Firms' Main Market, Human Capital and Wages

Recent international trade literature emphasizes two features in characterizing the current patterns of trade: efficiency heterogeneity at the firm level and quality differentiation. This paper explores human capital and wage differences across firms in that context. We build a partial equilibrium model predicting that firms selling in more-remote markets employ higher human capital and pay higher wages to employees within each education group. The channel linking these variables is firms’ endogenous choice of quality. Predictions are tested using Spanish employer-employee matched data that classify firms according to four main destination markets: local, national, European Union, and rest of the World. Employees’ average education is increasing in the remoteness of firm’s main output market. Market–destination wage premia are large, increasing in the remoteness of the market, and increasing in individual education. These results suggest that increasing globalization may play a significant role in raising wage inequality within and across education groups

On the possible Computational Power of the Human Mind

The aim of this paper is to address the question: Can an artificial neural network (ANN) model be used as a possible characterization of the power of the human mind? We will discuss what might be the relationship between such a model and its natural counterpart. A possible characterization of the different power capabilities of the mind is suggested in terms of the information contained (in its computational complexity) or achievable by it. Such characterization takes advantage of recent results based on natural neural networks (NNN) and the computational power of arbitrary artificial neural networks (ANN). The possible acceptance of neural networks as the model of the human mind's operation makes the aforementioned quite relevant.Comment: Complexity, Science and Society Conference, 2005, University of Liverpool, UK. 23 page

Is there any real substance to the claims for a 'new computationalism'?

'Computationalism' is a relatively vague term used to describe attempts to apply Turing's model of computation to phenomena outside its original purview: in modelling the human mind, in physics, mathematics, etc. Early versions of computationalism faced strong objections from many (and varied) quarters, from philosophers to practitioners of the aforementioned disciplines. Here we will not address the fundamental question of whether computational models are appropriate for describing some or all of the wide range of processes that they have been applied to, but will focus instead on whether `renovated' versions of the \textit{new computationalism} shed any new light on or resolve previous tensions between proponents and skeptics. We find this, however, not to be the case, because the 'new computationalism' falls short by using limited versions of "traditional computation", or proposing computational models that easily fall within the scope of Turing's original model, or else proffering versions of hypercomputation with its many pitfalls

Firms' Main Market, Human Capital and Wages

Recent international trade literature emphasizes two features in characterizing the current patterns of trade: efficiency heterogeneity at the firm level and quality differentiation. This paper explores human capital and wage differences across firms in that context. We build a partial equilibrium model predicting that firms selling in more-remote markets employ higher human capital and pay higher wages to employees within each education group. The channel linking these variables is firms’ endogenous choice of quality. Predictions are tested using Spanish employer-employee matched data that classify firms according to four main destination markets: local, national, European Union, and rest of the World. Employees’ average education is increasing in the remoteness of firm’s main output market. Market–destination wage premia are large, increasing in the remoteness of the market, and increasing in individual education. These results suggest that increasing globalization may play a significant role in raising wage inequality within and across education groups.vertical differentiation, exporters, Alchian-Allen effect, wage inequality, unobservable skills

Automatic detection, tracking and counting of birds in marine video content

Robust automatic detection of moving objects in a marine context is a multi-faceted problem due to the complexity of the observed scene. The dynamic nature of the sea caused by waves, boat wakes, and weather conditions poses huge challenges for the development of a stable background model. Moreover, camera motion, reflections, lightning and illumination changes may contribute to false detections. Dynamic background subtraction (DBGS) is widely considered as a solution to tackle this issue in the scope of vessel detection for maritime traffic analysis. In this paper, the DBGS techniques suggested for ships are investigated and optimized for the monitoring and tracking of birds in marine video content. In addition to background subtraction, foreground candidates are filtered by a classifier based on their feature descriptors in order to remove non-bird objects. Different types of classifiers have been evaluated and results on a ground truth labeled dataset of challenging video fragments show similar levels of precision and recall of about 95% for the best performing classifier. The remaining foreground items are counted and birds are tracked along the video sequence using spatio-temporal motion prediction. This allows marine scientists to study the presence and behavior of birds