Time-decaying currencies have long been discussed in economic theory as a means to discourage hoarding and promote circulation. However, their modern digital implementation as a universal basic income (UBI) mechanism raises unresolved structural questions regarding labor participation and long-term social reproduction. In this study, we analyze a dual-currency model in which a time-decaying currency is distributed exclusively as UBI, while labor income and savings are denominated in a standard currency. Through agent-based simulations, we identify the acceptance ratio of the time-decaying currency for necessities as a critical design parameter. Our results show that essential labor does not necessarily collapse under such a system. Nevertheless, beyond a threshold acceptance ratio, delayed labor participation and weakened human capital formation emerge even in the absence of material deprivation. These findings suggest that time-decaying currency can stabilize short-term living conditions while distorting long-term formation incentives, depending on system design.
Modern macroeconomic monetary theory suggests that the labor share of income has effectively become a core macroe-conomic parameter anchored by top policymakers through Open Market Operations (OMO). However, the setting of this parameter remains a subject of intense economic debate. This paper provides a detailed summary of these controversies, analyzes the scope of influence exerted by market agents other than the top policymakers on the labor share, and explores the rationality of its setting mechanism.
Modern cities increasingly rely on ridesharing services for on-demand transportation, which offer consumers convenience and mobility across the globe. However, these marketed consumer affordances give rise to burdens and vulnerabilities that drivers shoulder alone, without adequate infrastructures for labor regulations or consumer-led advocacy. To effectively and sustainably advance protections and oversight for drivers, consumers must first be aware of the labor, logistics and costs involved with ridehail driving. To motivate consumers to practice more socially responsible consumption behaviors and foster solidarity with drivers, we explore the potential for gamified in-ride interactions to facilitate engagement with real (and lived) driver experiences. Through nine workshops with 19 drivers and 15 passengers, we surface how gamified in-ride interactions revealed passenger knowledge gaps around latent ridehail conditions, prompt reflection and shifts in perception of their relative power and consumption behaviors, and highlight drivers' preferences for creating more immersive and contextualized service experiences, and identify opportunities to design safe and appropriate passenger-driver interactions that motivate solidarity with drivers. In sum, we advance conceptual understandings of in-ride social and managerial relations, demonstrate potential for future worker advocacy in algorithmically-managed labor, and offer design guidelines for more human-centered workplace technologies.
Purpose: The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) systems like ChatGPT, Claude AI, etc., has a deep impact on how work is done. Predicting how AI will reshape work requires understanding not just its capabilities, but how it is actually being adopted. This study investigates which intrinsic task characteristics drive users' decisions to delegate work to AI systems. Methodology: This study utilizes the Anthropic Economic Index dataset of four million Claude AI interactions mapped to O*NET tasks. We systematically scored each task across seven key dimensions: Routine, Cognitive, Social Intelligence, Creativity, Domain Knowledge, Complexity, and Decision Making using 35 parameters. We then employed multivariate techniques to identify latent task archetypes and analyzed their relationship with AI usage. Findings: Tasks requiring high creativity, complexity, and cognitive demand, but low routineness, attracted the most AI engagement. Furthermore, we identified three task archetypes: Dynamic Problem Solving, Procedural & Analytical Work, and Standardized Operational Tasks, demonstrating that AI applicability is best predicted by a combination of task characteristics, over individual factors. Our analysis revealed highly concentrated AI usage patterns, with just 5% of tasks accounting for 59% of all interactions. Originality: This research provides the first systematic evidence linking real-world generative AI usage to a comprehensive, multi-dimensional framework of intrinsic task characteristics. It introduces a data-driven classification of work archetypes that offers a new framework for analyzing the emerging human-AI division of labor.
Мета роботи: вивчення досвіду НАТО та ЄС щодо формування національної стійкості у сфері безпеки й оборони з метою формування нової якості вітчизняного сектору безпеки і оборони.
Метод дослідження: аналізу, теоретико-емпіричний метод, експертна оцінка.
Результати дослідження: визначено спільні риси та розбіжності у підходах НАТО та ЄС до розуміння національної стійкості: в НАТО стійкість має відношення, передусім, до принципів військового співробітництва та стримування; в ЄС поняття стійкості використовувалося у контексті державного будівництва, належного врядування, прав людини та сталого розвитку.
