

Is the Minimum Wage Efficient? Evidence of the Effects of the UK National Minimum Wage in the Residential Care Homes Sector

In this paper we exploit a natural experiment provided by the 1999 introduction and 2001 increase of the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) to investigate the relationship between wages and supervision and to test for efficiency wages considerations in a low-wage labour market, the UK residential care homes sector. We also provide evidence of the effects of the UK National Minimum Wage introduction and increase on the main labour market outcomes in the sector. We find evidence supporting a wage-supervision trade-off for the 1999 NMW introduction but no evidence of a trade-off for the 2001 NMW increase. We also find that the 1999 NMW introduction caused significant growth in average home hourly wages but only moderate negative employment effects and no significant effect on other outcomes as prices and profits. Finally, we find that the 2001 NMW increase generated higher wage growth than the 1999 introduction but had no employment effect, which can be possibly explained by the fact that homes increased the price of care to offset the increased wage costs generated by the NMW increase.Efficiency Wages, National Minimum Wage, Difference-in-Differences, Insrumental Variables.

Factors Influencing the Quality of the User Experience in Ubiquitous Recommender Systems

The use of mobile devices and the rapid growth of the internet and networking infrastructure has brought the necessity of using Ubiquitous recommender systems. However in mobile devices there are different factors that need to be considered in order to get more useful recommendations and increase the quality of the user experience. This paper gives an overview of the factors related to the quality and proposes a new hybrid recommendation model.Comment: The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Interactions Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 8530, 2014, pp 369-37