Millions of American workers believe they are bound by contracts they are not actually bound by, according to University of Maryland Smith Business School’s Evan Starr, and this means less earnings for workers. Starr spoke at length on the subject at the recent Aspen Institute summit and to us on Twitter.
While non-competes are required by employers to protect trade secrets, they are found everywhere, including regular minimum wage workers and volunteers. Around 20% America’s 130 million workers are in a non-compete right now, and 40% have signed a non-compete at some point in their lives.
What Starr has found is that workers are acting as though they are bound by employee contracts based solely on their false belief that the contracts are always enforceable. In many states the contracts are not.
“[W]orkers are chilled just by the existence of the contract regardless of whether it’s enforceable or not, and when you ask workers, ‘What do you know about the law,’ most of them don’t know what the law is, but their default is they believe that contracts they put their name on are enforceable, and they abide by them, even in states like California where they wouldn’t be enforceable if they went to court.
Evan Starr of UMD Smith B-School
“When it comes to workers choosing to move between jobs what we see is the use of these provisions appears to be what matters, not necessarily their enforceability in court.”
And, according to Starr, one of the results is workers making less money throughout their careers.
“I did one study where we tracked workers over 8 years of their career. We had every single worker in 30 states over roughly a 20-year period, and what we found was that if you start your career in kind of an average enforcing state, you are going to earn 5% lower earnings relative to a non-enforcing state like California, over those 8 years, regardless of where you end up, regardless of where you go.”
Numbers are uncertain as to exactly how many Americans are affected in this way, because states vary so much in regards to non-compete enforceability.
“There’s tremendous heterogeneity across the US in what states will do. In some states you can be fired from your job, and if you get sued over the violation of a non-compete it can still be enforced even though you were fired. In other states it won’t be enforced, and everyone else is kind of in the middle.”
But Starr said it was safe to say that many millions of Americans assume they are bound by non-binding contracts. In California, to use a state he studied recently, there are approximately 20 million workers, so around 4 million may be involved in non-binding contracts. Those numbers can be roughly extrapolated to the rest of the 130 million U.S. workers who live in the other states.
“And that number is most certainly an underestimate given that non-competes are used for workers in states that wouldn’t enforce them for such workers, even though they would enforce them for other workers,” Starr added.
This is the Volvo Vera concept truck. Volvo trucks has been making headlines for the past couple years because of their autonomous and electric vehicles. They’ve gone a bit further with this latest entry into the commercial trucking concept market.
The Volvo Vera autonomous truck uses a lot of existing Volvo electric truck tech, including their 500 horsepower, 300kWh battery (with a 186 mile approximate range).
Without the trailer, the vehicle is even less recognizable, looking more like a powered dolly.
“[A]n individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements” – Chief Justice John Roberts
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for a change in the law regulating the ability of police to search citizens’ phone records.
Since a 1979 ruling, which decided that citizens had no expectation of privacy for their phone records kept by a phone company, police have been able to search people’s phones without probable cause (strong evidence the person has committed a crime). However, police can still obtain records without a warrant in the case of an emergency, and they can search other items people carry without probable cause.
The court found that “an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements” as these movements are captured and recorded by phone companies.
The majority of the Supreme court framed the question in terms of a shift in the role and capabilities of technology, specifically cell phones and data collection and records, with one writing that a mobile phone was now “a feature of human anatomy” that “faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales” and “when the government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.”
As many as 950,000 people have descended upon Barcelona Sunday, from all over Spain to protest Catalonia’s bid for Independence and to support the continued unification of the Spain with cries of “Long live Spain, long live Catalonia.”
Josep Borrell a speaker in the rally, a Catalan and Ex-president of the European Parliament spoke out against Carles Puigdemont, leader of the separatist movement and asked him “Not to throw this country off the cliff.”
From the beginning when the illegal referendum began on the 1st of October, a propaganda war between Catalonia and Spain ensued, and it was clear from the outset that Catalonia was winning, the victory handed to them by the Spanish state that deployed more than 4000 of the Spanish Civil guard and Police across the province looking to close down polling booths.