Теоретичні значення. визначено на системних засадах перелік та зміст специфічних особливостей забезпечення національної стійкості у сфері безпеки НАТО та ЄС, а також напрями зближення їх позицій на тлі безпрецедентних викликів, пов’язаних із війною в Україні.
Практична цінність дослідження: Ідентифіковано необхідність імплементації позитивного досвіду та напрацювань НАТО і ЄС щодо посилення стійкості країн-членів організацій – у процеси реформування сектору безпеки і оборони України, зміцнення власної стійкості і наближення до стандартів євроатлантичної і загальноєвропейської спільноти.
Цінність. це дослідження показує напрями зближення підходів НАТО та ЄС щодо формування національної стійкості у сфері безпеки й оборони, що можуть слугувати підставою для формування нової якості вітчизняного сектору безпеки і оборони в умовах продовження військового супротиву України російському вторгненню.
Обмеження досліджень: Це дослідження відкриває шляхи для майбутніх досліджень щодо визначення шляхів реформування сектору безпеки і оборони України, зміцнення власної стійкості і наближення до стандартів євроатлантичної і загальноєвропейської спільноти.
Тип статті: теоретична.
Working memory is a central cognitive ability crucial for intelligent decision-making. Recent experimental and computational work studying working memory has primarily used categorical (i.e., one-hot) inputs, rather than ecologically relevant, multidimensional naturalistic ones. Moreover, studies have primarily investigated working memory during single or few cognitive tasks. As a result, an understanding of how naturalistic object information is maintained in working memory in neural networks is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we developed sensory-cognitive models, comprising a convolutional neural network (CNN) coupled with a recurrent neural network (RNN), and trained them on nine distinct N-back tasks using naturalistic stimuli. By examining the RNN's latent space, we found that: (1) Multi-task RNNs represent both task-relevant and irrelevant information simultaneously while performing tasks; (2) The latent subspaces used to maintain specific object properties in vanilla RNNs are largely shared across tasks, but highly task-specific in gated RNNs such as GRU and LSTM; (3) Surprisingly, RNNs embed objects in new representational spaces in which individual object features are less orthogonalized relative to the perceptual space; (4) The transformation of working memory encodings (i.e., embedding of visual inputs in the RNN latent space) into memory was shared across stimuli, yet the transformations governing the retention of a memory in the face of incoming distractor stimuli were distinct across time. Our findings indicate that goal-driven RNNs employ chronological memory subspaces to track information over short time spans, enabling testable predictions with neural data.
We study how the batch size affects the total gradient variance in differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), seeking a theoretical explanation for the usefulness of large batch sizes. As DP-SGD is the basis of modern DP deep learning, its properties have been widely studied, and recent works have empirically found large batch sizes to be beneficial. However, theoretical explanations of this benefit are currently heuristic at best. We first observe that the total gradient variance in DP-SGD can be decomposed into subsampling-induced and noise-induced variances. We then prove that in the limit of an infinite number of iterations, the effective noise-induced variance is invariant to the batch size. The remaining subsampling-induced variance decreases with larger batch sizes, so large batches reduce the effective total gradient variance. We confirm numerically that the asymptotic regime is relevant in practical settings when the batch size is not small, and find that outside the asymptotic regime, the total gradient variance decreases even more with large batch sizes. We also find a sufficient condition that implies that large batch sizes similarly reduce effective DP noise variance for one iteration of DP-SGD.
This article is devoted to the study of the Schatten class membership of commutators involving singular integral operators. We utilize martingale paraproducts and Hytönen's dyadic martingale technique to obtain sufficient conditions on the weak-type and strong-type Schatten class membership of commutators in terms of Sobolev spaces and Besov spaces respectively. We also establish the complex median method, which is applicable to complex-valued functions. We apply it to get the optimal necessary conditions on the weak-type and strong-type Schatten class membership of commutators associated with non-degenerate kernels. This resolves the problem on the characterization of the weak-type and strong-type Schatten class membership of commutators. Our new approach is built on Hytönen's dyadic martingale technique and the complex median method. Compared with all the previous ones, this new one is more powerful in several aspects: $(a)$ it permits us to deal with more general singular integral operators with little smoothness; $(b)$ it allows us to deal with commutators with complex-valued kernels; $(c)$ it turns out to be powerful enough to deal with the weak-type and strong-type Schatten class of commutators in a universal way.
