Methods and apparatus to obtain anonymous audience measurement data from network server data for particular demographic and usage profiles are disclosed. An example method to provide anonymous audience measurement data to an audience measurement entity disclosed herein comprises obtaining a demographic profile and a network usage profile, sampling customer data stored in a customer database not accessible by the audience measurement entity to generate a customer sample representative of the demographic profile and the network usage profile without customer intervention, the customer sample including customer identification information, processing log data obtained from a network server not accessible by the audience measurement entity using the customer identification information to determine audience measurement data associated with customers in the customer sample, and removing the customer identification information from the audience measurement data to prepare the anonymous audience measurement data for the audience measurement entity.

The health care industry in the United States accounted for $2.7 trillion in spending in 2011. More people are employed in health care (including those working in the private and public sectors) than in any other private industry in the United States, accounting for 13% of the workforce. Job growth in the health care industry has been consistently positive, even during recessions. Between 2007 and 2013, employment in health care grew 10.7%, with 1.85 million new jobs, while all other industries declined 2.8%, losing 3.85 million jobs (Wright, 2013). There are many career fields in . . .

I exploit temporal and spatial variation in the adoption of disclosure regulation across the state banking systems of the National Banking era to examine how these regulations affect the development and stability of commercial banks. I find strong evidence that requirements to report financial statements in local newspapers promoted the stability and development of the state banking system, but little evidence that periodic on-site examinations incrementally contributed to these outcomes. These results suggest disclosure regulation mitigates agency conicts between bankers and depositors by facilitating private monitoring. I also analyze the political economy of disclosure regulation using evidence from the popular votes on the 1888 Illinois and Michigan referenda. Counties in which large agricultural landowners and private banks were particularly strong were less likely to vote favorably for the enactment of these laws. These findings suggest incumbent groups oppose laws that promote disclosure and monitoring, because their passage would foster nancial development and threaten their private interests.

Both the military and police departments are concerned about recruiting and promoting a racially/ethnically diverse workforce. This paper discusses three broad lessons from the Military Leadership Diversity Commission (MLDC) that can be used to inform police department hiring and personnel management: qualified minority candidates are available, career paths impact diversity, and departments should leverage organizational commitment to diversity. Additionally, specific suggestions are given as to how law enforcement agencies can incorporate each of these lessons.

This paper asks how far one can go towards identifying the parameters of the Ben-Porath model without imposing strong assumptions about cohort endowments and skill prices. The main finding is that the Ben-Porath model generates nearly identical age wage profiles for a wide range of two key parameters: the curvature of the human capital technology and the average growth rate of skill prices. In contrast to a recent literature which argues that the Ben-Porath technology is nearly linear, I show that the model closely fits observed age wage profiles, but only for curvature parameters that are below 0.8. I explore how this finding changes a number of empirical implications that have been derived from the model.

Public sector unionism and collective bargaining are being widely debated in U.S. state and local governments, some of which have sharply reduced or eliminated public employee unionism and bargaining rights. These actions have occurred based on a belief that fiscal adversity facing state and local governments stems mainly from the over-compensation of public employees that has ostensibly resulted from unionism, bargaining and supportive state-level legislation that was enacted decades earlier. These contemporary policy changes, however, are being made with little or no consideration of empirical evidence about public-private sector pay and benefit relationships, the effects of unions on public employee pay, the effectiveness of employment dispute resolution procedures, including arbitration, and the ability of public sector labor and management to effectively combat fiscal adversity and enhance organizational performance. In this paper, we provide new evidence showing that, on balance, public employees are under-compensated relative to their public sector counterparts and that the effects of unions on compensation are considerably smaller in the public than in the private sector. We also review and summarize empirical evidence pertaining to the uses and effectiveness of public sector dispute resolution procedures and to public and private sector joint labor-management initiatives to reform work practices and enhance organizational performance. This evidence indicates that dispute resolution procedures work reasonably well based on process and outcome assessments, and that public sector labor and management can use mutual gains negotiations to benefit not just themselves but citizens and communities more broadly. In addition, we propose a research agenda for a new generation of scholars so that they, like their predecessors, can influence policy makers in making high stakes decisions about public employee unionism and collective bargaining.

Background. Obtaining an accurate understanding of a childscancer prognosis can help parents make informed decisions about treatment. Research has shown that parents tend to overestimate their childs cancer prognosis relative to physicians. Thus, we examined whether the content of physician communication, parent sources of medical information, and parent demographic factors affected the association between oncologist and parent estimatesof a childs cancer prognosis. Procedure. Families were recruited 38 weeks after a childs new diagnosis or relapse of cancer. Parents (77 mothers; 42 fathers) completed questionnaires regarding their sources of medical information, age, and education. The childs oncologist reported on the content of their communication withparents regarding prognosis. Parents and oncologists estimated the childs chance of 5-year survival using a visual-analogue scale. Results. Mothers and fathers reported a more favorable prognosisfor their child, which was on average about 30% higher than oncologists. Time since diagnosis was correlated with less discrepancy between physician and mother prognosis ratings, with a similar trend noted for fathers. Agreement between oncologists and parents was better for younger fathers, but it was unrelated to physician communication, sources of medical information, or other demographic factors. Conclusions. Fathers age may be important to their understanding of their childs cancer prognosis, but we did not find support for other factors related to prognosis literacy. Given the homogeneity of our sample, future research should assess differences in parents prognosis knowledge across cancer diagnosis, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (SES), which may aid in developing interventions to improve parent understanding.