The photographs of armed Police firing rubber bullets and brutally mistreating protestors flashed across the globe, garnering international support from such newspapers as The Guardian who openly supports Catalonia´s right to self-determination. Julian Assange has put his weight behind the cause from day one, calling the Spanish response “Very serious repression by European standards.” He has gone so far as to compare Spain with China in the way it has dealt with the situation.
The independence referendum was intended to be etched in the minds of the Catalans as the day Catalonia defied Spain, harking back to the war of the reapers and the Catalan uprising of 1640. It was to be a day of revolution and an official long-awaited divorce from Spain, like a bad marriage that has run its course. The outcome had been predicted by a test vote from November 2014 that the voting would produce a positive result for the Catalan government and that independence would be declared within 48 hours of the last vote being made.
A week has passed since the vote on the 1st of October and no independence has been declared yet.
The Catalan government has been seen to be stalling with rumors of infighting between the various independence parties and no real long-term implementation strategy for any kind of self-governance.
To add to this the Spanish government is refusing to enter into any talks regarding Independence. The interior minister Juan Ignacio Zoido Called the vote “Nothing more than a spectacle.”
2.3 Million people voted on the 1st of October, many of those people voted 3 or 4 times, regardless of the presence of international mediators there was little control or organization. Only 42% of the Catalan population turned out to vote. Some were excluded, including a large foreign population and migrants from the rest of Spain. Others refused to vote and others simply were too worried to leave the house, knowing full well that things were going to get ugly at the polls. This 58% have become the majority without a voice, caught between two polarized Political opposites, heavily invested in their own agenda.
Since the vote, this silent majority without a voice has begun fractioning, some have come out in support of Spain and the unity of the state, some have joined the independence movement; unhappy with the way the Spanish state handled the referendum. Others have looked to the middle ground and “Hablamos” (Let’s talk) a movement which has opted for white flags, believing in a truce and dialogue between Catalonia and Spain with the tagline. “We are better than our leaders, let’s talk.”
Meanwhile, the Catalan parliament stalls, banks, and large conglomerates are leaving the province in droves. Banco Sabadell, Spain’s fifth largest banking group has moved its headquarters to Alicante, Biotech firm Oryzon Genomics has said it will be moving to Madrid. Its shares have surged 29% since then.
In turn, hotels owned by pro-independence supporters have asked any Police or Civil Guards stationed under their roof to leave.
As a result an audio recording went viral regarding a phone call to the Police in Madrid by a concerned citizen of Barcelona offering beds for the night and thanking the police for their help has led to an overwhelming surge in support to the Police, the caller saying in an emotional and tearful phone call that she felt alone and forgotten by the Spanish state. As a consequence Pro-Spanish support has begun to rise, something which was somewhat lacking during the voting. During the lead up to the referendum, the streets in Barcelona were filled with the independence flag, the “Estelada” (based on the flag of Cuba,) flying from balconies. Spanish flags have now also begun to appear in support of the continued unity of Spain. The King of Spain in a televised interview said that the people of Barcelona who believed in unity were not alone.
However the events in Catalonia continue to play out, a large proportion of the population is feeling insecure with the way their future is being decided for them.
A new law of science has been found to beautifully explain crowd movements for first time. The as-yet unnamed law, which is a mathematical, universal power law for human interactions, was found by U of M researchers who analyzed complex datasets that have only recently been available. The movement of crowds is fundamentally anticipatory in nature, according to the researchers, and the new, simple energy law expresses, in the words of its lead author, “the beauty of human nature.”
“Nowadays, though, in the era of big-data there is a plethora of publicly available human crowd data. By analyzing such data, we found that, unlike particle-based interactions, the interactions between pedestrians are anticipatory in nature,” Karamouzas told us, referring to previous models that had attempted to predict crowd behavior with data based on repulsive particles rather than humans.
“To be more specific, when two particles interact the amount of energy that they have to expend to avoid colliding with each other depends on how close they are. In contrast, when two pedestrians interact, their energy depends on the ‘time-to-collision,’ i.e., the time that it takes for the pedestrians to collide assuming that they do not change course; as a collision becomes more imminent, this energy increases drastically.”