In developing quantum science and technologies, it is essential to demonstrate the so-called quantum advantages, which are performances that can be achieved only with the assistance of quantum resources. Most of the time, different quantum features lead to different advantages. Interestingly, there are certain classes of tasks where quantum advantages are achievable by general quantum resources. This work reports such a class of tasks in thermodynamics -- we provide a work extraction task that certifies general quantum resources of both states and channels, suggesting general quantum effects can provide non-classical advantages in work extraction. We also show that such work extraction tasks can be applied to certify quantum entanglement in a one-sided device-independent way. As an application, we report a novel type of anomalous energy flow -- a type of locally extractable energy that is attributed to the globally distributed entanglement. Finally, we show that the existence of this novel anomalous energy flow is equivalent to measurement incompatibility.
Louis-Pierre Auger, Emmanuelle Moreau, Odile Côté
et al.
<i>Objective</i>: To identify the factors influencing the implementation of telerehabilitation (TR) in a post-stroke early supported discharge (ESD) rehabilitation program as perceived by clinicians and managers. <i>Methods</i>: A descriptive qualitative design was used in collaboration with a Canadian ESD stroke rehabilitation program. After 15 months of pre-COVID-19 implementation and 4 months of COVID-19 implementation, 9 stakeholders (7 clinicians, 1 coordinator and 1 manager) from an ESD program participated in 2 focus groups online or an individual interview. Qualitative data were coded and analyzed semi-deductively for the pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 phases using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR). <i>Results</i>: Four categories emerged related to the CFIR, each with themes: (1) Telerehabilitation, which included “Technology” and “Clinical activities”; (2) Telerehabilitation users, which included: “Clients’ characteristics” and “Clinicians’ characteristics”; (3) Society and healthcare system, which included “Changes related to COVID-19” and “ESD program”; and (4) TR implementation process, which included “Planning” and “Factors that influenced practice change”. <i>Conclusions</i>: Factors impacting TR implementation in the ESD program were found to be numerous and varied according to the pre-COVID-19 or COVID-19 phases. Clinicians’ motivation regarding potential gains for them in using TR was key in its implementation during the COVID-19 period.
Vocational rehabilitation. Employment of people with disabilities
Robert Ngarambe, Jean Baptiste Sagahutu, Assuman Nuhu
et al.
Background: Limb loss limits functioning and restricts participation in various environments. Persons with lower limb amputations (PLLA) experience challenges ranging from self-care and independence to psychological disorders that negatively impact their functioning.
Objectives: To assess the functioning and the level of disability of PLLA with or without prostheses in Rwanda.
Method: A descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted among PLLAs aged 18 years and above in 10 districts of Rwanda. A total of 247 participants were purposively selected to fill the questionnaires. Descriptive and inferential statistics using t-test and binary logistic regression were performed to analyse data using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) (version 21.0).
Results: Out of 247 PLLA, 99 (40.1%) had prostheses and remaining 148 (59.9%) did not. Majority of PLLA without prostheses reported having more difficulties in mobility (s.d. 3.98), participation (s.d. 5.18) and life activities (s.d. 3.87). The majority of PLLA reported mild and moderate functioning in the domains of cognitive (odds ratio [OR] 8.842, 5.384 with 95% confidence interval [CI]) mobility (OR 16.154, 2.485 with 95% CI) and participation (OR 13.299, 15.282 with 95% CI).
Conclusion: Persons without prostheses demonstrated reduced level of functioning and high levels of disability compared to those with prostheses in all domains. However, the mobility, self-activities and the participation domains were the mainly affected.
Contribution: The study helps to understand the needs of the PLLA and emphasises that not only having prostheses can improve functioning but also emphasises the psychosocial aspects to reduce disability.
Vocational rehabilitation. Employment of people with disabilities, Communities. Classes. Races
Derek Gloudemans, Gergely Zachár, Yanbing Wang
et al.
This work introduces a multi-camera tracking dataset consisting of 234 hours of video data recorded concurrently from 234 overlapping HD cameras covering a 4.2 mile stretch of 8-10 lane interstate highway near Nashville, TN. The video is recorded during a period of high traffic density with 500+ objects typically visible within the scene and typical object longevities of 3-15 minutes. GPS trajectories from 270 vehicle passes through the scene are manually corrected in the video data to provide a set of ground-truth trajectories for recall-oriented tracking metrics, and object detections are provided for each camera in the scene (159 million total before cross-camera fusion). Initial benchmarking of tracking-by-detection algorithms is performed against the GPS trajectories, and a best HOTA of only 9.5% is obtained (best recall 75.9% at IOU 0.1, 47.9 average IDs per ground truth object), indicating the benchmarked trackers do not perform sufficiently well at the long temporal and spatial durations required for traffic scene understanding.
