Hasil untuk "Labor policy. Labor and the state"

Zenji Hiroi

Superconductivity is one of the most amazing properties that metallic conductors exhibit. Electrical resistance is completely eliminated below the critical temperature (Tc), which is the most important parameter in superconductivity. Since the discovery of copper oxide superconductors 39 years ago, many solid state chemists have made significant contributions to the field by discovering new compounds and producing high-quality samples for physical measurements. However, superconductivity research remains challenging for most solid state chemists because it requires knowledge of complicated solid state physics. This manuscript aims to provide a simple, intuitive introduction to superconductivity using only fundamental physics concepts that solid state chemists are familiar with. The author investigates a wide range of materials and classifies them according to the superconductivity mechanisms that may drive them. Specifically focusing on a series of copper oxide superconductors with the highest Tc at ambient conditions, the remarkable material dependence of Tc and the underlying, unconventional superconductivity mechanism that leads to the high Tc are thoroughly examined. Although our understanding of cuprate superconductivity is still fragmented, the author believes that once the branches and leaves are removed, the story will be fairly simple, similar to the phonon-based superconductivity mechanism revealed by the BCS theory. Furthermore, potential strategies for raising the Tc of cuprates and other superconductors are discussed. The author hopes that this article will pique interest in superconductors in young solid state chemists and encourage them to pursue the discovery of still unknown and unexplored room-temperature superconductors in the future.

Bénédicte ZIMMERMANN, Lisa HERZOG

Le «travail soutenable» n’a pas de définition claire. Ses diverses dimensions ont jusqu’à présent été étudiées par des courants de la recherche différents, alors que les implications politiques des appels en faveur d’un «travail soutenable» ont suscité peu d’intérêt. Ce dossier spécial montre qu’il est nécessaire d’adopter une approche intégrant ces différents courants pour appréhender les conflits politiques inhérents au concept, ainsi que ses différentes dimensions et leur potentiel. Cette introduction présente l’éclairage que les divers contributeurs au dossier apportent sur ces dimensions et leur nature politique.

Nikos Papadakis, Stylianos Ioannis Tzagkarakis

IntroductionSustainable development is based on three interrelated and equally important pillars; the environmental, the economic and the social. The social pillar involves building a framework that promotes the well-being of the whole population with the ultimate aim of preserving social cohesion, while reducing social discrimination. In our analysis, the concept of social sustainability refers to the need for the creation of a society that contains all the conditions for sustainable development in terms of equal opportunities for employment and social well-being. Currently, significant problems and dysfunctions exist as long as several European labor markets are fragmented with a strong insiders-outsiders divergence, job-polarization, high labor market slack, high in-work poverty rates especially in precarious forms of employment. In Europe as well as globally, addressing these issues is of major importance in order to ensure social sustainability, given that the permacrisis (multiple crises), along with the Mega-Trends have a clear impact on the structure of economy and labor market, industrial relations systems, and business models.MethodsThe present paper analyses the state of play of social sustainability in Europe and aims to identify specific policy responses that could offer viable solutions to old and emerging challenges in terms of social inclusion through the examination of secondary quantitative data.ResultsThe permacrisis era, along with the Mega-Trends that are taking place and seem to gradually have a clear impact on the structure of economy and labor market, substantially affecting every aspect of society, since social inequalities have the tendency to interrelate and getting reproduced.DiscussionThere is a need for knowledge-based and evidence-informed policy making, both in terms of policy design and implementation, for a true and actual sustainable (as well as inclusive) development, within momentous times.

Lujun Li, Lama Sleem, Niccolo' Gentile et al.

With the emergence of ChatGPT, Transformer models have significantly advanced text classification and related tasks. Decoder-only models such as Llama exhibit strong performance and flexibility, yet they suffer from inefficiency on inference due to token-by-token generation, and their effectiveness in text classification tasks heavily depends on prompt quality. Moreover, their substantial GPU resource requirements often limit widespread adoption. Thus, the question of whether smaller language models are capable of effectively handling text classification tasks emerges as a topic of significant interest. However, the selection of appropriate models and methodologies remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of prompt engineering and supervised fine-tuning methods for transformer-based text classification. Specifically, we focus on practical industrial scenarios, including email classification, legal document categorization, and the classification of extremely long academic texts. We examine the strengths and limitations of smaller models, with particular attention to both their performance and their efficiency in Video Random-Access Memory (VRAM) utilization, thereby providing valuable insights for the local deployment and application of compact models in industrial settings.