Karamouzas and his team have discovered a universal parameter based on single variable that explains crowd movement.
“Surprisingly, the relationship between interaction energy and time-to-collision consistently follows a simple mathematical law stating that the degree to which two pedestrians are willing to respond to each other is inversely proportional to the square of their projected time-to-collision.”
Karamouzas elaborated on the types of crowd phenomena that could be explained by the new law.
“This law is broadly applicable as it consistently holds across different crowd settings; we analyzed both sparse and dense human crowds and found that pedestrian interactions follow the same power-law relationship. Our law has allowed us to gain a better understanding into how human behave and interact in a crowd.
“Looking into the future, I believe that such a law will have broad applications into our everyday life, from simulating in a more accurate way pedestrian behaviors in games, training simulators and animated movies, to designing safer buildings and pedestrian facilities.”
Karamouzas also explained how a law could so simply cover such range in speeds, densities and situations.
“That’s the beauty of the human nature! Every person in a crowd is certainly unique with his/her own desires and individual goals. What our law captures is how people adapt their courses in response to others around them. And such adaptations directly follow from the psychology of anticipation. As we move through a crowd our brain is able to process visual and acoustic cues and recognize the future consequences of our actions allowing us to react accordingly. And it’s the interaction between each person’s individual goals and our inferred law that allows pedestrians to exhibit such a large variety of behaviors.”
The law could not have been found in the past, due to the complexity required of the analysis.
“When we move in a crowd, we typically experience a complex system of competing forces,” said Karamouzas. “On one hand we have a goal that we are tying to reach–e.g. grocery store–and on other hand we try not to bump into other people. On top of that, we hardly ever walk alone but in small groups–such as couples, families, friends, etc. As such, we have to account for all these factors and continuously make our own decisions, which makes very hard to isolate/identify the primary rule that describes our interactions in a crowd. Much of the work in our paper was developing a new analysis technique which can account for the effect of all these forces simultaneously. Because the technique we employed was statistical in nature, we needed to analyze thousands of trajectories to robustly determine the pedestrian interaction law.”
Karamouzas went into detail about how his team found the law.
“We turned into a large collection of publicly available pedestrian datasets that are nowadays available thanks to the advances in automated tracking and computer vision,” said Karamouzas. “Overall, we analyzed six datasets consisting of students walking in college campuses, pedestrians interacting at commercial streets, and a few controlled experiments where participants navigate through narrow bottlenecks.
Previously, there had been formidable challenges facing researchers who wanted to find an accurate and general rule for pedestrian behavior.
“To overcome the challenges that I mentioned already and robustly quantify the interaction law of pedestrians we employed a novel approach rooted in condensed matter physics. We initially measured the probability that any pair of pedestrians in the data has of maintaining a certain separation distance. We basically hypothesized that similar to charged particles, the interaction between pedestrians is distance-dependent. However, we found that the probability plots were very different for different walking speeds; when two pedestrians approach each other very fast they tend to maintain a larger separation distance than when they move slowly, as opposed to particles. As such, we started looking into different variables that can describe the interactions between pedestrians and we found that the time-to-collision is a sufficient descriptor. The probability plots were the same for different speeds as well as different orientations at which pedestrians approach each other. In addition, the time-to-collision measure naturally accounts for pedestrians coming relatively close to one another when moving in roughly the same direction–e.g. a pair of friends walking line-abreast. Eventually, by analyzing all the data, we inferred a simple energy law for the interactions between pairs of pedestrians.”
The research is considered to hold new promise for improved public architecture and spaces, the failings of which in the past have caused deaths.
“First of all, the nice thing about our newly identified law is that it directly implies an accurate model of simulating crowd flows. And through such simulations, we can design safer buildings as well as improve the efficiency of existing facilities–e.g., better egress times at a stadium. Furthermore, our novel way of analyzing crowd data and directly measuring the “interaction energy” between pairs of pedestrians opens interesting avenues for future work. For example, we would like to analyze crowd data from mass gatherings, such as concerts, and see how the interaction energy can be used to identify critical areas preventing the likelihood of crowd disasters–like the Love Parade in 2010).
