Why Did Rhode Island have Slower Employment Growth than the Nation During the Recovery Period, 2009-16?

[Excerpt] When most of the nation was recovering from the Great Recession, Rhode Island was on a different path. From June 2009 to June 2016, national employment increased by 10.1 percent while employment in Rhode Island increased by only 5.1 percent. To examine why Rhode Island lagged behind employment growth rates nationwide, this Beyond the Numbers article compares industry employment growth trends in Rhode Island with overall growth trends over the 2009–16 period for the United States, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program. This 7-year period generally coincides with the national economic recovery, which officially began in June 2009. Using methodology that can be used for any state, this article isolates the impact of industry job growth on overall statewide job growth. The analysis suggests that had employment growth in the state’s largest supersector, education and health services, matched that of the national average, the gap between overall state employment growth and the national average would have closed by more than half. Specifically, job losses in the colleges and universities industry, within the educational services sector, and the hospital subsector, within the healthcare and social assistance sector, were responsible for depressed overall growth in this supersector and the state overall

From cognitive capability to social reform? Shifting perceptions of learning in immersive virtual worlds

Learning in immersive virtual worlds (simulations and virtual worlds such as Second Life) could become a central learning approach in many curricula, but the socio‐political impact of virtual world learning on higher education remains under‐researched. Much of the recent research into learning in immersive virtual worlds centres around games and gaming and is largely underpinned by cognitive learning theories that focus on linearity, problem‐solving and the importance of attaining the ‘right answer’ or game plan. Most research to date has been undertaken into students’ experiences of virtual learning environments, discussion forums and perspectives about what and how online learning has been implemented. This article reviews the literature relating to learning in immersive virtual worlds, and suggests that there needs to be a reconsideration of what ‘learning’ means in such spaces

On the shape of compact hypersurfaces with almost constant mean curvature

The distance of an almost constant mean curvature boundary from a finite family of disjoint tangent balls with equal radii is quantitatively controlled in terms of the oscillation of the scalar mean curvature. This result allows one to quantitatively describe the geometry of volume-constrained stationary sets in capillarity problems.Comment: 36 pages, 2 figures. In this version we have added an appendix about almost umbilical surface

On the shape of capillarity droplets in a container

We provide a quantitative description of global minimizers of the Gauss free energy for a liquid droplet bounded in a container in the small volume regime.Comment: 37 pages, 3 figure

Capillarity problems with nonlocal surface tension energies

We explore the possibility of modifying the classical Gauss free energy functional used in capillarity theory by considering surface tension energies of nonlocal type. The corresponding variational principles lead to new equilibrium conditions which are compared to the mean curvature equation and Young's law found in classical capillarity theory. As a special case of this family of problems we recover a nonlocal relative isoperimetric problem of geometric interest.Comment: 37 pages, 4 figure

Giant capacitance of a plane capacitor with a two-dimensional electron gas in a magnetic field

If a clean two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) with small concentration $n$ comprises one (or both) electrodes of a plane capacitor, the resulting capacitance $C$ can be larger than the "geometric capacitance" $C_g$ determined by the physical separation $d$ between electrodes. A recent paper [1] argued that when the effective Bohr radius $a_B$ of the 2DEG satisfies $a_B << d$, one can achieve $C >> C_g$ at low concentration $nd^2 << 1$. Here we show that even for devices with $a_B > d$, including graphene, for which $a_B$ is effectively infinite, one also arrives at $C >> C_g$ at low electron concentration if there is a strong perpendicular magnetic field.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures; updated discussion about bilayer systems; added discussion of fractional quantum Hall state