Senne Deproost, Dennis Steckelmacher, Ann Nowé

Deep Reinforcement Learning is one of the state-of-the-art methods for producing near-optimal system controllers. However, deep RL algorithms train a deep neural network, that lacks transparency, which poses challenges when the controller has to meet regulations, or foster trust. To alleviate this, one could transfer the learned behaviour into a model that is human-readable by design using knowledge distilla- tion. Often this is done with a single model which mimics the original model on average but could struggle in more dynamic situations. A key challenge is that this simpler model should have the right balance be- tween flexibility and complexity or right balance between balance bias and accuracy. We propose a new model-agnostic method to divide the state space into regions where a simplified, human-understandable model can operate in. In this paper, we use Voronoi partitioning to find regions where linear models can achieve similar performance to the original con- troller. We evaluate our approach on a gridworld environment and a classic control task. We observe that our proposed distillation to locally- specialized linear models produces policies that are explainable and show that the distillation matches or even slightly outperforms the black-box policy they are distilled from.

Qing Wang, Yingru Li, Jiechao Xiong et al.

In deep reinforcement learning, policy optimization methods need to deal with issues such as function approximation and the reuse of off-policy data. Standard policy gradient methods do not handle off-policy data well, leading to premature convergence and instability. This paper introduces a method to stabilize policy optimization when off-policy data are reused. The idea is to include a Bregman divergence between the behavior policy that generates the data and the current policy to ensure small and safe policy updates with off-policy data. The Bregman divergence is calculated between the state distributions of two policies, instead of only on the action probabilities, leading to a divergence augmentation formulation. Empirical experiments on Atari games show that in the data-scarce scenario where the reuse of off-policy data becomes necessary, our method can achieve better performance than other state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithms.

Junyong Jiang, Buwei Tian, Chenxing Xu et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in fields like robotics and autonomous driving, but adversarial attacks designed to mislead RL systems remain challenging. Existing approaches often rely on modifying the environment or policy, limiting their practicality. This paper proposes an adversarial attack method in which existing agents in the environment guide the target policy to output suboptimal actions without altering the environment. We propose a reward iteration optimization framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate adversarial rewards explicitly tailored to the vulnerabilities of the target agent, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of inducing the target agent toward suboptimal decision-making. Additionally, a critical state identification algorithm is designed to pinpoint the target agent's most vulnerable states, where suboptimal behavior from the victim leads to significant degradation in overall performance. Experimental results in diverse environments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing approaches.

Emo Todorov

Policy gradients in continuous control have been derived for both stochastic and deterministic policies. Here we study the relationship between the two. In a widely-used family of MDPs involving Gaussian control noise and quadratic control costs, we show that the stochastic and deterministic policy gradients, natural gradients, and state value functions are identical; while the state-control value functions are different. We then develop a general procedure for constructing an MDP with deterministic policy that is equivalent to a given MDP with stochastic policy. The controls of this new MDP are the sufficient statistics of the stochastic policy in the original MDP. Our results suggest that policy gradient methods can be unified by approximating state value functions rather than state-control value functions.

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Gao Facheng

Using fieldwork, this study investigated the endogenous issues of fishermen's livelihood vulnerability on Naozhou Island, Guangdong. Existing literature shows that current studies focus on external factors such as the resource reduction, climate impact, policy changes, and fishermen's mode of operation to explore the vulnerability of fishermen's livelihoods to reveal the resource-based impacts of fishermen's livelihood difficulties and to explain the impacts of exogenous factors on fishermen's livelihoods. However, to some extent, these studies have neglected fishermen's internal problems and failed to understand fishermen's perspective on whether the improvement of capital can offset fishermen's production inputs and improve their production relations. The study on Naozhou island found that the existing studies have ignored the endogenous problems of the fishermen's livelihood vulnerability; in the era of collective economy, each fisherman's family had a small boat, but the fishermen joined together to work for the "state" on a big boat. Currently, the market economy has ordered this type of cooperative relationship to disappear. Owing to the characteristics of marine fishing operations, everyone must help each other in cases of difficulties when going to sea. In the same boat, the crew members may be immediate or distant family members to avoid malicious harm. However, if production tools require high investment and fishery resources are scarce, cooperation is no longer important. Whoever has more money to purchase large ships has a greater opportunity to control the scarce fishery resources, which is essentially the change in production tools that led to a breakdown in production relations. Although fishermen still talk about traditional relatives' contact, the situation of "As soon as the ship arrives, there is nothing left" has made fishermen realize that competition is the essence of relationships in their fishing villages. Fishermen's mobility, combined with the outflows and reflows created by various realities at the time of the survey, further demonstrates that fishermen, as the labor force, are not able to participate in the market competition of labor factors, nor are they able to get rid of the fishing skills inherited from their parents. They want to leave behind their status as fishermen but have to rely on the status of fishermen for basic labor security. All of these aggregate into endogenous forces, ranging from the inputs of fishermen's production tools and their own skills to the ambiguity of their age and identity. This constitutes an endogenous mechanism for the vulnerability of fishermen's livelihoods, which offers a disincentive effect of institutional arrangements on fishermen's withdrawal from marine production and exacerbates the predatory exploitation of marine resources fueled by modern consumer markets. Consequently, it is difficult to determine the effectiveness of marine ecological protection policies. Research has shown that, based on Marx's theory of Productivity and Relations of Production, the vulnerability of fishermen's livelihoods is inherent in their own insurmountable rapid increase in productivity and their failure to establish relations of production that are adapted to the needs of productivity, which creates tensions in human–sea relations. Therefore, to solve the vulnerability of fishermen's livelihoods, it is necessary to start from the cultural specificities of fishermen, reform their relations of production from the inside out, update their skills, establish effective organizations, and gradually alleviate the tensions in human–sea relations to construct a community with a shared future for mankind and the ocean.

Amaia Sangroniz, Roland Ebel, Mary Stein

Rapid urbanization and peri-urban development are driving land use change across the globe, result­ing in lands being converted from agricultural uses to housing development. Sustainable, multifunc­tional land use in urban and peri-urban areas is needed to balance the requirements of producing food in a way that protects environmental resources and of providing housing to a growing population. An agrihood is a planned development model that incorporates food production within a community to help address goals of nutritious food security while providing social, economic, and environmental benefits. Agrihoods may offer an alternative land use for integrating food production in new housing developments for the sustainable development of rapidly urbanizing cities. A com­parative case study, using semi-structured, qualita­tive interviews with key informants from two cities (Bozeman, Montana, and Longmont, Colorado), highlighted four key barriers to agrihood develop­ment in two cities in the Rocky Mountain region of the U.S: labor; ownership and governance struc­tures; resource availability; and land use regulation. Concerns for water and land resource availability reflect general barriers to agricultural expansion in the Rocky Mountain region, while the other identi­fied barriers reflect the structural and legal limita­tions preventing agrihood development and expan­sion. To reduce these barriers, policy interventions and incentives provided at municipal, state, and federal levels, informed by community advocates in support of local food production, will be essential.

Aabid Karim, Heman Das Lohano

This research examines whether sentiments conveyed in the State Bank of Pakistan's (SBP) communications impact financial market expectations and can act as a monetary policy tool. To achieve our goal, we first use sentiment analysis techniques to quantify the tone of SBP monetary policy documents and second, we use short time window, high frequency methodology to approximate the impact of tone on stock market returns. Our results show that positive (negative) change in the tone positively (negatively) impacts stock returns in Karachi Stock Exchange. Further extension shows that the communication of SBP still has a statistically significant impact on stock returns when controlling for different variables and monetary policy tool. Also, the communication of SBP does not have a long term constant effect on stock market.

Andrew Maris, Cristina Rea, Alessandro Pau et al.

The "density limit" is one of the fundamental bounds on tokamak operating space, and is commonly estimated via the empirical Greenwald scaling. This limit has garnered renewed interest in recent years as it has become clear that ITER and many tokamak pilot plant concepts must operate near or above the Greenwald limit to achieve their objectives. Evidence has also grown that the Greenwald scaling - in its remarkable simplicity - may not capture the full complexity of the density limit. In this study, we assemble a multi-machine database to quantify the effectiveness of the Greenwald limit as a predictor of the L-mode density limit and compare it with data-driven approaches. We find that a boundary in the plasma edge involving dimensionless collisionality and pressure, $ν_{*\rm, edge}^{\rm limit} = 3.5 β_{T,{\rm edge}}^{-0.40}$, achieves significantly higher accuracy (false positive rate of 2.3% at a true positive rate of 95%) of predicting density limit disruptions than the Greenwald limit (false positive rate of 13.4% at a true positive rate of 95%) across a multi-machine dataset including metal- and carbon-wall tokamaks (AUG, C-Mod, DIII-D, and TCV). This two-parameter boundary succeeds at predicting L-mode density limits by robustly identifying the radiative state preceding the terminal MHD instability. This boundary can be applied for density limit avoidance in current devices and in ITER, where it can be measured and responded to in real time.

Weiye Zhao, Feihan Li, Yifan Sun et al.

Enforcing state-wise safety constraints is critical for the application of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world problems, such as autonomous driving and robot manipulation. However, existing safe RL methods only enforce state-wise constraints in expectation or enforce hard state-wise constraints with strong assumptions. The former does not exclude the probability of safety violations, while the latter is impractical. Our insight is that although it is intractable to guarantee hard state-wise constraints in a model-free setting, we can enforce state-wise safety with high probability while excluding strong assumptions. To accomplish the goal, we propose Absolute State-wise Constrained Policy Optimization (ASCPO), a novel general-purpose policy search algorithm that guarantees high-probability state-wise constraint satisfaction for stochastic systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by training neural network policies for extensive robot locomotion tasks, where the agent must adhere to various state-wise safety constraints. Our results show that ASCPO significantly outperforms existing methods in handling state-wise constraints across challenging continuous control tasks, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

S. V. Brovchak

The article deals with the issues of gender equality based on the consideration of Russian and international norms, statistics of gender equality in the Russian Federation. The measures implemented in the Russian Federation to preserve gender equality, in particular the National Strategy of Action for Women for 2023–2030, the state programs «Development of healthcare», «Social support for citizens», «Employment», national projects «Demography», «Healthcare», «Small and medium–sized entrepreneurship» are considered and support for individual entrepreneurial initiative».The proposals for the preservation of gender equality in the Russian Federation for the long term are formulated. The development of a separate federal project is proposed, for example, as part of the state program economic development and innovative economy with indicators such as the proportion of women who have the same salary as men holding equivalent positions; the proportion of women holding managerial positions; achieving equivalent results in terms of the amount of time for household chores for men and women, including through development and accessibility of technologies that replace women’s labor. The development and adoption of the all–Russian standard of gender equality policy is also proposed. A standard can be a set of principles, rules, processes, an analysis of the current situation, and best practices for observing gender equality. The standard should have practice–oriented recommendations for the implementation of gender policy in the organization.

Šobić Ljiljana, Pantović Danijela, Miletić Radovan

One of the main problems the world is currently dealing with is unemployment. The characteristics of the labor market in the Republic of Serbia are long-term high unemployment rate, unfavorable qualification structure, high youth unemployment rate, regionally unequally distributed unemployment, and insufficient measures of active state employment policy. These characteristics point to complex issues that can be characterized as a type of labor market disparity. The problem is that the existing labor supply is finding it increasingly difficult to adapt to the changing demand for labor, which is associated with growing competition in the global market and accelerated technological change. The fact that Serbia's unemployment rates are higher than those of the EU's member states is particularly significant given that the Republic of Serbia's employment policy's primary objectives are the establishment of an effective, stable, and sustainable employment growth trend and the harmonization of employment policy and labor market institutions with the EU acquis. Insufficient use of human resources of a country has a direct impact on its economy and national income, which directly has negative repercussions on the living standards of the population and increasing poverty.