Recent climatic patterns indicate that extreme weather events will increase in frequency and magnitude. Remote sensing offers unique advantages for large-scale monitoring. In this research, Landsat 5 remotely sensed imagery was used to assess flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters in the US over the past decades. The objective of our work is to assess whether decisions associated with the classification process, such as location of reference data and algorithm choice, affected flooding results and subsequent analysis using census data. Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Back Propagation Neural Network (NN) were the tested algorithms, the former reflecting a simple and popular classifier, and the latter an advanced but complex method. Flooding estimations were almost identical within the reference sample area, 124.4 km2 for the ML classifier and 123.7 km2 for the NN classifier. However, large discrepancies were found outside the reference sample area with the ML predicting 462.5 km2 and the NN identifying 797.2 km2 as flooded, almost twice the amount. Further investigation took place to evaluate the influence of the classification method to a social study, namely the racial characteristics of flooded areas. Using Census 2000 data, our study area was segmented in census tracts. Results indicated a strong positive correlation between concentration of African Americans and proportional residential flooding. Pairwise T-Tests also verified that flooding among different African American concentrations was statistically different. There were no significant differences between the ML and NN methods in the results interpretation, which is mostly attributed to the significant geographic overlap between reference sample area and the examined census tracts. This study suggests that emergency responders should exercise significant caution in their decision making when using classification products from under-sampled geographic areas in terms of classification reference data.

In the early twentieth century, education legislation was often passed based on arguments that new laws were needed to force immigrants to learn English and Americanize. We provide the first estimates of the effect of statutes requiring English as the language of instruction and compulsory schooling laws on the school enrollment, work, literacy and English fluency of immigrant children from 1910 to 1930. English schooling statutes did increase the literacy of foreign-born children, though only modestly. Compulsory schooling and continuation school laws raised immigrants enrollment and the effects were much larger for children born abroad than for native-born children.

Data outsourcing, also known as database-as-a-service, has been widely used in industry to provide better data management while lowering the cost. However data outsourcing is limited in the presence of sensitive data (e.g., medical records) due to the untrusted third party providing the data outsourcing service. In this thesis, we present a private data outsourcing model supporting both queries and updates by using anonymization. Our private data outsourcing model is based on a data publishing technique called anatomization. Data are divided into identifying and sensitive data the same way in anatomization; however, the client can also reconstruct the original identifiable data from the separated data. Without the client, an adversary can link individuals to their actual sensitive values only to an extent specified by the underlying privacy preserving technique (such as k-anonymity or l-diversity). By exposing data where possible, the server can perform value-added services such as data analysis not possible with fully encrypted data, while still being unable to violate privacy constraints. We first present a relational query processor limited to queries that minimize the client-side computation while ensuring that the server learns nothing violating the privacy constraints. We then focus on updates and present a dynamic private data outsourcing model on top of the query processor allowing the client to insert, delete and update tuples with the same privacy guarantees as our read-only model. Lastly, we present a prototype for our private data outsourcing model.

There is a lingering assumption embedded in the social sciences that suburban areas are better locations for residence compared to central city areas. This thesis tests whether the objective economic advantage of suburbs has changed over time and whether it varies geographically. Data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), for the period of 1950 to 2000 are combined with the American Community Survey data from 2005-09. The sample in this study is restricted to non-institutionalized, white heads of households between the ages 18-64 who are not currently students. The findings reveal: (1) a declining suburban advantage for a set of socioeconomic indicators over time and (2) variation in the level and trend of suburb/central city differences across geographic regions.

American policy makers, educators, and others are concerned that predicted workforce shortages in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields will have a catastrophic impact on the economy. This article takes a realistic look at the STEM problem, identifying how community colleges can be a part of the solution. We provide evidence that shortages in STEM workers vary by geographic locale. Furthermore, STEM achievement is not consistent across ethnic groups or between men and women. These gaps may be due to unequal access to STEM degree programs and the shortage of quality STEM teachers.

The Massachusetts health reform initiative enacted into law in 2006 continued to fare well in 2010, with uninsurance rates remaining quite low and employer-sponsored insurance still strong. Access to health care also remained strong, and first-time reductions in emergency department visits and hospital inpatient stays suggested improvements in the effectiveness of health care delivery in the state. There were also improvements in self-reported health status. The affordability of health care, however, remains an issue for many people, as the state, like the nation, continues to struggle with the problem of rising health care costs. And although nearly two-thirds of adults continue to support reform, among nonsupporters there has been a marked shift from a neutral position toward opposition (17.0 percent opposed to reform in 2006 compared with 26.9 percent in 2010). Taken together, Massachusettss experience under the 2006 reform initiative, which became the template for the structure of the Affordable Care Act, highlights the potential gains and the challenges the nation now faces under federal health reform.

This article revisits Michel Chevaliers work and discussions on tariffs. Chevalier shifted from Saint-Simonism to economic liberalism during his life in the 19th century. His influence was soon perceived in the political world and in economic debates, mainly because of his discussion on tariffs as instruments of efficient transport policies. This work discusses Chevaliers thoughts on tariffs by revisiting his masterpiece (Le Cours dconomie Politique). Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was conducted in order to test Chevaliers hypothesis on the inefficiency of French tariffs. This study shows that Chevaliers claims on French tariffs are not validated by DEA.

Labor supply theory makes strong predictions about how the introduction or expansion of a social welfare program impacts work effort. Although there is a large literature on the work incentive effects of AFDC and the EITC, relatively little is known about the work incentive effects of the Food Stamp Program and none of the existing literature is based on quasi-experimental methods. We use the cross-county introduction of the program in the 1960s and 1970s to estimate the impact of the program on the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, earnings, and family cash income. Consistent with theory, we find reductions in employment and hours worked when food stamps are introduced. The reductions are concentrated among families headed by single woman.