Does Affirmative Action Work? Evidence from the Operation of Fair Employment Legislation in Northern Ireland

An affirmative action programme, established by the Fair Employment (Northern Ireland) Act 1989, has been an important attempt to ensure ‘fair participation’ in employment for both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland since 1990. The programme includes detailed monitoring of the community background of employees and requires employers to undertake remedial action where fair participation is not evident. Agreements were concluded between the regulatory agency and many employers specifying what affirmative action measures were required. Based on the annual monitoring returns submitted between 1990 and 2005, this article evaluates the effectiveness of the affirmative action programme in promoting fair employment participation using fixed effects models. The analysis shows that there has been a general shift towards workforce integration in Northern Ireland but the increase of under-represented groups in agreement concerns is greater than in concerns with no agreement. The success of agreements, however, is limited to certain industrial sectors and medium-sized enterprises.

The Right to a Fair Fight: Sporting Lessons on Consensual Harm

This article critically assesses the criminal law on consensual harm through an examination of the legality of fighting sports. The article begins by considering fighting sports such as bare-fisted prize fighting (dominant in the nineteenth century). It then, in historical chronology, examines the legality of professional boxing with gloves (dominant in the twentieth century). Doctrinally, the article reviews why and how, in a position adopted by the leading common law jurisdictions, fighting sports benefit from an application of the “well-established” category-based exceptions to the usual bodily harm threshold of consent in the criminal law. Centrally, fighting sports and doctrinal law on offenses against the person are juxtaposed against the theoretical boundaries of consent in the criminal law to examine whether and where the limit of the “right to be hurt” might lie. In sum, this article uses fighting sports as a case study to assess whether the criminal law generally can or should accommodate the notion of a fair fight, sporting or otherwise, predicated on the consent of the participants to the point that the individuals involved might be said, pithily, to have extended an open invite to harm.

Fair charging strategies for EVs connected to a low-voltage distribution network

The development of smart grid technologies and appropriate charging strategies are key to accommodating large numbers of Electric Vehicles (EV) charging on the grid. In this paper a general framework is presented for formulating the EV charging optimization problem and three different charging strategies are investigated and compared from the perspective of charging fairness while taking into account power system constraints. Two strategies are based on distributed algorithms, namely, Additive Increase and Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD), and Distributed Price-Feedback (DPF), while the third is an ideal centralized solution used to benchmark performance. The algorithms are evaluated using a simulation of a typical residential low voltage distribution network with 50% EV penetration. © 2013 IEEE.

Methods and Metrics for Fair Server Assessment under Real-Time Financial Workloads

We present a rigorous methodology and new metrics for fair comparison of server and microserver platforms. Deploying our methodology and metrics, we compare a microserver with ARM cores against two servers with ×86 cores running the same real-time financial analytics workload. We define workload-specific but platform-independent performance metrics for platform comparison, targeting both datacenter operators and end users. Our methodology establishes that a server based on the Xeon Phi co-processor delivers the highest performance and energy efficiency. However, by scaling out energy-efficient microservers, we achieve competitive or better energy efficiency than a power-equivalent server with two Sandy Bridge sockets, despite the microserver's slower cores. Using a new iso-QoS metric, we find that the ARM microserver scales enough to meet market throughput demand, that is, a 100% QoS in terms of timely option pricing, with as little as 55% of the energy consumed by the Sandy Bridge server.

An address delivered before the South-Carolina institute, at its second annual fair

This document contains a correspondence of Joseph H. Lumpkin, which originated from a meeting of the board of directors of the South Carolina Institute, in connection with the Annual Fair, held on Tuesday evening, November 19, 1850. It included a request for a copy of the address for publication.

An address delivered before the South-Carolina institute, at its first annual fair

This document contains an address by James H. Hammond , delivered before the South Carolina Institute, held at Military Hall It mentions the resolutions that were proposed and adopted including an acknowledgements for the very able and eloquent address, appointment of five committee members for communication and to request a copy of the address for publication with James H. Hammond.

Catalogue of the articles on exhibition, at the fair of the South-Carolina Institute, third annual fair, November 18, 1851

This document contains a catalogue of the articles on exhibition at the 1851 annual fair of the South Carolina Institute. It includes 432 items exhibited at the fair in Charleston.

Catalogue of articles on exhibition at the second annual fair of the South-Carolina Institute, at the Military hall, November, 1850

This document contains a catalogue of the articles on exhibition at the 1850 annual fair of the South Carolina Institute. It includes 337 items exhibited at the fair in Charleston at the Military Hall.

An address delivered before the South-Carolina institute, at its second annual fair, on the 19th November, 1850. By Jos. H. Lumpkin

This speech by Georgia Supreme Court judge Joseph Lumpkin aims to ignite a spirit of improvement and bring about its influence. This improvement is not necessarily in the interest of agriculture alone, but in the interest of the state as well.

A fair day's wage? Perceptions of public sector pay

There is a scarcity of evidence pertaining to the general public's perception of public sector pay. Hence, in the present study, 161 women and 149 men were asked to estimate the wages 35 public sector professions should receive annually in the fictitious nation of Maldoria, based on a comparison value of an annual income of T10,000 for general practitioners. Analysis showed that only pilots were given a higher annual income than general practitioners; miners and local government workers were also provided with relatively high annual incomes. By contrast, newscasters were provided with the lowest annual income. Participants' sex did not affect these evaluations, and other demographic variables and public sector-related information of the participants were poor predictors of their evaluations. The implications of this research on public attitudes toward wage determination are discussed, and avenues for further research highlighted.