Technologies supporting independent moving inside buildings for people with visual impairment

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include disability and persons with disabilities for example partially sighted or blind. Disability is referenced in multiple parts of the SDGs, specifically in the parts related to education, growth and employment, inequality, accessibility of human settlements and buildings. The paper presents selected technologies that support independent movement blind people inside huge buildings. The paper will refer to two SDGs: No 9 and No 11. There needs to be a future in which cities provide opportunities for all with access to basic services, housing, friendly public buildings, transportation and more, even to people with eye disabilities. This paper presents selected systems for finding objects or places, recognizing objects inside rooms and navigation inside buildings based on nonradio and wireless technologies. The following technologies and solutions were presented and compared: physical items, smartphone cameras, laser rangefinders, pedestrian dead-reckoning, intelligent lighting, Wi-Fi, BLE beacons, magnetic fields and barometric pressure sensors.

US employment inequality in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic

This article compares inequality in employment across demographic groups in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. We develop a measure to capture both how much employment declines during a recession and the persistence of employment losses. Results show a significant shift of job loss from men in the Great Recession to women in the COVID-19 lockdown. White workers fare better than other racial/ethnic groups in both recessions. Black and Hispanic women are hit especially hard in the COVID-19 pandemic. With our job-loss measure, less-educated workers had modestly worse outcomes in the Great Recession. However, during COVID-19, less-educated workers suffer much more severe employment consequences than more-educated groups. We discuss long-term effects of employment inequality and how these findings are relevant to debates about policy responses.

Rising Inequality in Mothers' Employment Statuses: The Role of Intergenerational Transmission

During the late twentieth century, U.S. mothers' propensities to hold full-time jobs became increasingly unequal across the distribution of socioeconomic status (SES). Consequently, daughters in high-SES households became more likely to be raised by working mothers than daughters in low-SES households. To what extent did this unequal exposure further shape maternal employment inequality in the twenty-first century—when these daughters had grown into adults and begun to raise their own children? Leveraging the genealogical structure of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this article estimates intergenerational employment coefficients on a sample of late twentieth century mothers and their daughters. It documents a much stronger intergenerational relationship in high-SES families than in low-SES families. Supplementary analyses reveal that being raised by a working mother significantly reduces the motherhood employment penalty among high-SES women but not among low-SES women. Unequal rates of mother-daughter employment transmission by SES can account for 36% of growing inequality in maternal employment across SES groups, observed in the Current Population Survey, between 1999 and 2016. These findings indicate that family-level transmission processes magnify the effects of structural forces on maternal employment inequality.

US Employment Inequality in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article compares inequality in US employment across social groups in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. We develop an inequality measure that captures both how much employment declines during a recession and the persistence of those declines. The results show a significant shift of job loss from men in the Great Recession to women in the COVID-19 lockdown. White workers fare better than other racial/ethnic groups in both recessions. Black and Hispanic women are hit especially hard in the COVID-19 pandemic. With our job loss measure, less educated workers had modestly worse outcomes in the Great Recession. However, during COVID-19, less educated workers suffer much more severe employment consequences than more educated groups. We discuss long-term effects of employment inequality and how these findings are relevant to debates about policy responses.

Regional employment quality in the context of Russia's technological development

The socio-economic inequality of the Russian regions poses a significant threat both to the successful social and technological development of the country. Since employment is one of the crucial highlighters of such inequality, the paper is devoted to assessing regional inequality in terms of employment quality in the context of technological changes. The article presents a system of social and economic indicators to determine the place of each region in the interregional employment inequality. The novelty of the study includes the methodological approaches and methods to estimate regional employment inequality and its components. The authors reveal the employment quality and its main components keeping relatable with the technological development. Based on these points, we developed employment quality coefficient and carried out a typology of Russian regions in terms of the employment quality. The study uses data from the Rosstat on working conditions and economic activity of the population for 2005-2019. The results expand the scientific ideas about the interdependence of employment and technological development. In addition, the research results should be considered when developing the state technical policy, differentiating the employment policy and socio-economic development of the regions.

Youth, Social Contracting and the Postcolony

Social contracts are concerned with the legitimacy of the state over the individual. The social contract offers mutual benefit and reciprocal obligation and is intrinsic to liberalism’s assertion that freedom is normative and encroaching on freedom requires justification. The social contract is both a philosophical idea and a toolkit for defusing conflict and tying participants to core liberal values. Talk of new social contracts, including intergenerational contracts, focus on maintaining a peaceful status quo, not transcending it. For the Global South in general, and youth in particular, the experience is more contract and less social. There seems little opportunity for southern youth to move from the margins to center stage, mimicking the inability of the Global South to do the same. Southern youth bear the brunt of limited economic opportunities, precarious employment, inequality, racism, and violence, compounding their marginalized place in society. What value can social contracting play beyond a short-term band-aid, unless it incorporates a fundamental rupture with the past?

Evolution of the Employment Gender Inequality

Participation of women on the labor market and in employment increased in the recent years, while men seem to be pulling out of the labor force. This is not true for all countries. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview and a comparison of gender employment inequality and the relation with policy implications. The authors have found evidence, based on data, of the opposite behavior. When gender inequality is mentioned, people usually depict women being at a disadvantage. Although this is true for many countries, there are also countries where women are better positioned in the labor market than men. However, this also depends on such characteristics as age, education, and economic sector. Policy implications were proposed based on the obtained findings of this chapter.