The labor market effects of refugee waves: reconciling conflicting results

An influential strand of research has tested for the effects of immigration on natives’ wages and employment using exogenous refugee supply shocks as natural experiments. Several studies have reached conflicting conclusions about the effects of noted refugee waves such as the Mariel Boatlift in Miami and post-Soviet refugees to Israel. We show that conflicting findings on the effects of the Mariel Boatlift can be explained by a large difference in the pre- and post-Boatlift racial composition in subsamples of the Current Population Survey extracts. This compositional change is specific to Miami, unrelated to the Boatlift, and arises from selecting small subsamples of workers. We also show that conflicting findings on the labor market effects of other important refugee waves are caused by spurious correlation between the instrument and the endogenous variable introduced by applying a common divisor to both. As a whole, the evidence from refugee waves reinforces the existing consensus that the impact of immigration on average native-born workers is small, and fails to substantiate claims of large detrimental impacts on workers with less than high schoo

Quantifying Roadside Assessment for Highway Safety

Many of Kentucky’s two-lane rural roads pose an above average risk for fixed object crashes. In Kentucky, run-off-road (ROR) collisions with fixed objects account for 18.9% of all crashes and 41.6% of fatal crashes. Accordingly, ROR crashes are a significant public safety hazard that must be addressed through judicious investments in safety improvements. Until recently, transportation engineers and planners have mostly leveraged qualitative metrics to prioritize safety investments, however, qualitative methodologies are problematic because they may rely excessively on subjective opinion and intuition. This study applied methodologies and software from the U.S. Road Assessment Program (usRAP) to develop quantitative, objective roadside safety ratings for rural two-lane roads in the state of Kentucky on which 20 or more crashes occurred from 2010 to 2015. Kentucky Transportation Center researchers generated usRAP star rating scores following standard protocols and, to validate the methodology, compared those scores to the number of ROR collisions over the specified interval. Analysis revealed robust correlations between star rating scores (and star ratings) and crash data, justifying their as an objective measure of roadside safety. Researchers also delivered a comprehensive database containing over 126,000 records to the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, which can be used to examine roadside severity and potentially inform future highway investments

Genetics and geography of leukocyte telomere length in sub-Saharan Africans

Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) might be causal in cardiovascular disease and major cancers. To elucidate the roles of genetics and geography in LTL variability across humans, we compared LTL measured in 1295 sub-Saharan Africans (SSAs) with 559 African-Americans (AAms) and 2464 European-Americans (EAms). LTL differed significantly across SSAs (P = 0.003), with the San from Botswana (with the oldest genomic ancestry) having the longest LTL and populations from Ethiopia having the shortest LTL. SSAs had significantly longer LTL than AAms [P = 6.5(e-16)] whose LTL was significantly longer than EAms [P = 2.5(e-7)]. Genetic variation in SSAs explained 52% of LTL variance versus 27% in AAms and 34% in EAms. Adjustment for genetic variation removed the LTL differences among SSAs. LTL genetic variation among SSAs, with the longest LTL in the San, supports the hypothesis that longer LTL was ancestral in humans. Identifying factors driving LTL variation in Africa may have important ramifications for LTL-associated diseases

Racial Justice and Black Lives in Research: Consider these areas of inquiry

Developed by the Black Matter in Research Working Group 2021 -- Researchers, Ethics & IRB Professionals

A continuously updated, geospatially rectified database of utility-scale wind turbines in the United States.

Over 60,000 utility-scale wind turbines are installed in the United States as of October, 2019, representing over 97 gigawatts of electric power capacity; US wind turbine installations continue to grow at a rapid pace. Yet, until April 2018, no publicly-available, regularly updated data source existed to describe those turbines and their locations. Under a cooperative research and development agreement, analysts from three organizations collaborated to develop and release the United States Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) - a publicly available, continuously updated, spatially rectified data source of locations and attributes of utility-scale wind turbines in the United States. Technical specifications and wind facility data, incorporated from five sources, undergo rigorous quality control. The location of each turbine is visually verified using high-resolution aerial imagery. The quarterly-updated data are available in a variety of formats, including an interactive web application, comma-separated values (CSV), shapefile, and application programming interface (API). The data are used widely by academic researchers, engineers and developers from wind energy companies, government agencies, planners, educators, and the general public

A study of wireless sensor networks with focus on node localization

Abstract only availableDue to research in low-power, cheap wireless communications, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has become one of the most exciting new fields of interest within computer science and engineering. Just as the Internet has made data readily available to many users, so will wireless sensor network, but on a different and larger scale. Because of Wireless Sensor Networks, we will be able to receive measurements of the physical phenomena around us, leading to their understanding and ultimately the utilization of this information for a wide range of applications. This research allows the evaluation of the many requirements that a wireless system must meet in order to be considered an effective WSN. Furthermore, because of these requirements, there still exist several unresolved research issues. Wireless Senor Networks are composed of individual of sensor nodes. Once the nodes are deployed, it is very important to be able to determine where each node is; furthermore, the position of the nodes need not be engineered or pre-determined. Being able to immediately locate a sensor node without having to rely on satellites or any other external infrastructure is one of the major research components of Wireless Sensor Networks that has received a great deal of attention.Louis Stokes Missouri Alliance for Minority Participatio

Nanowire electron scattering spectroscopy

Methods and devices for spectroscopic identification of molecules using nanoscale wires are disclosed. According to one of the methods, nanoscale wires are provided, electrons are injected into the nanoscale wire; and inelastic electron scattering is measured via excitation of low-lying vibrational energy levels of molecules bound to the nanoscale wire

Fecal glucocorticoids and anthropogenic injury and mortality in North Atlantic right whales Eubalaena glacialis

© The Author(s), 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Endangered Species Research 34 (2017): 417-429, doi:10.3354/esr00866.As human impacts on marine ecosystems escalate, there is increasing interest in quantifying sub-lethal physiological and pathological responses of marine mammals. Glucocorticoid hormones are commonly used to assess stress responses to anthropogenic factors in wildlife. While obtaining blood samples to measure circulating hormones is not currently feasible for free-swimming large whales, immunoassay of fecal glucocorticoid metabolites (fGCs) has been validated for North Atlantic right whales Eubalaena glacialis (NARW). Using a general linear model, we compared fGC concentrations in right whales chronically entangled in fishing gear (n = 6) or live-stranded (n = 1), with right whales quickly killed by vessels (n = 5) and healthy right whales (n = 113) to characterize fGC responses to acute vs. chronic stressors. fGCs in entangled whales (mean ± SE: 1856.4 ± 1644.9 ng g-1) and the stranded whale (5740.7 ng g-1) were significantly higher than in whales killed by vessels (46.2 ± 19.2 ng g-1) and healthy whales (51.7 ± 8.7 ng g-1). Paired feces and serum collected from the live-stranded right whale provided comparison of fGCs in 2 matrices in a chronically stressed whale. Serum cortisol and corticosterone in this whale (50.0 and 29.0 ng ml-1, respectively) were much higher than values reported in other cetaceans, in concordance with extremely elevated fGCs. Meaningful patterns in fGC concentration related to acute vs. chronic impacts persisted despite potential for bacterial degradation of hormone metabolites in dead whales. These results provide biological validation for using fGCs as a biomarker of chronic stress in NARWs.This research was funded by the NOAA/NMFS, Office of Naval Research Marine Mammals and Biology Program, Northeast Consortium, Island Foundation, Irving Oil, NEAq Internal Research Fund, Prescott Grant NA08NMF4390590, and NOAA CINAR Cooperative Agreement NA09OAR4320129