Retirement and Medical Benefits: Who Has Both?

[Excerpt] Employee compensation packages commonly include both wages and benefits. For decades, employee benefits have been used as part of the total compensation package to attract and retain highly qualified workers. Just as workers in various occupations receive different levels of pay, they also receive access to different types and combinations of employee benefits. This article uses March 2012 National Compensation Survey (NCS) data to examine private industry workers’ access to medical benefits, retirement benefits, and combinations of the two benefits, by major occupation group, wage category, part-time and full-time status, union and nonunion status, and establishment size. The study finds notable differences in the patterns of access to medical and retirement benefits—separately, and in combination—among the various worker groups

How Many Undocumented: The Numbers Behind the U.S.-Mexico Migration Talks

Presents estimates of the undocumented migrant population in the U.S., broken down into the categories that were most relevant to the migration proposals under consideration by the U.S. and Mexican governments, prior to the March 2002 migration talks

New Lows From New Highs: Latino Economic Losses in the Current Recession

Assesses the recession's impact on the Latino population and the likely long-term effects of unemployment on Hispanic communities. Examines recession-related job losses for Hispanics and forecasts their prospects for economic recovery

The peacebuilding potential of healthcare training programs.

Global health professionals regularly conduct healthcare trainings, such as first aid courses, in disadvantaged communities across the world. Many of these communities lack healthcare infrastructure because of war and political conflict. The authors draw on their experience conducting a first aid course in South Sudan to provide a perspective on how healthcare trainings for people with no medical background can be used to bridge ethnic, political, and religious differences. They argue that a necessary step for turning a healthcare training into a vehicle for peacebuilding is to bring people from different communities to the same physical space to learn the course material together. Importantly, simply encouraging contact between communities is unlikely to improve intergroup relations and could be detrimental if the following features are not incorporated. Buy-in from respected community leaders is essential to ensure that training participants trust that their safety during the training sessions is not at risk. Trainers should also create a supportive environment by conferring equal status and respect on all trainees. Finally, hands-on training exercises allow for positive interactions between trainees from different groups, which in turn can challenge stereotypes and facilitate cross-group friendships. These features map onto social psychological principles that have been shown to improve intergroup relations and are consistent with lessons learned from peace through health initiatives in public health and medicine. By adopting peacebuilding features, healthcare trainings can serve their primary goal of medical education and provide the added benefit of strengthening social relations

A gendered assessment of the brain drain

This paper updates and extends the Docquier-Marfouk data set on international migration by educational attainment. We use new sources, homogenize definitions of what a migrant is, and compute gender-dissaggregated indicators of the brain drain. Emigration stocks and rates are provided by level of schooling and gender for 195 source countries in 1990 and 2000. Our data set can be usded to capture the recent trend in women’s brain drain and to analyze its causes and consequences for developing countries. We show that women represent an increasing share of the OECD immigration stock and exhibit relatively higher rates of brain drain than men. The gender gap in skilled migration is strongly correlated with the gender gap in educational attainment at origin. Equating women’s and men’s access to education would probably reduce gender differences in the brain drain.Brain drain, Gender, Human capital, Migration

A gendered assessment of the brain drain

This paper updates and extends the Docquier-Marfouk data set on inter-national migration by educational attainment. The authors use new sources, homogenize definitions of what a migrant is, and compute gender-disaggregated indicators of the brain drain. Emigration stocks and rates are provided by level of schooling and gender for 195 source countries in 1990 and 2000. The data set can be used to capture the recent trend in women's skilled migration and to analyze its causes and consequences for developing countries. The .findings show that women represent an increasing share of the OECD immigration stock and exhibit relatively higher rates of brain drain than men. The gender gap in skilled migration is strongly correlated with the gender gap in educational attainment at origin. Equating women's and men's access to education would probably reduce gender differences in the brain drain.Population Policies,Gender and Development,Access to Finance,International Migration,Anthropology

Gas -Fueled Engine-Driven Air Conditioning Systems for Commercial Buildings

In 1985, the Gas Research Institute (GRI) initiated a program with Tecogen, Inc., to develop a nominal 150-ton gas-fueled engine-driven water chiller for commercial buildings. The packaged system has been designed, fabricated, and operated satisfactorily in the laboratory and in a 450-bed hospital. The engine chiller has been redesigned to improve performance, increase capacity, and reduce the footprint, and is undergoing field tests at seven sites to verify performance and reliability

110 GHz rapid, continous tuning from an optical parametric oscillator pumped by a fiber-amplified DBR diode laser

A singly-resonant continuous-wave optical parametric oscillator (cw-OPO) pumped by a fiber-amplified diode laser is described. Tuning of the pump source allowed the OPO output to be tuned continuously, without mode-hops, over 110 GHz in 29 ms. Discontinuous pump tuning over 20 nm in the region of 3.4 µm was also obtained. The rapid and continuous idler tuning was demonstrated by the measurement of a methane absorption spectrum. We believe this to be the first example of a singly-resonant OPO pumped by a fiber-amplified diode laser and the mode-hop free tuning range to be the highest reported for a cw-OPO