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Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research has demonstrated gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against female students that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent. We also assessed faculty participants’ preexisting subtle bias against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student, but was unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.

In Moiré fringe lithography alignment technology, alignment is realized by monitoring the grating interference fringe image in real-time. The technique exhibits excellent sensitivity to displacement changes and is not easily affected by the gap changes between the mask and silicon wafer. Therefore, this technique is widely used in conventional proximity and contact lithography and new-generation micro- and nanolithography systems. The rapid development of semiconductor and integrated circuit industries, as well as the increasing requirements for the resolution of various nanodevices and systems, have posed new challenges in Moiré fringe lithography alignment technology, which are mainly reflected in alignment accuracy, alignment range, and scheme complexity. In this study, the development history, alignment principle, and overall process of Moiré fringe lithography alignment technology are reviewed; the main factors affecting alignment accuracy are analyzed, and corresponding optimization schemes are provided; and finally, the development trend and research focus of Moiré fringe lithography alignment technology are predicted from the marking structure, alignment scheme, and algorithm processing.

A substantial literature shows that U.S. early childhood interventions have important long-term economic benefits. However, there is little evidence on this question for developing countries. We report substantial effects on the earnings of participants in a randomized intervention conducted in 1986–1987 that gave psychosocial stimulation to growth-stunted Jamaican toddlers. The intervention consisted of weekly visits from community health workers over a 2-year period that taught parenting skills and encouraged mothers and children to interact in ways that develop cognitive and socioemotional skills. The authors reinterviewed 105 out of 129 study participants 20 years later and found that the intervention increased earnings by 25%, enough for them to catch up to the earnings of a nonstunted comparison group identified at baseline (65 out of 84 participants).

An invisible threat has visibly altered the world. Governments and key institutions have had to implement decisive responses to the danger posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Imposed change will increase the likelihood that alternative explanations take hold. In a proportion of the general population there may be strong scepticism, fear of being misled, and false conspiracy theories. Our objectives were to estimate the prevalence of conspiracy thinking about the pandemic and test associations with reduced adherence to government guidelines. A non-probability online survey with 2501 adults in England, quota sampled to match the population for age, gender, income, and region. Approximately 50% of this population showed little evidence of conspiracy thinking, 25% showed a degree of endorsement, 15% showed a consistent pattern of endorsement, and 10% had very high levels of endorsement. Higher levels of coronavirus conspiracy thinking were associated with less adherence to all government guidelines and less willingness to take diagnostic or antibody tests or to be vaccinated. Such ideas were also associated with paranoia, general vaccination conspiracy beliefs, climate change conspiracy belief, a conspiracy mentality, and distrust in institutions and professions. Holding coronavirus conspiracy beliefs was also associated with being more likely to share opinions. In England there is appreciable endorsement of conspiracy beliefs about coronavirus. Such ideas do not appear confined to the fringes. The conspiracy beliefs connect to other forms of mistrust and are associated with less compliance with government guidelines and greater unwillingness to take up future tests and treatment.

In high dynamic scenes, fringe projection profilometry (FPP) may encounter fringe saturation, and the phase calculated will also be affected to produce errors. This paper proposes a saturated fringe restoration method to solve this problem, taking the four-step phase shift as an example. Firstly, according to the saturation of the fringe group, the concepts of reliable area, shallow saturated area, and deep saturated area are proposed. Then, the parameter A related to the reflectivity of the object in the reliable area is calculated to interpolate A in the shallow and deep saturated areas. The theoretically shallow and deep saturated areas are not known in actual experiments. However, morphological operations can be used to dilate and erode reliable areas to produce cubic spline interpolation (CSI) areas and biharmonic spline interpolation (BSI) areas, which roughly correspond to shallow and deep saturated areas. After A is restored, it can be used as a known quantity to restore the saturated fringe using the unsaturated fringe in the same position, the remaining unrecoverable part of the fringe can be completed using CSI, and then the same part of the symmetrical fringe can be further restored. To further reduce the influence of nonlinear error, the Hilbert transform is also used in the phase calculation process of the actual experiment. The simulation and experimental results validate that the proposed method can still obtain correct results without adding additional equipment or increasing projection number, which proves the feasibility and robustness of the method.

