Empirical Evidence on Occupation and Industry Specific Human Capital

This paper presents instrumental variables estimates of the effects of firm tenure, occupation specific work experience, industry specific work experience, and general work experience on wages using data from the 1979 Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. A key feature of the empirical work presented in this paper is that the returns to human capital are allowed to vary across occupations, in contrast to existing research which has constrained the parameters of the wage equation to be the same across occupations. The estimates indicate that both occupation and industry specific human capital are key determinants of wages, and the importance of various types of human capital varies widely across one-digit occupations. Human capital is primarily occupation specific in occupations such as craftsmen, where workers realize a 14% increase in wages after five years of occupation specific experience but do not realize wage gains from industry specific experience. In contrast, human capital is primarily industry specific in other occupations such as managerial employment where workers realize a 23% wage increase after five years of industry specific work experience. In other occupations, such as professional employment, both occupation and industry specific human capital are key determinants of wages

Cultural Capital and Educational Attainment

According to Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction, children from middle class families are advantaged in gaining educational credentials due to their possession of cultural capital. In order to assess this theory, I have developed a broad operationalisation of the concept of cultural capital, and have surveyed pupils on both their own and their parents ’ cultural capital. I will conclude that cultural capital is transmitted within the home and does have a significant effect on performance in the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examinations. However, a large, direct effect of social class on attainment remains when cultural capital has been controlled for. Therefore, ‘cultural reproduction ’ can provide only a partial explanation of social class differences in educational attainment

AUnit - a testing framework for alloy

textWriting declarative models of software designs and analyzing them to detect defects is an effective methodology for developing more dependable software systems. However, writing such models correctly can be challenging for practitioners who may not be proficient in declarative programming, and their models themselves may be buggy. We introduce the foundations of a novel test automation framework, AUnit, which we envision for testing declarative models written in Alloy -- a first-order, relational language that is supported by its SAT-based analyzer. We take inspiration from the success of the family of xUnit frameworks that are used widely in practice for test automation, albeit for imperative or object-oriented programs. The key novelty of our work is to define a basis for unit testing for Alloy, specifically, to define the concepts of test case and test coverage as well as coverage criteria for declarative models. We reduce the problems of declarative test execution and coverage computation to partial evaluation without requiring SAT solving. Our vision is to blend how developers write unit tests in commonly used programming languages with how Alloy users formulate their models in Alloy, thereby facilitating the development and testing of Alloy models for both new Alloy users as well as experts. We illustrate our ideas using a small but complex Alloy model. While we focus on Alloy, our ideas generalize to other declarative languages (such as Z, B, ASM).Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Frontline(s)

The challenge of theorising and analysing socio-political phenomena can feel overwhelming given today’s somewhat threatening realpolitik (9/11, US-led wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and now, perhaps, Syria) and the rapid pace with which (dis)information is received, digested and discarded. Through an act of ‘literary montage’ construction, and prefaced by some interpretation of my own, I offer this ‘exhibit’ as an attempt to highlight this sense of dislocation whilst simultaneously ‘building a picture’. A specific concern is to problematise the notion of ‘the frontline’. Given blatant military and economic imperialism by the US, underscored by the construction and fetishising of the rational subject under modernity and the social democratic state, I suggest that frontlines are located in any public or private space where the legitimacy of these interests and categories is questioned. Expressions of difference, including peace activism, thus become ‘proliferating illegitimacies’ and are policed as such. Against this context, the texts positioned here tell of growing realisation and fear of the coldness and instrumentalism at the heart of empire-building, of which both the horrific violence currently inflicted on Iraqi people, and the discounting and suppression of dissent to war worldwide, are part. For a global anti-capitalist/pro-justice movement that recognises trade in arms as a core constraint on human potential, reaching beyond this fear - retaining the hope of the ‘politics of possibility’ with which this ‘movement of movements’ has come to be identified – emerges as a latent and essential challenge