Karamouzas commented on what he thought may be the most important thing for readers to understand of the research.
“The main take-away message is that a lot of the complexity of pedestrian interactions can be captured using simple mathematical equations. The universality of how pedestrian respond to each other is really surprising, and understanding this can lead to more accurate simulations, safer building designs, and shed some light into the anticipatory nature of human interactions.
The development of a new metal matrix composite foam may tip the balance back towards metal materials in the construction of marine vehicles — in addition to offering heat resistance well beyond that of the fiberglasses common in the industry today. According to NYU engineers, the first lighter-than-water metal construction foam can withstand significant pressure and three times as much heat as fiberglass.
“This is the first time anybody has been able to achieve density of the composite lower than that of water to create naturally buoyant materials,” explained New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering’s Dr. Nikhil Gupta.
Dr. Nikhil Gupta
The metal matrix composite is a magnesium alloy reinforced with spherical silicon carbide particles. The density — 0.92 grams per cubic centimeter versus water’s 1.0 – still allows the material to withstand 25,000 pounds per square inch of pressure before rupturing.
Some of the strength of the material is due to the hallow particles embedded in the material, which absorb energy during a fracture. With different measures of spheres added to the matrix, various densities can be created.
“The spheres are manufactured by our industrial partner Deep Spring Technology, Toledo, OH, USA,” noted Gupta, an expert in mechanical and aerospace engineering.
Spheres were the shape of choice for the foam. “This company also has capabilities of manufacturing hollow particles of many other shapes,” said Gupta, who referred to two other types of particle shapes — made of silicon carbide [gray color] and alumina [white color].
“Spherical particles have advantage that their properties are the same from any side. Particles of different shapes need to be used with more caution with regard to loading them along their strongest direction.”
The light-weight heat-resistant material is also expected to offer potential improvements in fuel economy for land transportation. The ability of metallic materials to withstand high temperatures is one of the main selling points, Gupta noted.
“Some of the competing materials are polymer matrix composites, commonly known as ‘fiberglass.’ One of the limitations of fiberglass materials is that they cannot be used over 150 degrees Celsius because polymer will degrade or burn. In addition, fire, smoke, and toxicity are concerns when polymers are exposed to high temperature. Magnesium and Magnesium matrix composites can be used up to about 500 degrees Celsius. Automotive components such as pistons, connecting rods, exhaust systems and structural components can be made of lightweight Mg matrix composite materials. High temperature in many of these components prohibits use of polymer matrix composites.
“The Magnesium-hollow sphere composites that we have developed also absorb a large amount of energy under compression. This property is desirable in automotive energy absorber components in cursing zones. These foams can also be filled in A and B-pillars of cars, and doors for side impact energy absorption.”
The technology may be put into use in prototype automobiles and boats within three years, as well as in amphibious vehicles developed by the US military, where currently the trend is toward other materials, although experts consider that the new lightweight product may again give metals a material advantage.
“Weight reduction in transportation applications can help in reducing the fuel consumption,” Gupta told us. “In addition, the high energy absorption capability per unit mass in these materials can also help in making vehicles safer. However, one material cannot be used to make all components, we need to find the components that will benefit the most from these new materials.
Why in Vancouver’s wealthy neighborhoods — where houses cost over $2 million — over 30 percent of residents claim poverty
Mansion owners in Vancouver are claiming poverty at the same levels as those suffered by the city’s homeless struggling in the Downtown Eastside.
A recent study by University of B.C. geographer Dan Hiebert has revealed that wealthy business-investor immigrants to Canada — hundreds of thousands of whom have chosen to relocate to Vancouver — are “poor” enough to receive social welfare.
Areas of Vancouver that report extreme low income (Dan Hiebert)
The neighborhoods that report the most poverty, according to Hiebert’s report, which is based on Statistics Canada data, are the upscale Metro neighborhoods with high proportions of immigrants — mostly Chinese.
In these areas over 30 percent of adults claim poverty.
The houses in these areas, including Shaughnessy-Arbutus, south of Oakridge Shopping Center, and north-central Richmond — sell in the range of $2 million to $6 million Canadian.