K. Camacho, S. C. G. Gomes Junior, Adriana Teixeira Reis
et al.
Brazil has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The high numbers of confirmed cases and deaths have continued unabated since the first reported case, with no flattening or downward turn in the curve. In this context, healthcare workers have been exposed uninterruptedly to stress factors throughout a year of the pandemic. The study´s aim was to identify and analyze healthcare workers´ perceptions of their feelings and concerns that have surfaced in responding to the pandemic. Method: This was a cross-sectional online qualitative survey study of 554 healthcare personnel working in the state of Rio de Janeiro during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recruitment occurred from July 20 to September 30, 2020, using an online survey, preceded byfree informed consent term. Data were analyzed with the Iramuteq software. Results: Through a dendrogram, the words with the highest chi-square were highlighted and grouped into four classes: healthcare workers´ fear of falling ill to COVID-19 and infecting their family members; work/labor issues; feelings of powerlessness and need for public policies for government action; and fatigue and burnout in the pandemic. Each word class was also illustrated by a similarity tree. Conclusion: The study revealed healthcare workers´ exacerbated fear of infection and transmission of COVID-19 to their family members, besides financial losses and feelings of powerlessness and abandonment.
J French has written an extraordinary book, from which we can learn a great deal not only about Lula and Brazil, but also about political leadership. Social scientists often worry about delving into the personal, exceptional, and contingent nature of leadership. But contingency is what makes it leadership—recognition of opportunity where its existence was not evident before, identification of a path where none was marked. C. Wright Mills insisted that the sociological imagination must recognize the intersection of biography and history. This has usually been taken to mean that we must identify the way that social forces shape our lives. But in turning everything into social forces, we should not forget that social forces are also human constructions, and biography matters. Lula and His Politics of Cunning is the fruit of 40 years of work, in which French has immersed himself in the living history of the ABC industrial suburbs of São Paulo and especially of its industrial working class. In his 1992 book, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo, he examined the complicated history of labor organization and the struggles of the working-class left in the first half of the twentieth century; in his second book, he took a deep dive into Brazilian labor law. From the time he was a graduate student at Yale, French has also been a leader in a large cohort of labor and social historians of Latin America whose work has engaged the political history of the region. Some of its members, like John, were either students or colleagues of the great Emília Viotti da Costa. This book is dense and meticulously researched. The breadth of French’s sources is astonishing. They range from official and personal archives to popular culture, from fiction to police records to masters’ theses, as well as lengthy, extensive, and repeated interviews. The biographical approach to history opens up for us a textured, almost intimate account of a remarkable period in working-class life in the São Paulo suburbs. For the first 15 chapters of the book, he presents us with Lula’s world, populates it with other characters who come alive for us, and sets them in motion with plenty of contradictions showing. The world in which Lula grew to maturity was a thoroughly gendered world; the women in the story were mothers, wives, sisters, or girlfriends. In the last few chapters, the perspective is more distant and more analytical. Although I missed the granularity of the earlier account, I recognize that once Lula became a national and international figure, greater distance was inevitable.
Introduction: The increasing number of Covid-19 cases in Indonesia triggers fear and anxiety in the community and causes stress. Teachers who work are at risk of experiencing job stress. The change in the learning system from face-to-face to distance learning requires teachers to adapt to the new technology applied. The purpose of this research was to analyze the relationship between the understanding of the Google Classroom application and duration of work during the Covid-19 pandemic with job stress. Methods: This research is an analytical research with a cross sectional approach. The research was conducted in 8 public high schools in Nganjuk District, and the samples were 115 teachers. Data retrieval was done by using an online questionnaire via Google Form. The variables in this research were the understanding of the Google Classroom (knowledge, perceptions of the usefulness and ease of use), work duration and job stress. Bivariate analysis used Spearmans’ Rho correlation test to determine the relationship between variables. Results: Most respondents had a moderate level of knowledge, and most of them had a fairly good perception of the usefulness and ease of use of the Google Classroom application. The duration of work that most respondents had was 2 hours, and the highest category of job stress was mild stress. Conclusion: The understanding of the Google Classroom application (knowledge of the Google Classroom application, the perception of the usefulness of the Google Classroom application and the perception of the ease of use of the Google Classroom application) and the duration of work had a significant relationship with job stress among public high school teachers in Nganjuk District during the Covid-19 pandemic.
