Determining the Effect of the Minimum Wage on Income Inequality

Many recent studies have shown a significant increase to income inequality since the 1980s. One of the proposed methods for fixing this trend is to increase the minimum wage, since this policy would help those at the low end of the income spectrum to see economic growth. To analyze the effectiveness of this policy, we studied data from countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation. By forming an econometric model to account for many factors that affect income inequality in nations around the world, including the real value of the minimum wage, we can determine the relationship and provide recommendations for future policy. We conclude that increases to the minimum wage can cause a decrease to income inequality until the minimum wage exceeds a maximum effectiveness value, at which point the effect starts to reverse itself. [excerpt

The Effects of a Rapidly-Fluctuating Random Environment on Systems of Interacting Species

Some models of interacting species in a random environment are analyzed. Approximate solutions of the stochastic differential or delay-differential equations describing the systems are obtained, on the assumption that the random environment is fluctuating rapidly

A Grammar for Reproducible and Painless Extract-Transform-Load Operations on Medium Data

Many interesting data sets available on the Internet are of a medium size---too big to fit into a personal computer's memory, but not so large that they won't fit comfortably on its hard disk. In the coming years, data sets of this magnitude will inform vital research in a wide array of application domains. However, due to a variety of constraints they are cumbersome to ingest, wrangle, analyze, and share in a reproducible fashion. These obstructions hamper thorough peer-review and thus disrupt the forward progress of science. We propose a predictable and pipeable framework for R (the state-of-the-art statistical computing environment) that leverages SQL (the venerable database architecture and query language) to make reproducible research on medium data a painless reality.Comment: 30 pages, plus supplementary material

Entangling spins by measuring charge: a parity-gate toolbox

The parity gate emerged recently as a promising resource for performing universal quantum computation with fermions using only linear interactions. Here we analyse the parity gate (P-gate) from a theoretical point of view in the context of quantum networks. We present several schemes for entanglement generation with P-gates and show that native networks simplify considerably the resources required for producing multi-qubit entanglement, like n-GHZ states. Other applications include a Bell-state analyser and teleportation. We also show that cluster state fusion can be performed deterministically with parity measurements. We then extend this analysis to hybrid quantum networks containing spin and mode qubits. Starting from an easy-to-prepare resource (spin-mode entanglement of single electrons) we show how to produce a spin n-GHZ state with linear elements (beam-splitters and local spin-flips) and charge-parity detectors; this state can be used as a resource in a spin quantum computer or as a precursor for constructing cluster states. Finally, we construct a novel spin CZ-gate by using the mode degrees of freedom as ancillae.Comment: updated to the published versio