Shaughnessy-Arbutus is currently 50 percent Chinese and 34 percent white, although the percentage of Chinese in all of Vancouver’s neighborhoods is currently rising.
South of Oakridge Shopping Center, the percentage of Chinese is 70 percent. Whites make up 20 percent.
Several north Richmond neighborhoods are “low-income” according to tax stats. These neighborhoods are also approximately 60 percent Chinese.
Hiebert’s data echoes another recent study conducted by Vancouver mathematician Jens Von Bergmann which found that 1 in 10 households declare less income than they spent on housing costs — mostly in Vancouver’s West Side.
Canada’s business investor program allowed foreign nationals to obtain a Canadian passport in exchange for a temporary investment of $800,000 Canadian — an amount much lower than similar programs in other countries popular with wealthy immigrants. The program was cancelled last year but the Quebec business investor program remains in use, allowing thousands to land in Quebec before relocating to Vancouver.
Just those immigrants who have relocated to Vancouver (current population under 2.5 million for Greater Vancouver Area) using this program amount to approximately 200,000 in the last generation. However, the number of new immigrants to Vancouver is estimated to be over 30,000 per year.
Many Canadians see this issue in terms of tax fairness because those rich in assets but poor in income do not pay for public services.
However, a further consideration exists, according Vancouver immigration lawyer Samuel Hymm.
Many of these families actually do have high incomes — a phenomenon in Canada known as “astronauts” because the husband usually works overseas while the wife and children live in Canada — but these incomes are not reported and, according to Hymm, neither the B.C. government or the federal government are cracking down on rich home buyers.
Critics such as Immigration Watch Canada’s Dan Murray have pointed out the political nature of the problem. Despite the breadth of the issue and the cost to Canadian taxpayers, no Canadian political party has said a word about it, despite the current federal election.
“So far, none of our five major political parties has even uttered a peep about this matter,” Murray told The Speaker. “The point is that several million immigrants — particularly hundreds of thousands of Investor Immigrants — have been taking huge amounts of economic and social benefits from Canada, but have been contributing next to nothing. And they have been getting away with it because the Canada Revenue Agency has not pursued these hundreds of thousands or millions of cheats.”
Murray has asserted that the issue should be a top election matter. “It translates into a major scandal,” Murray said. “It should be a major election scandal.”
Monopolization of community-based information networks by cartels of a few “super editors” among several risks that could lead to a diminished Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s quality benefits from high levels of free participation, but volunteer information databases like Wikipedia can be negatively effected by tendencies toward information monopolization, and, according to a recent study, this negative effect is more prevalent in more frequently edited articles — articles that could be considered to be more important.
In the study, researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and the Korea Institute for Advanced Study looked at how editors interact with each other as well as how they interact with articles, and integrated previously-ignored factors such as the consideration of real time — not just the number of edits used in previous studies to mark time.
Among the team’s findings: infrequently-referred articles grow faster than frequently-referred ones. Not only that, but articles that attracted a high motivation to edit actually reduced the number of participants. Yun and his colleagues inferred that this type of Wikipedia article participation decay results in inequality among community editors. The trend will become more severe as time goes on, they suspected:
“For the previous decade, many of these open-editing access movements have significantly affected the entire
Jinhyuk Yun
society,” Jinhyuk Yun, a Ph.D. candidate at the Complex Systems and Statistical Physics Lab at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, told us.
“Wikipedia, Creative Commons Licenses, GNU, etc. To sustain such movements, they must maintain their motivations for participants, which might be taken away by monopolization.”
Yun explained how communal information databases like Wikipedia slow down.
“There are various reasons to participate in such ‘open-editing’ movements. Some are collective reasons shared in a society, and others are somewhat personal. Because the motivation is diverse, slowing down is also due to various causes. First, there can be a loss of necessity to contribute due to changes in society — or technology. Some GNU software based on old platforms no longer continue because the number of users of such software is getting smaller. In addition, there can be new barriers caused by governmental regulations — not about such communal databases, but considering the case of UBER. One particular candidate we discussed in the paper is the monopolization by few ‘super-editors.'”
