This is a comprehensive review of evidence on the effect of minimum wages on employment, skills, wage and income distributions, and longer-term labour market outcomes, and concludes that the minimum wage is not a good policy tool.;Minimum wages exist in more than one hundred countries, both industrialized and developing. The United States passed a federal minimum wage law in 1938 and has increa…
For all the use scientists make of computers in their work, we still know little about how computing affects their working methods and the knowledge they produce. Christine Hine explores these questions by examining the developing use of information technology in one discipline, systematics (the classification of organisims).
This systematic assessment of seven prominent initiatives - in Texas, California, Florida and Arizona - evaluates the effectiveness of ecosystem-based management at protecting the environment. The author concludes that projects that set goals based on stakeholder collaboration are less likely to result in environmental improvement.
Much of the difficulty in creating information technology systems that truly meet people's needs lies in the problem of pinning down system requirements. This book offers a new approach to the requirements challenge, based on modeling and analyzing the relationships among stakeholders. Although the importance of the system-environment relationship has long been recognized in the requirements en…
Experts investigate communicative flexibility (in both form and usage of signals) as the foundation of the evolution of complex communication systems, including human language.
This collection of short expository, critical and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social and aesthetic impact of software. Experts from a range of disciplines each take a key topic in software and the understanding of software, such as algorithms and logical structures.
The United States Social Security fund is huge and in trouble. The United Kingdom has experimented with the voluntary contracting out of pensions to the private sector. Chile has privatized its public pension system. Australia has adopted a means-tested public pension system. Japan has the earliest retirement age of any advanced economy; it also has the highest rate of labor force participation…
The first modern pedagogically oriented reference to the grammar of standard Basque (Euskara Batua), in two volumes: Part 1 presents detailed grammar lessons, Part 2 glosses and supplementary materials.A pre-Indo-European language with no known relatives, the Basque language survives in the Basque region of Spain and France, with about half a million native or near-native speakers. The local di…
The last decade has seen computational implementations of large hand-crafted natural language grammars in formal frameworks such as Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Combinatory Categorical Grammar (CCG), Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Grammars in these frameworks typically associate linguistically motivated rich descriptions (Supertags) with word…
The contemporary discipline of biolinguistics is beginning to have the feel of scientific inquiry. Biolinguistics—especially the work of Noam Chomsky—suggests that the design of language may be “perfect”: language is an optimal solution to conditions of sound and meaning. What is the scope of this inquiry? Which aspect of nature does this science investigate? What is its relation to the…