This paper presents a quantitative framework for optimizing human AI workforce allocation in software development, translatable to other labor categories. I formalize baseline and AI-collapsed labor models, derive tipping point equations for safe headcount reduction, and embed them in a multi objective evolutionary optimization setup. NSGAII experiments reveal reproducible, phase specific automation strategies that reduce cost while maintaining quality and stable workloads.
More than one year after the deadline for the transposition of the European Minimum Wage Directive into national law, this contribution analyses the impact which the Directive already had on minimum wage setting and collective bargaining at national level. The article illustrates that the impact of the Directive goes far beyond the legal changes introduced in the context of its formal transposition into national law. Another important dimension is the political impact which the Directive had on the political agenda setting and the more general discourse about minimum wages and collective bargaining at national level. The article illustrates that the Directive is indeed a game changer but that it also faces some obstacles that prevent it from realizing its full potential in ensuring adequate minimum wages and strong collective bargaining. Against this background, the article highlights the need for further supportive actions at European level in order to support and push the Member States to realize the Directive’s overarching political objectives of reducing in-work poverty and wage inequality.
Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence, Labor. Work. Working class
How labor markets adjust immediately after minimum wage hikes remains an open, policy-relevant question. This paper studies short-run minimum-wage effects in Japan's spot labor market using Timee data and a wage-bin difference-in-differences design. We find a 2\% employment decline in affected bins, driven by reduced vacancy creation rather than worker supply. Effects are more negative where the minimum-wage bite is higher and in low-wage occupations. Using job descriptions and amenity information, we document reallocation across job types: postings shift toward greater amenity provision and experienced-worker targeting, while female-targeted descriptions become less common, suggesting short-run labor-demand adjustments may foreshadow longer-run reallocation.
Este artigo analisa o documentário Vida Maria, explorando a interseção entre cultura, educação e realidade socioeconômica no contexto do sertão nordestino. O problema central abordado é como os elementos culturais presentes no curta-metragem influenciam as experiências e perspectivas dos personagens, em particular da protagonista Maria. Os objetivos incluem compreender a relação entre cultura escolar e desenvolvimento humano, bem como investigar como as condições de vida impactam a educação em contextos desfavorecidos. Predomina a metodologia qualitativa, com análise crítica do conteúdo do documentário à luz de Carlos Rodrigues Brandão. Os resultados destacam a estreita relação entre cultura, educação e oportunidades, evidenciando a importância da reflexão acerca das desigualdades presentes na sociedade. Concluiu-se, pois, que a educação e a cultura desempenham papéis fundamentais na formação das identidades e perspectivas dos indivíduos, ressaltando a necessidade de políticas educacionais inclusivas e igualitárias.
Social Sciences, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Yuanjie Tu, Moein Khaloei, Natalia Zuniga-Garcia
et al.
We identified four types of ridehailing drivers and jointly modeled driver working time and relocation choices using a stated preference survey of 200 drivers in Seattle, US.
Recent work on Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has revealed striking limits in their working memory capacity, similar to what has been found in human behavioral studies. Specifically, these models' performance drops significantly on N-back tasks as N increases. However, there is still a lack of mechanistic interpretability as to why this phenomenon would arise. Inspired by the executive attention theory from behavioral sciences, we hypothesize that the self-attention mechanism within Transformer-based models might be responsible for their working memory capacity limits. To test this hypothesis, we train vanilla decoder-only transformers to perform N-back tasks and find that attention scores gradually aggregate to the N-back positions over training, suggesting that the model masters the task by learning a strategy to pay attention to the relationship between the current position and the N-back position. Critically, we find that the total entropy of the attention score matrix increases as N increases, suggesting that the dispersion of attention scores might be the cause of the capacity limit observed in N-back tasks. Our findings thus offer insights into the shared role of attention in both human and artificial intelligence. Moreover, the limitations of the self-attention mechanism revealed in the current study could inform future efforts to design more powerful model architectures with enhanced working memory capacity and cognitive capabilities.