We analyze work commute time by sexual orientation of partnered or married individuals, using the American Community Survey 2008-2019. Women in same-sex couples have a longer commute to work than working women in different-sex couples, whereas the commute to work of men in same-sex couples is shorter than the one of working men in different-sex couples, also after controlling for demographic characteristics, partner characteristics, location, fertility, and marital status. These differences are particularly stark among married couples with children: on average, about 3 minutes more one-way to work for married mothers in same-sex couples, and almost 2 minutes less for married fathers in same-sex couples, than their corresponding working parents in different-sex couples. These gaps among men and women amount to 50 percent, and 100 percent, respectively, of the gender commuting gap estimated in the literature. Within-couple gaps in commuting time are also significantly smaller in same-sex couples. We interpret these differences as evidence that it is gender-conforming social norms boosted by parenthood that lead women in different-sex couples to specialize into jobs with a shorter commute while their male partners or spouses hold jobs with a longer commute.
Scholars have produced a rich literature examining ways in which organized feminists influence government policy. An important sub-segment within this literature takes a cross-national approach, comparing countries to discern broad global patterns in the circumstances motivating governments to enact women-friendly law and policy. Mala Htun and Laurel Weldon’s new volume, The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Rights around the World, offers an important addition to this body of scholarship. Their work draws on data from 70 countries to discern how ‘‘gender justice’’ in policy-making can be achieved. Their data span a broad time frame, from 1975 to 2005, and their selection of nations encompasses 85 percent of the world’s population. The authors draw their data from a variety of sources: for example, legislative and court documents, media accounts, law review articles, labor codes, and existing women’s rights databases. A work of this scope with its detailed and rigorous analyses provides authoritative insights into the types of contexts that can result in greater rights and equality for women around the world. At the heart of Htun and Weldon’s contribution is a typology of the contexts facilitating and hindering feminist policy change. In defining their typology, the authors discuss three core dimensions along which societies can vary: the degree to which the national culture values or devalues women (that is, the nature of a country’s gender status hierarchy); the extent to which a society shifts authority to distribute critical resources from the marketplace to the state in order to move toward less class inequality, which Htun and Weldon label as the nation’s ‘‘class politics’’; and the degree to which religious institutions exert their doctrinal beliefs in the society. As the authors’ analyses demonstrate, where a nation is situated along these three dimensions plays a pronounced role in shaping gender-based policy outcomes. Additionally, and importantly, the authors’ typology also helps us make sense of which groups in society, beyond feminist activists, are likely to mobilize for and against specific policy proposals. Indeed, this is where Htun and Weldon’s scholarship provides its greatest insights. As the authors acknowledge, women’s rights organizations are typically at the forefront of efforts to enact women-friendly policy. But other groups enter the struggle as well. And characteristics of the national context, as they are arrayed along the three dimensions in Htun and Weldon’s typology, explain where and when other groups are motivated to enter into policy debates. For example, when proposed policy to increase women’s equality presents a core challenge to religious doctrine, such as policy concerning abortion rights, traditional religious groups commonly play pronounced roles in the policy debates; and often religious groups can stall policy change to grant women reproductive rights. When proposed policy is likely to be most beneficial to working-class and/or lower-income women, such as family or maternity leave or childcare policy, pro-labor political parties frequently become activated, and their presence in the policy debate can increase the likelihood of such policy being enacted. Policy to combat violence against women challenges traditional assumptions about the status of women in society but not, in many cases, according to the authors, religious doctrine or state-market relations, and thus such policy battles are often left to women’s and feminist groups alone to obtain from the government. Htun and Weldon’s volume’s utility, then, is in helping us see how variation in a nation’s broader context influences activation of specific groups in particular policy debates, which can then facilitate or hinder passage of the policies. In addition, the book offers insights into important global patterns in specific areas of policy development. For example, the book’s findings show a strong positive relationship between Left political parties and the presence of national family leave policy. Reviews 317