Final-Offer Arbitration and Salaries of Police and Firefighters

[Excerpt] Did final-offer arbitration have a discernible impact on the salaries of police and firefighters in Massachusetts during the 3-year trial period which ended June 30, 1977? To analyze this question, we collected information on the maximum salary paid to police patrolmen, police sergeants, firefighters, and fire lieutenants for a large sample of Massachusetts municipalities. We integrated these data with police and fire impasse experiences and added several economic and environmental characteristics for each Massachusetts municipality. Then we performed several tests of the economic impact of final-offer arbitration

Lattice QCD Calculations of Hadron Structure: Constituent Quarks and Chiral Symmetry

New data from parity-violating experiments on the deuteron now allow isolation of the strange-quark contribution to the nucleon magnetic moment, G_M^s(0), without the uncertainty surrounding the anapole moment of the nucleon. Still, best estimates place G_M^s(0) > 0. It is illustrated how this experimental result challenges the very cornerstone of the constituent quark model. The chiral physics giving rise to G_M^s(0) \sim 0 is illustrated.Comment: Invited talk presented by DBL at the 16th Int. Conf. on Few Body Problems (Taipei, March 6-10, 2000); 9 pages, 5 figure

The role of active galactic nuclei in galaxy formation

We use Monte-Carlo Markov chain techniques to constrain acceptable parameter regions for the Munich L-Galaxies semi-analytic galaxy formation model. Feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) is required to limit star-formation in the most massive galaxies. However, we show that the introduction of tidal stripping of dwarf galaxies as they fall into and merge with their host systems can lead to a reduction in the required degree of AGN feedback. In addition, the new model correctly reproduces both the metallicity of large galaxies and the fraction of intracluster light.Comment: Monster's Fiery Breath Conference Proceedings, 4 page

Conceptual Foundations: Walton and McKersie\u27s Subprocesses of Negotiations

[Excerpt] Walton and McKersie\u27s 1965 book, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, provides much of the conceptual underpinnings of what grew into the modern-day teaching of negotiations in business, public policy, law, and other professional schools. We therefore believe that it is useful to outline the basic concepts and ideas introduced by these authors. We do so, however, with a word of caution. There is no substitute for the original. Every student should have the pleasure of struggling (as we did the first time it was assigned to us as students) with the tongue twisters like attitudinal structuring and the many other new terms and theoretical ideas introduced in the book

Final-Offer Arbitration and Public-Safety Employees: The Massachusetts Experience

[Excerpt] We conclude that, in terms of its impact on the bargaining process, final-offer arbitration has had a mixed record in Massachusetts. On the one hand, the law must probably be given some credit for preventing police and firefighter strikes; in addition, the rate of arbitration usage was remarkably low compared to experience in other states. On the other hand, the law probably led to more impasses in police and fire bargaining (although the experience in the commonwealth was still favorable compared to other states) and reduced the effectiveness of the mediation stage of the impasse procedures. Perhaps most important, the law failed to gain acceptance with municipal employers in the commonwealth

Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD : elicited production of passives

Children with ASD and an IQ-matched control group of typically developing (TD) children completed an elicited-production task which encouraged the production of reversible passive sentences (e.g., “Bob was hit by Wendy”). Although the two groups showed similar levels of correct production, the ASD group produced a significantly greater number of “reversal” errors (e.g., “Wendy was hit by Bob”, when, in fact Wendy hit Bob) than the TD group (who, when they did not produce correct passives, instead generally produced semantically appropriate actives; e.g., “Wendy hit Bob”). These findings suggest that the more formal elements of syntax are spared relative to more semantic/pragmatic/narrative aspects (e.g., manipulating thematic roles) in at least high-functioning children with ASD

The First Moments of Nucleon Generalized Parton Distributions

We extrapolate the first moments of the generalized parton distributions using heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. The calculation is based on the one loop level with the finite range regularization. The description of the lattice data is satisfactory and the extrapolated moments at physical pion mass are consistent with the results obtained with dimensional regularization, although the extrapolation in the momentum transfer to $t=0$ does show sensitivity to form factor effects which lie outside the realm of chiral perturbation theory. We discuss the significance of the results in the light of modern experiments as well as QCD inspired models.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure