IZA World of Labor - Wage compression and the gender pay gap
Wage structure and the gender pay gap: Conceptual issues Much research on the gender pay gap focuses on gender differences in qualifications, experience, or treatment by firms. These factors may be thought of as gender specific in that male–female differences in these dimensions cause a gender pay gap. In addition, men and women work in a world economy in which labor market prices such as the returns to education or experience are affected by supply and demand as well as labor market institutions. Moreover, since men and women work in different industries and occupations, differences or changes in occupational or industrial wage differentials will lead to differences or changes in the gender pay gap as well. This constellation of returns to skills and to location in favorable sectors of the economy is referred to here as the “wage structure.” Changes in the wage structure are likely to have an effect on the gender pay gap. Empirical evidence on wage compression and the gender pay gap
10 Companies That Control What We Buy
UW study shows direct brain interface between humans
Engineering | News releases | Research | Science | Social science | Technology November 5, 2014 Sometimes, words just complicate things. University of Washington researchers have successfully replicated a direct brain-to-brain connection between pairs of people as part of a scientific study following the team’s initial demonstration a year ago. In this photo, UW students Darby Losey, left, and Jose Ceballos are positioned in two different buildings on campus as they would be during a brain-to-brain interface demonstration. Read the PLOS ONE paper Learn more about the team’s current research At the time of the first experiment in August 2013, the UW team was the first to demonstrate two human brains communicating in this way. Collaborator Rajesh Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, is the lead author on this work. The research team combined two kinds of noninvasive instruments and fine-tuned software to connect two human brains in real time.
Faith: Marianne Williamson Is Full of It
In a matter of hours, Marianne Williamson will take the stage in cascading taupe and have 1,000 disciples eating out of her delicate hands. She will ask them to pray for peace, for prosperity, for the deliverance of a prostitute. She will urge them to save America from spiritual bankruptcy, and they will nod and murmur and consider her call to action. A young man will stand to ask advice about a friend and sit down smiling after she proclaims his attitude “enabling.” She will hold the lecture at Los Angeles’ Wilshire Ebell Theater, where she is a frequent headliner. “See, I find it interesting. Maybe so. Not everyone, of course, gets Williamson. “Because there’s a disconnection inside people, there is no listening,” Williamson says. Williamson’s first book was the 1992 A Return to Love, which sold 750,000 copies in hardback, an equal number in paperback, and spent 39 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Later, she calls to clarify.
Policy Responsiveness to Public Opinion - Political Science
Some authors offer general discussions of the process of democratic responsiveness in the United States. Burstein 2003 offers one general review of the literature on democratic representation. Manza and Cook 2002 contrasts research that finds evidence of large responsiveness with literature that argues that the public has a limited role in policymaking. Hurley and Hill 2012 presents the issues involved in estimating responsiveness and the causal structure responsible. Shapiro 2011 reviews research on public opinion and its role in democratic representation. As for mechanisms, Miller and Stokes 1963 provides the classic paradigm of how constituencies can influence their representatives’ behavior. Burstein, Paul.
A Rockefeller explains: Why I lost faith in Exxon Mobil, and donated my shares
My great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller Sr., created the Standard Oil Company and I inherited shares in the companies it spun off, including Exxon Mobil. But this year I donated those shares to the nonprofit Rockefeller Family Fund's Environmental program, which sold them and is using the $400,000 proceeds to fight global warming. I lost faith in Exxon Mobil's future value. A prime reason is that Exxon's valuation is based largely on the immense untapped reserves of oil and gas it owns. And yet if future generations are to inherit a livable world, most of those reserves must stay in the ground. Cynics may say that foreknowledge of the dire consequences won't stop humanity from using this fossil fuel. Internally, though, the company continued to accept the validity of the science it had helped pioneer. Way back in 1982 Exxon Mobil's environmental affairs office printed a primer on climate change marked “not to be distributed externally.” It's time to give the DWP a reboot
The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people
In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata." Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent. Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person's likelihood of being a terrorist. Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.
Watch Facebook Take Over The World In These Extremely Trippy Illustrations
What if Facebook took over the world -- even more than it already has? What if the almighty social networking site existed in the age of M.C. Escher or Salvador Dali, and served as their inspirations? What if that damn website was watching you watching it watch you? For an eerily beautiful answer to all of the questions above, we highly recommend checking the dark illustrations of Pawel Kuczynski. The artist, born in Szczecin, Poland, creates surreal satires that, gorgeous as they may be, strike a little too close to home for our liking. The depictions, of course, comment on our society's growing obsession with Mark Zuckerberg's brainchild, which has now become a crucial aspect of so many of our lives. "Some people say, that my works are surrealist drawings," Kuczynski explained in an email to The Huffington Post.
