Family Security Insurance: A New Foundation for Economic Security

A report released by Georgetown Law\u27s Workplace Flexibility 2010 and the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic & Family Security (Berkeley CHEFS) outlining a blueprint for establishing and financing a new national insurance program to provide wage replacement for time off for health and caregiving needs. The report describes the need among working Americans for time off from work to address personal illness, to care for a new child, or to care for a loved one with a serious illness. It argues that the need for time off is no longer an issue for individual families or select industries, but a national priority that has major social and economic implications. Family Security Insurance, the national insurance program proposed in the report, would fundamentally reform social policy to address workers\u27 critical needs, and, at the same time, spread the cost fairly, protect the deficit, and keep people working

Breit-Wigner Enhancement of Dark Matter Annihilation

We point out that annihilation of dark matter in the galactic halo can be enhanced relative to that in the early universe due to a Breit-Wigner tail, if the dark matter annihilates through a pole just below the threshold. This provides a new explanation to the "boost factor" which is suggested by the recent data of the PAMELA, ATIC and PPB-BETS cosmic-ray experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Anomaly-Free Sets of Fermions

We present new techniques for finding anomaly-free sets of fermions. Although the anomaly cancellation conditions typically include cubic equations with integer variables that cannot be solved in general, we prove by construction that any chiral set of fermions can be embedded in a larger set of fermions which is chiral and anomaly-free. Applying these techniques to extensions of the Standard Model, we find anomaly-free models that have arbitrary quark and lepton charges under an additional U(1) gauge group.Comment: 21 (+1) page

Proposal for encoding the Old Turkic script in the SMP of the UCS

This is a proposal to encode the Old Turkic script in the international character encoding standard Unicode. The script was published in Unicode Standard version 5.2 in October 2009. Old Turkic appears in stone inscriptions from the early 8c CE near the Orkhon River in Mongolia, and a slightly different version is found near the Yenisei River in Siberia in the later 8c CE. By the 9c CE, the script had been replaced by the Uyghur script

2024 CPBSP Highlights

The Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Program (CPBSP) was launched by the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) in collaboration with California Walks to reduce pedestrian and bicycle fatalities and serious injuries in California communities. The CPBSP prioritizes working in communities at disproportionate risk for road traffc injuries and addressing the safety needs of people who are underserved by traditional transportation resources and planning.The CPBSP engages participants in active transportation planning and strengthens the capacity of community partners to create safer and more accessible streets for everyone walking and biking. The CPBSP educates communities with an adapted Safe System approach, shares pedestrian and bicycle safety strategies and best practices, conducts on-the-ground walking safety assessments, provides site-specifc crash data analysis, and offers follow-up services to help communities advance their safety goals

2022 Statewide Traffic Safety Survey

2022 marked the thirteenth year of the Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) California’s Annual Traffic Safety Study. The study is intended to create a better understanding of trends in traffic safety behaviors and help focus traffic safety programs, which include enforcement efforts along with public education campaigns to ensure they are effective in targeting areas with disproportionate traffic safety injuries. The survey is sponsored by the OTS while being administered by Ewald and Wasserman Research Consultants along with University of California Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC). The 2022 wave of data collection for the statewide traffic safety survey was conducted with an online panel of California drivers instead of an intercept interview, as were previous waves of data collection. This decision was made due to the COVID-19 pandemic as alternative data was collected to avoid in-person contact between field interviewers and respondents. The survey questions and data analysis of survey items presented in this report are largely similar to previous waves of the survey, including survey items on traffic safety opinions and knowledge on traffic safety campaigns, distracted driving and perceptions about pedestrian and bicycle traffic interactions. However, the 2022 survey underwent a revision with new survey items added to gain understanding of opinions about the Safe System approach, which was introduced by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The participants for the online survey panel were obtained through Qualtrics, a commercial panel vendor utilizing multiple subcontractors, to provide a representative cross-section of pre-screened and qualified respondents. SafeTREC paid attention to matching age and gender distributions with previous years. Below are the results from the 2022 California Traffic Safety Public Opinion Study. Overall, 2,768 eligible panelists completed the online survey in 2022. Panelists consisted of California drivers who were forwarded to an online survey portal. The criteria for eligibility included a valid California driver’s license and being at least 18 years of age. Numbers may not add to 100% due to rounding error. The survey instrument appears at the end of this report summary. To review the full report, please click her

Monte Carlo Comparisons to a Cryogenic Dark Matter Search Detector with low Transition-Edge-Sensor Transition Temperature

We present results on phonon quasidiffusion and Transition Edge Sensor (TES) studies in a large, 3 inch diameter, 1 inch thick [100] high purity germanium crystal, cooled to 50 mK in the vacuum of a dilution refrigerator, and exposed with 59.5 keV gamma-rays from an Am-241 calibration source. We compare calibration data with results from a Monte Carlo which includes phonon quasidiffusion and the generation of phonons created by charge carriers as they are drifted across the detector by ionization readout channels. The phonon energy is then parsed into TES based phonon readout channels and input into a TES simulator

SUSY Simplified Models at 14, 33, and 100 TeV Proton Colliders

Results are presented for a variety of SUSY Simplified Models at the 14 TeV LHC as well as a 33 and 100 TeV proton collider. Our focus is on models whose signals are driven by colored production. We present projections of the upper limit and discovery reach in the gluino-neutralino (for both light and heavy flavor decays), squark-neutralino, and gluino-squark Simplified Model planes. Depending on the model a jets + MET, mono-jet, or same-sign di-lepton search is applied. The impact of pileup is explored. This study utilizes the Snowmass backgrounds and combined detector. Assuming 3000 fb^{-1} of integrated luminosity, a gluino that decays to light flavor quarks can be discovered below 2.3 TeV at the 14 TeV LHC and below 11 TeV at a 100 TeV machine.Comment: 81 pages, 55 figures; v2 journal versio

The Intricacies of Adopting International “Norms” from the Bottom Up

This manuscript examines the socio-political climate that led San Francisco to adopt an ordinance based on the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), despite the United States’ failure to ratify the treaty. The publication also investigates the successes and shortcomings of the ordinance’s materialization

California Safe System Institute for Road Safety Executive Summary

In the summer of 2025, the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) conducted a Needs Assessment to explore the need for, and interest in, a program to support and nurture California communities’ road safety work to align with an effective Safe System Approach. As part of the Assessment, interviews and surveys were conducted, finding strong interest in such assistance, particularly for peer learning, leadership support opportunities, and more concrete examples of successes to inform individual communities’ work