Heat engines are considered a valuable resource for modern society. The development of these systems leads to the production of heat engines with high efficiency despite their small size, called quantum heat engines. Among these, the quantum Otto cycle which is considered a fundamental thermodynamic cycle in classical heat engines, has also found applications in the realm of quantum heat engines. In this paper, we consider three InAs quantum dots as a working substance, which allows the engine to operate at very small scales, in the presence of an electric field, and the Forster mechanism, which describes the transfer of energy between quantum dots and affects thus the engine's behavior. In this regard, we study the behavior of the work performed by the engine and the entanglement in the system as the Forster parameter is varied. We find that the work performed by the engine is affected by the Forster interaction and the electric field and that the entanglement in the system also changed as the Forster parameter was changed. Finally, we study the influence of entanglement on the work performed by the engine. We find and discuss the intricate relation between the entanglement and the performance of the engine.
Abstractive related work generation has attracted increasing attention in generating coherent related work that better helps readers grasp the background in the current research. However, most existing abstractive models ignore the inherent causality of related work generation, leading to low quality of generated related work and spurious correlations that affect the models' generalizability. In this study, we argue that causal intervention can address these limitations and improve the quality and coherence of the generated related works. To this end, we propose a novel Causal Intervention Module for Related Work Generation (CaM) to effectively capture causalities in the generation process and improve the quality and coherence of the generated related works. Specifically, we first model the relations among sentence order, document relation, and transitional content in related work generation using a causal graph. Then, to implement the causal intervention and mitigate the negative impact of spurious correlations, we use do-calculus to derive ordinary conditional probabilities and identify causal effects through CaM. Finally, we subtly fuse CaM with Transformer to obtain an end-to-end generation model. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that causal interventions in CaM can effectively promote the model to learn causal relations and produce related work of higher quality and coherence.
Jose Aurelio Medina-Garrido, Jose Maria Biedma-Ferrer, Jaime Sanchez-Ortiz
Among the main causes of absenteeism are health problems, emotional problems, and inadequate work-family policies (WFP). This paper analyses the impact of the existence and accessibility of WFP on work absenteeism, by considering the mediating role of the well-being, which includes emotional as well as physical or health problems, that is generated by these policies. We differentiate between the existence of the WFP and its accessibility, as the mere existence of the WFP in an organisation is not enough. Additionally, workers must be able to access these policies easily and without retaliation of any kind. The model includes the hierarchy and the gender as moderating variables. To test the proposed hypotheses, a structural equation model based on the partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach is applied to a sample of employees in the service sector in Spain. On the one hand, the findings show that the existence of WFP has no direct effect on absenteeism; however, accessibility to these policies does have a direct effect on absenteeism. On the other hand, both the existence and accessibility of WFP have positive direct effects on emotional well-being. In addition, emotional well-being is positively related to physical well-being which, in turn, promotes a reduction in absenteeism. Finally, significant differences in the relationship between the existence of WFP and emotional well-being confirm the special difficulty of female managers in reconciling family life and work life.
Purpose: the aim of the article is to present the institutional development and democratic setup which has been started to move forward towards economic development and the formation of welfare programmes for human development after the demise of Communist rule.
Design/Method/Approach: The article analyses how the countries had changed their policy to tie up with the European Union. Furthermore, the article discusses the Romanian political transformation and political transitions in the country after the regime changed in late 1989. The article asses the role of external actors to promote the establishment of democratic institutions. The case study method is driven by EU to strengthen the process of democratisation and political-institutional reformation according to Copenhagen criteria.
Findings: The result of the article is that what extent the democratisation process has been successful ever inclusion to the European Union.
Paper type: theoretical.
We analyze differences in mode of transportation to work by sexual orientation, using the American Community Survey 2008-2019. Individuals in same-sex couples are significantly less likely to drive to work than men and women in different-sex couples. This gap is particularly stark among men: on average, almost 12 percentage point (or 13%) lower likelihood of driving to work for men in same-sex couples. Individuals in same-sex couples are also more likely to use public transport, walk, or bike to work: on average, men and women are 7 and 3 percentage points more likely, respectively, to take public transportation to work than those in different-sex couples. These differences persist after controlling for demographic characteristics, partner's characteristics, location, fertility, and marital status. Additional evidence from the General Social Survey 2008-2018 suggests that these disparities by sexual orientation may be due to lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals caring more for the environment than straight individuals.
Sivakumar Murugadoss, Frederic Brassinne, Noham Sebaihi
et al.
Abstract Background The terms agglomerates and aggregates are frequently used in the regulatory definition(s) of nanomaterials (NMs) and hence attract attention in view of their potential influence on health effects. However, the influence of nanoparticle (NP) agglomeration and aggregation on toxicity is poorly understood although it is strongly believed that smaller the size of the NPs greater the toxicity. A toxicologically relevant definition of NMs is therefore not yet available, which affects not only the risk assessment process but also hinders the regulation of nano-products. In this study, we assessed the influence of NP agglomeration on their toxicity/biological responses in vitro and in vivo. Results We tested two TiO2 NPs with different primary sizes (17 and 117 nm) and prepared ad-hoc suspensions composed of small or large agglomerates with similar dispersion medium composition. For in vitro testing, human bronchial epithelial (HBE), colon epithelial (Caco2) and monocytic (THP-1) cell lines were exposed to these suspensions for 24 h and endpoints such as cytotoxicity, total glutathione, epithelial barrier integrity, inflammatory mediators and DNA damage were measured. Large agglomerates of 17 nm TiO2 induced stronger responses than small agglomerates for glutathione depletion, IL-8 and IL-1β increase, and DNA damage in THP-1, while no effect of agglomeration was observed with 117 nm TiO2. In vivo, C57BL/6JRj mice were exposed via oropharyngeal aspiration or oral gavage to TiO2 suspensions and, after 3 days, biological parameters including cytotoxicity, inflammatory cell recruitment, DNA damage and biopersistence were measured. Mainly, we observed that large agglomerates of 117 nm TiO2 induced higher pulmonary responses in aspirated mice and blood DNA damage in gavaged mice compared to small agglomerates. Conclusion Agglomeration of TiO2 NPs influences their toxicity/biological responses and, large agglomerates do not appear less active than small agglomerates. This study provides a deeper insight on the toxicological relevance of NP agglomerates and contributes to the establishment of a toxicologically relevant definition for NMs.
Alfredo Sánchez-Castañeda, José Pablo Hernández Ramírez
Mexico has an applicable labor law framework to epidemics as Coronavirus. However, given the labor market’s context, and the ambiguity stemming from government agreements and ordinances emitted to legally make a stand against COVID-19, the workers are being left vulnerable, regarding their employment and wages.
Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence, Labor. Work. Working class
Through virtual presence, information and communication technology (ICT) allows employees to work from places other than their employers office and reduce commuting-related environmental effects (telecommuting). Working from a local coworking space, as a form of telecommuting, has the potential to significantly reduce commuting and is not associated with deficits of working from home (e.g. isolation, lack of focus). However, environmental burden might increase through co-working due to the infrastructure required to set-up and operate the co-working space and potential rebound effects. In this paper, we (1) develop a framework of direct and indirect environmental effects of coworking based on a well-known conceptual framework of environmental effects of ICT and, (2) apply the framework to investigate the case of a coworking living lab established in Stockholm. Based on interviews and surveys conducted with co-workers in the living lab and infrastructure data of the co-working space, we roughly estimate associated energy impacts. Results show that energy requirements associated with operating the coworking space can counterbalance commute-related energy savings. Thus, in order to realize energy savings co-working should be accompanied with additional energy saving measures such as a net reduction of (heated) floor space(at the co-working space, at the employer's office and the co-workers home) and use of energy efficient transport modes.
María García Díaz, Giacomo Guarnieri, Mauro Paternostro
The Two Point Measurement scheme for computing the thermodynamic work performed on a system requires it to be initially in equilibrium. The Margenau-Hill scheme, among others, extends the previous approach to allow for a non-equilibrium initial state. We establish a quantitative comparison between both schemes in terms of the amount of coherence present in the initial state of the system, as quantified by the $l_1$-coherence measure. We show that the difference between the two first moments of work, the variances of work and the average entropy production obtained in both schemes can be cast in terms of such initial coherence. Moreover, we prove that the average entropy production can take negative values in the Margenau-Hill framework.
Data forms a key component of any enterprise. The need for high quality and easy access to data is further amplified by organizations wishing to leverage machine learning or artificial intelligence for their operations. To this end, many organizations are building resources for managing heterogenous data, providing end-users with an organization wide view of available data, and acting as a centralized repository for data owned/collected by an organization. Very broadly, we refer to these class of techniques as a "data hub." While there is no clear definition of what constitutes a data hub, some of the key characteristics include: data catalog; links to data sets or owners of data sets or centralized data repository; basic ability to serve / visualize data sets; access control policies that ensure secure data access and respects policies of data owners; and computing capabilities tied with data hub infrastructure. Of course, developing such a data hub entails numerous challenges. This document provides background in databases, data management and outlines best practices and recommendations for developing and deploying a working data hub.
O artigo se propõe a identificar os impactos iniciais da reforma trabalhista sobre o sindicalismo em um contexto desfavorável aos trabalhadores e à ação coletiva, dado o crescimento da precariedade e da informalidade no mercado de trabalho. A análise trata da reconfiguração das classes trabalhadoras e da fragmentação sindical, bem como dos impactos da reforma sobre as estratégias e ações sindicais e sobre as negociações coletivas. A metodologia combinou pesquisas quantitativas sobre mercado de trabalho com análise documental (instrumentos normativos, matérias de imprensa comercial e sindical) e observação participante. Os resultados mostram que os sindicatos buscam se adaptar ao novo contexto, com pequenas inovações substantivas na ação e organização, e que as negociações têm sido tanto espaço de resistência quanto de legitimação do conteúdo da reforma. LABOR REFORM: precarious work and the challenges for unionsThe paper proposes to identify the initial impacts of the labor reform on trade unionism, in a context that is unfavorable to workers and to collective action, resulting from the transformations in the reconfiguration of the working classes, with the growth of precariousness and crisis of the labor market. The analysis focuses on the impacts of this reconfiguration of the working classes and the fragmentation of trade unions, as well as the impacts of the labor reform on union strategies and actions and on collective negotiation. The methodology combined quantitative labor market research with documents (collectives work contracts, commercial and trade union press materials) and participant observation. The results show that the trade unions are searching to adapt to the new context with some substantive innovations in action and organization. The latest negotiations have been, at the same time, spaces of resistance and legitimization of the content of the reform.Key words: Trade unionism; Labor reform; Precariousness; And collective bargaining RÉFORME DU TRAVAIL: le travail précaire et les défis du syndicalismeL’article propose d’identifier les impacts initiaux de la réforme du travail sur le syndicalisme, dans un contexte défavorable aux travailleurs et à l’action collective, en raison du développement de la précarité et de l’informalité dans le marché du travail. L’analyse porte sur la reconfiguration de la classe ouvrière et de la fragmentation syndicale, aussi bien que sur les impacts de la réforme sur les stratégies et actions des syndicats et sur la négociation collective. La méthodologie combine une étude quantitative du marché du travail avec des documents (contrats de travail collectives, matériel de presse commerciale et syndicale) et de l’observation participante. Les résultats montrent que les syndicats essayent de s’adapter au nouveau contexte, avec de petites innovations substantielles dans l’action et l’organisation, et que les négociations sont autant des espaces de résistance comme de légitimation du contenu de la réforme.Key words: Syndicalisme; Réforme du travail; Précarité; Négociation collective