Yun also commented on how we can consider the health of such community databases?
“It is very hard to quantify the ‘health’ of such database because of the ambiguity in the definition of health. In my point of view, the databases should meet the standard of accuracy and instantaneity. In other words, it should keep the trend, but it should not lose its accuracy in the contents. Although these databases are mainly based on the contribution of anonymous sources, it should also have reliable references to cross-check.”
However, data monopolization is not a black and white issue, Yun noted.
“To be honest, monopolization sometimes does good in particular occasions,” Yun told us, “yet it has many risks in most cases. Consider political issues in authoritarian governments, where media controlled by the government sometimes manipulates people’s opinions by a simple nudge or filtering. Such manipulation can also happen in Wikipedia — for example, by cartels of super-editors.”
Yun offered some possible remedies for content monopolization on Wikipedia:
“Based on our observations, Wikipedia could consider a reward program to recruit new editors. Simple achievement reward programs — like those in video games — at an early stage might be helpful, yet it should be done under strict supervision to avoid vandals. For instance, giving merit to editors who supply new reliable references might help to keep the quality of articles.”
Cross Canada charity runner Fast Eddy has made it to the East Coast — he ran from Vancouver Island to Cape Spear, Newfoundland, the most eastern point in North America, and is now on his way back to the West Coast.
The ultramarathoner started out in Victoria, British Columbia last March. He calls the journey his “There and Back Run” — and it has two charity causes, Alzheimer’s and Breast Cancer,” two medical conditions close to Fast Eddy.
Alzheimer’s is something Fast Eddy’s grandmother deals with. She helped raise the runner and gave him his nickname. Fast Eddy’s birth name is Edward Dostaler. Breast cancer was a cause undertaken by Fast Eddy’s former professor, Tom Owen, who taught at Thompson Rivers University before his death from lung cancer.
The run has already amounted to 10,000 kilometers one way. The way back will be twice as long.
“Now I’m basically running across Canada again but twice in one go,” Fast Eddy told us.
In order to fit speaking engagements into the trip, Fast Eddy is running a leg, running back, and driving back again to his furthest point.
Fast Eddy’s breakdown of the legs of his return trip
“It allows me to go to schools and do presentations and put the causes first,” Fast Eddy said. Also, he is his own driver, so it is a practical method of juggling the tasks of running and driving the gear necessary for the trip.
Not only is Fast Eddy raising money for charity, but he’s also speaking to students in Canada’s school on such topics as saying “no” to bullying, believing in yourself, and persevering. The issues are ones personal to Fast Eddy, like the causes he is fundraising for. Bullying was something the activist faced in school — moving three times with his family because of it — and persevering is something he says he deals with every day.
Fast Eddy (left) with friends in Gander, N.L., December 12
“Every morning you have to get up and face the mental challenge of your day,” he tells the kids he speaks to. “The brain has to say, ‘Nope, we’re going to get up and get going.’ Don’t quit, just keep on moving.”
Interesting “There and Back” Facts
– It takes 4,500 calories per day to fuel the body running as much as Fast Eddy runs
– It will take 28 pairs of shoes to make the complete “There and Back” journey (a pair of runners lasts approximately 700 kilometers)
– The cost will be around $25,000
– The total length of the trip will be 21,585 kilometers
Alexei Navalny has organized one of the largest public demonstrations against the Russian government this week, with thousands showing up.
Although Navalny was given permission to hold a demonstration, he moved the protest to another area where he did not have permission. Clashes with police followed.
Navalny sent out a video message at night telling his supporters to go to the location near Red Square and to “go nowhere else.” Navalny was arrested before he could go to the location.
Navalny has only 2% support in Russia, while Putin has widespread support.
Tennessee is the first state in the country to offer community college free for almost all adults.
The state already had free community college for all graduating students, but now it has extended this to pretty much everyone. And the state lets attendees do it part time if they want, since many people work while attending.
The drop started last Friday, and continued over the weekend and on Monday. The big tech stocks, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, which have been on a long upward trend, have dropped significantly.
The drop is considered possibly overdue given the high out-performance and positioning of the stocks.