Ya.V. Tereshchenko

Background. Migration processes of the beginning of the 20th century had a huge impact on the subsequent development of the Russian society, laying the general trend of state policy on the placement of labor resources in the 20th and even 21st centuries. The rel-evance of studying the historical experience of organizing resettlement flows and strategies of social behavior is determined by the need to comprehend the problem of factors and the mission of the resettlement project in a peasant country, suffocated by low land. The pur-pose of the work is to study the activities of state structures to move the rural population of Penza province to Siberia and the Far East as part of the Stolypin agrarian reform, as well as strategies and practices for the interaction of the main actors of this process. Materials and methods. The implementation of research tasks was achieved by identifying and ana-lyzing documents extracted from the funds of the State Archive of the Penza Region, as well as studying statistical data on the socio-demographic development of Russia during the period under review. The methodological basis of the study was the methods of demo-graphic analysis, historical comparative studies, hermeneutics, and the history of everyday life. Results. The regional material examined the factors of activation, specificity and re-sults of the resettlement movement at the beginning of the 20th century. An assessment of the effectiveness of political measures initiated by the government in this direction was giv-en. Conclusions. The Stolypin agrarian reform did not affect the socio-demographic situa-tion of Penza province, its socio-economic diversification and did not accelerate migration processes, and also did not have a significant impact on reducing the organizational and economic inertia of the population of the province. Among the factors that prevented the exit of the Russian village from the state of the socio-cultural crisis, it is necessary to name the underdevelopment of the agricultural credit system, the low level of well-being of the rural population, the weak spread of new technologies, and the conservatism of the peasant consciousness.

Fengdi Che, Gautham Vasan, A. Rupam Mahmood

The policy gradient theorem gives a convenient form of the policy gradient in terms of three factors: an action value, a gradient of the action likelihood, and a state distribution involving discounting called the \emph{discounted stationary distribution}. But commonly used on-policy methods based on the policy gradient theorem ignores the discount factor in the state distribution, which is technically incorrect and may even cause degenerate learning behavior in some environments. An existing solution corrects this discrepancy by using $γ^t$ as a factor in the gradient estimate. However, this solution is not widely adopted and does not work well in tasks where the later states are similar to earlier states. We introduce a novel distribution correction to account for the discounted stationary distribution that can be plugged into many existing gradient estimators. Our correction circumvents the performance degradation associated with the $γ^t$ correction with a lower variance. Importantly, compared to the uncorrected estimators, our algorithm provides improved state emphasis to evade suboptimal policies in certain environments and consistently matches or exceeds the original performance on several OpenAI gym and DeepMind suite benchmarks.

S. E. Titor

Statistics show that the number of large families in Russian Federation is not decreasing. The state takes sufficient measures to support such families. The status of a father with many children is also being transformed. Fathers with many children today have begun to assert their rights more, which inevitably leads to the need for their revision. This determines the relevance of this study. The article analyzes sociological studies of multiple-child families from the point of view of their property status, the ability to work, improve their qualifications and career opportunities. The opinion of large families themselves about the problems they have to face with is studied. The status of a father with many children is studied in the context of his labor rights. According to the results of the study, some measures are proposed to further protect of fathers’ with many children labor rights. The study is applicable to the demographic policy of Russia.

H. Vozniak, O. Mulska, K. Patytska et al.

Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed significant structural flaws, caused deterioration of living and labor conditions, and slowed down economic growth paces for both regions and the country as a whole. It makes the domestic economy vulnerable to various stresses that, in turn, increases the vulnerability of financial systems and reduces their financial resilience. The paper aims to analyze the trends and factors causing financial imbalances of regions in economic instability and substantiate the consequences for their economic growth. The theoretical foundations of financial imbalances are expanded by decomposing financial stability, financial vulnerability, and financial instability. The interpretation of the concept of financial imbalances is expanded. The financial imbalances of Ukrainian regions in 2015—2020 are detected based on the suggested algorithm using the selected indicators. Depending on the year and type, the paper reveals the regions with a consistently low level of financial imbalances, high negative level, and a noticeable accumulation of financial imbalances. The causes of their emergence are explained, including the low capacity of the state to secure a sufficient amount of revenues and thus the budget balance, the low quality of planning and executing the budgets, weak relationship between budget programs and strategic priorities of regional development, domination of consumer expenditures over the development expenditures, inadequate public regional policy, falling volume of capital investment and poor investment attractiveness, declining production and thus deteriorating financial results in basic types of activity in the region, falling income of the population at the background of aggravated social tension and growing unemployment. The author suggests arrange of measures to prevent the emergence of financial imbalances and a set of efficient tools to regulate them. The paper emphasizes the need to develop a unified system of indicators in Ukraine similar to the scoreboard in Europe to measure imbalances on both macro and regional levels in order to detect prospective risks of imbalances emergence and expand the opportunities for their elimination or regulation. Keywords: financial imbalances, regional development, financial instability, financial capacity, financial vulnerability. JEL Classification H73, O40, R13 Formulas: 0; fig.: 2; tabl.: 2; bibl.: 16.