Matter-wave interference experiments provide a direct confirmation of the quantum superposition principle, a hallmark of quantum theory, and thereby constrain possible modifications to quantum mechanics1. By increasing the mass of the interfering particles and the macroscopicity of the superposition2, more stringent bounds can be placed on modified quantum theories such as objective collapse models3. Here, we report interference of a molecular library of functionalized oligoporphyrins4 with masses beyond 25,000 Da and consisting of up to 2,000 atoms, by far the heaviest objects shown to exhibit matter-wave interference to date. We demonstrate quantum superposition of these massive particles by measuring interference fringes in a new 2-m-long Talbot–Lau interferometer that permits access to a wide range of particle masses with a large variety of internal states. The molecules in our study have de Broglie wavelengths down to 53 fm, five orders of magnitude smaller than the diameter of the molecules themselves. Our results show excellent agreement with quantum theory and cannot be explained classically. The interference fringes reach more than 90% of the expected visibility and the resulting macroscopicity value of 14.1 represents an order of magnitude increase over previous experiments2.

Women (compared to men) and individuals from minority ethnic groups (compared to the majority group) face unfavourable labour market outcomes in many economies 1 , 2 , but the extent to which discrimination is responsible for these effects, and the channels through which they occur, remain unclear 3 , 4 . Although correspondence tests 5 —in which researchers send fictitious CVs that are identical except for the randomized minority trait to be tested (for example, names that are deemed to sound ‘Black’ versus those deemed to sound ‘white’)—are an increasingly popular method to quantify discrimination in hiring practices 6 , 7 , they can usually consider only a few applicant characteristics in select occupations at a particular point in time. To overcome these limitations, here we develop an approach to investigate hiring discrimination that combines tracking of the search behaviour of recruiters on employment websites and supervised machine learning to control for all relevant jobseeker characteristics that are visible to recruiters. We apply this methodology to the online recruitment platform of the Swiss public employment service and find that rates of contact by recruiters are 4–19% lower for individuals from immigrant and minority ethnic groups, depending on their country of origin, than for citizens from the majority group. Women experience a penalty of 7% in professions that are dominated by men, and the opposite pattern emerges for men in professions that are dominated by women. We find no evidence that recruiters spend less time evaluating the profiles of individuals from minority ethnic groups. Our methodology provides a widely applicable, non-intrusive and cost-efficient tool that researchers and policy-makers can use to continuously monitor hiring discrimination, to identify some of the drivers of discrimination and to inform approaches to counter it. An analysis of the search behaviour of recruiters on a Swiss online recruitment platform shows that jobseekers from minority ethnic groups are less likely to be contacted by recruiters, and also provides evidence of gender-based discrimination.

Private equity (PE) acquisitions of health care providers are often framed as a monolithic intervention, but firms' strategies for generating returns for investors may vary. In a difference-in-differences analysis using data from the 2005-19 Medicare hospital cost reports, we compared 242 US hospitals acquired by PE firms with 870 matched control hospitals not acquired by such firms. By firm, we examined changes in salary expenditures (reflecting staffing costs of delivering care) and cumulative charges (reflecting service utilization) associated with acquisition. On average, hospitals acquired by PE firms reduced salary expenditures, whereas control hospitals increased salary expenditures. At the firm level, salary expenditures declined between 12.9 percent and 27.3 percent of preacquisition levels. These reductions occurred across most clinical departments, although the specific departments and sizes of salary cuts varied across firms. Consistent with reduced staffing and capacity, most hospitals demonstrated a simultaneous decline in cumulative charges after acquisition-despite often raising their chargemaster rates (charges per service)-implying a reduced volume of services delivered. Some hospitals exhibited an alternative strategy of increasing cumulative charges without cutting salary expenditures. PE firms varied in management strategies, with most demonstrating cost cutting through salary expenditures.

In this analysis of 2012–2019 administrative claims for private-sector employees, mandates that require employers to provide paid sick leave for preventive care were associated with increased cancer-screening rates.

The singular focus of public debate on the \"top 1 percent\" of households overlooks the component of earnings inequality that is arguably most consequential for the \"other 99 percent\" of citizens: the dramatic growth in the wage premium associated with higher education and cognitive ability. This Review documents the central role of both the supply and demand for skills in shaping inequality, discusses why skill demands have persistently risen in industrialized countries, and considers the economic value of inequality alongside its potential social costs. I conclude by highlighting the constructive role for public policy in fostering skills formation and preserving economic mobility.