From Bad to Worse: Senior Economic Insecurity on the Rise

Based on the Senior Financial Stability Index, examines the increase in the number of economically insecure seniors by race/ethnicity, gender, and marital status between 2004 and 2008; contributing factors; and options for reversing the trend

Gender at Work: The Role of Habitus and Gender-Performance in Service Industry Occupations

This study examines the relationship between gender roles and habitus in service industry occupations. It draws primarily from the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler. Data includes an exploratory focus group, non-participant observations and interviews with women currently or formerly employed as bartenders, bar backs, servers, or hostesses. The main themes that emerged included how habitus is affected by views of employment, drug and alcohol use, the naturalization of gender roles, and the effect of appearance standards. This study supports previous feminist works that posit that gender as a performance, not a biological trait. Further this performance is used to navigate specific social experiences such as those in a workplace. This paper also comments on current enforcement of Title VII with reference to gender discrimination

Parity Reversing Involutions on Plane Trees and 2-Motzkin Paths

The problem of counting plane trees with $n$ edges and an even or an odd number of leaves was studied by Eu, Liu and Yeh, in connection with an identity on coloring nets due to Stanley. This identity was also obtained by Bonin, Shapiro and Simion in their study of Schr\"oder paths, and it was recently derived by Coker using the Lagrange inversion formula. An equivalent problem for partitions was independently studied by Klazar. We present three parity reversing involutions, one for unlabelled plane trees, the other for labelled plane trees and one for 2-Motzkin paths which are in one-to-one correspondence with Dyck paths.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Less Debt, More Equity: Lowering Student Debt While Closing the Black-White Wealth Gap

The dramatic increase in wealth inequality over the past several decades now forms the backdrop for many of today's most pressing public policy debates. Currently, the top 1 percent of U.S. households controls 42 percent of the nation's wealth, and nearly half of the wealth accumulated over the past 30 years has gone to the top 0.1 percent. Simultaneously, the wealth held by the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households continues to shrink, just as people of color are a growing percentage of the U.S. population. These trends have converged to produce a wealth divide that is apparent not just by class, but by race as well. The average white family owns $13 for every$1 owned by a typical Black family, and $10 for every$1 owned by the typical Latino family.This analysis uses the Racial Wealth Audit, a framework developed by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) to assess the impact of public policy on the wealth gap between white and Black households. We use the framework to model the impact of various student debt relief policies to identify the approaches most likely to reduce inequities in wealth by race, as opposed to exacerbating existing inequities. We focus specifically on the Black-white wealth gap both because of the historic roots of inequality described above, and because student debt (in the form of borrowing rates and levels) seems to be contributing to wealth disparities between Black and white young adults, in particular

Evidence of a transition from perceptual to category induction in 3- to 9-year-old children

We examined whether inductive reasoning development is better characterized by accounts assuming an early category bias versus an early perceptual bias. We trained 264 children aged 3 to 9 years to categorize novel insects using a rule that directly pitted category membership against appearance. This was followed by an induction task with perceptual distractors at different levels of featural similarity. An additional 52 children were given the same training followed by an induction task with alternative stimuli. Categorization performance was consistently high, however we found a gradual transition from a perceptual bias in our youngest children to a category bias around age 6-7. In addition, children of all ages were equally distracted by higher levels of featural similarity. The transition is unlikely to be due to an increased ability to inhibit perceptual distractors. Instead, we argue that the transition is driven by a fundamental change in children’s understanding of category membership

Hard Choices: Navigating the Economic Shock of Unemployment

During the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, millions of Americans faced severe economic hardship, forcing difficult decisions about how to stabilize their families' financial well-being and prevent downward economic mobility. Americans with savings were forced to weigh immediate needs against long-term investments, choosing whether to deplete personal assets in order to stay afloat. Those without wealth to fall back on were in an even more precarious position, leading them to turn to family assistance, debt, and other public and private supports when available.This study examines how families weather economic shocks through a close focus on one particular event -- the experience of unemployment, with specific attention to differences by race and family income. The analysis used a nationally representative sample of working-age families from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics or PSID, following the same households from 1999 to 2009. To provide greater insight into the challenges and choices families faced, the report also drew on a unique longitudinal data set of in-depth interviews with 51 families that endured one month or more of unemployment between 1998 and 2012

Abstract Diagnosis for Timed Concurrent Constraint programs

The Timed Concurrent Constraint Language (tccp in short) is a concurrent logic language based on the simple but powerful concurrent constraint paradigm of Saraswat. In this paradigm, the notion of store-as-value is replaced by the notion of store-as-constraint, which introduces some differences w.r.t. other approaches to concurrency. In this paper, we provide a general framework for the debugging of tccp programs. To this end, we first present a new compact, bottom-up semantics for the language that is well suited for debugging and verification purposes in the context of reactive systems. We also provide an abstract semantics that allows us to effectively implement debugging algorithms based on abstract interpretation. Given a tccp program and a behavior specification, our debugging approach automatically detects whether the program satisfies the specification. This differs from other semiautomatic approaches to debugging and avoids the need to provide symptoms in advance. We show the efficacy of our approach by introducing two illustrative examples. We choose a specific abstract domain and show how we can detect that a program is erroneous.Comment: 16 page

Exemplar models and category specific effects

In recent years, there have been numerous reports of patients with brain damage who show selective identification or recognition deficits for objects from specific categories (see Forde, in press; Humphreys & Forde, 2000, for reviews). The most common deficit appears to be a selective impairment in the identification of living things, accompanied by relatively unimpaired recognition or identification of artificial or non-living objects. However, despite the large number of reported cases with category-specific processing deficits, there is still no agreement on the mechanisms that produce these deficits. It is not even clear whether all such cases can be understood in terms of a single process or mechanism, or whether categoryspecific deficits can be caused by a variety of different factors. In this chapter, we explore category-specific deficits from a theoretical viewpoint that evolved from recent research on perceptual categorization and identification. Although some efforts have been made to model category-specific deficits with connectionist models (e.g., Farah & McClelland, 1991; Humphreys, Lamote, & Lloyd-Jones, 1995), we are not aware of any attempts to apply classical models of categorization and identification1 to the neuropsychological data on category-specificity (with the exception of a study by Dixon, Bub, & Arguin, 1997, which will be discussed in detail later)

Development of reasoning:behavioral evidence to support reinforcement over cognitive control accounts

Speed's theory makes two predictions for the development of analogical reasoning. Firstly, young children should not be able to reason analogically due to an undeveloped PFC neural network. Secondly, category knowledge enables the reinforcement of structural features over surface features, and thus the development of sophisticated, analogical, reasoning. We outline existing studies that support these predictions and highlight some critical remaining issues. Specifically, we argue that the development of inhibition must be directly compared alongside the development of reasoning strategies in order to support Speed's account