Many mothers have long suspected that they're getting the short end of the deal--and finally, a highly respected economics journalist proves they're not just griping. Despite all the lip service given to the importance of motherhood, American mothers are not only not paid for all the work they do, but also penalized for it. "The gift of care can be both selfless and exploited," writes Ann Crittenden in this intrepid and groundbreaking work. Motherhood is dangerously undervalued--it's now the single biggest risk factor for poverty in old age. Mothers lose out in forgone income if they stay at home, an inflexible job market makes part-time work scarce or inadequately paid, and in the case of divorce, they're refused family assets by divorce laws that don't count their unpaid work.

Crittenden is fond of pointing out the hypocrisies plaguing America, and one is the belief in a welfare state enabling single mothers. The true welfare state, she says, protects paid workers from unforeseen risks through social security, unemployment insurance, and workman's compensation. Mothers who work part-time or not at all have no such safety net and typically take a nosedive into poverty, along with their children, after divorce or the death of their spouse. Married working moms are also punished--they pay the highest taxes on earned income in America. Crittenden's impassioned argument is based on research in a variety of fields, from economics to child development to demography. She shows how mothers were demoted from an economic asset to dependents, why welfare for only a certain group of mothers bred bitterness among the rest, and why there is currently an exodus of highly trained women from the work force.

Crittenden also travels far and wide for solutions. She finds them not only in such European nations as Sweden--which has abolished child poverty by giving mothers a year's paid leave, cash subsidies, and flexible work schedules--but in the U.S. military, which runs the best subsidized child-care program in the country and knows the value of providing special benefits to those who selflessly serve their country. Ultimately, Crittenden insists, the equality women have been fighting for will only be achieved when mothers are recognized as productive citizens creating a much-needed public good--human capital, or in layman's terms, well-raised children who grow into productive, law abiding citizens (and who pay into social security). This is an admirable--and charged--defense of motherhood, reminding us that unpaid female labor is "the priceless, invisible heart of the economy," and those who engage in this labor deserve the same rights, and the same respect, as other workers. --Lesley Reed

The Ultimate Element of Differentiation is You..

Discrete-valued time series are common in practice, but methods for their analysis are not well-known. In recent years, methods have been developed which are specifically designed for the analysis of discrete-valued time series. Hidden Markov and Other Models for Discrete-Valued Time Series introduces a new, versatile, and computationally tractable class of models, the "hidden Markov" models. It presents a detailed account of these models, then applies them to data from a wide range of diverse subject areas, including medicine, climatology, and geophysics. This book will be invaluable to researchers and postgraduate and senior undergraduate students in statistics. Researchers and applied statisticians who analyze time series data in medicine, animal behavior, hydrology, and sociology will also find this information useful.

This volume is an accessible introduction to the subject of many-valued and fuzzy logic suitable for use in relevant advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. The text opens with a discussion of the philosophical issues that give rise to fuzzy logic - problems arising from vague language - and returns to those issues as logical systems are presented. For historical and pedagogical reasons, three-valued logical systems are presented as useful intermediate systems for studying the principles and theory behind fuzzy logic.

How do you keep valuable employees from leaving? With employee turnover at a ten-year high in the tightest labor market in recent memory, human resource professionals face this challenge daily. This book briefly summarizes the current research in the area of employee turnover and provides practical guidelines to implement proven strategies for reducing unwanted turnover. Topics covered include differentiating between functional and dysfunctional turnover, job enrichment, employee selection, orientation programs, compensation practices, easing conflicts between work and home, social integration, and managing exiting employees. Separate chapters are devoted to using employee surveys to predict turnover and diagnose turnover causes and reducin

This second edition, now available in paperback, is a follow up to the author's classic Boolean-Valued Models and Independence Proofs in Set Theory,. It provides an exposition of some of the most important results in set theory obtained in the 20th century - the independence of the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice. Aimed at graduate students and researchers in mathematics, mathematical logic, philosophy, and computer science, the second edition has been extensively updated with expanded introductory material, new chapters, and a new appendix on category theory. It also includes recent developments in the field and numerous exercises, along with the enlarged and entirely updated background material. This new paperback edition includes additional corrections and, for the first time, will make this landmark text accessible to students in logic and set theory.

Complex-valued random signals are embedded in the very fabric of science and engineering, yet the usual assumptions made about their statistical behavior are often a poor representation of the underlying physics. This book deals with improper and noncircular complex signals, which do not conform to classical assumptions, and it demonstrates how correct treatment of these signals can have significant payoffs. The book begins with detailed coverage of the fundamental theory and presents a variety of tools and algorithms for dealing with improper and noncircular signals. It provides a comprehensive account of the main applications, covering detection, estimation, and signal analysis of stationary, nonstationary, and cyclostationary processes. Providing a systematic development from the origin of complex signals to their probabilistic description makes the theory accessible to newcomers. This book is ideal for graduate students and researchers working with complex data in a range of research areas from communications to oceanography.