Structure, mechanical properties and acoustic emissions of starch extrudates

Imperial Users onl

The Archer-Shaw Social Security Plan: Laying the Groundwork for Another S&L Crisis

The Social Security reform plan proposed by Reps. Bill Archer (R-Tex.) and Clay Shaw (R-Fla.), chairmen, respectively, of the House Ways and Means Committee and its Subcommittee on Social Security, is a compromise between a Clinton administration plan to let the government invest workers' payroll taxes in the market and congressional proposals to let individuals invest their payroll taxes in personal market-based accounts. Government investment has been criticized for the possibility of political influence on investment decisions, while personal accounts face attack for making individuals shoulder the burden of market risk. The Archer-Shaw plan is an attempt to satisfy critics of both approaches. The Archer-Shaw plan would let individuals make investment decisions, thereby reducing the likelihood of political influence, but the government would be required to protect workers against any losses. The plan's proposal to privatize profit and socialize risk resembles the incentive structure that led to the 1980s savings and loan crisis, which cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. That incentive structure creates what economists call "moral hazard" and could again lead to large taxpayer liabilities if allowed to take root in the Social Security system

(WP 2015-02) Is Unemployment Good for the Environment?

Environmental quality is a public good, potentially impacted by everybody. Individual level pro-environmental behavior affects environmental quality in the aggregate. Therefore, it is important to understand what causes individual’s pro-environmental behaviors to change. We quantify the causal effect of one determinant, unemployment, using an EU-27 population representative Eurobarometer survey. Drawing on results from the theory of the private provision of public goods, and recognizing that unemployment decreases income and the opportunity cost of time, we formulate testable predictions that unemployment will decrease the extent of pro-environmental behaviors that require monetary contributions and increase the extent of pro-environmental behaviors that mainly require time/effort. Instrumental variables regressions provide empirical evidence to support these hypotheses. Changes in the unemployment rate within a sub-national region provide the exogenous variation needed to identify the causal effect. Several supplemental questions on the survey provide evidence that environmental issues lose saliency and economic issues gain saliency when one becomes unemployed, suggesting that interested parties may wish to emphasize cost savings of pro-environmental behavior rather than environmental benefits during times of increased unemployment

Search for Pair Production of Supersymmetric Top Quarks Mimicking Standard Model Top Event Signatures at CDF

We present results of the search for the super-symmetric partner of the top quark, the stop quark, decaying to a b-quark and chargino with the subsequent chargino decay into a neutralino, lepton and neutrino. Using the data sample corresponding to 2.7 inv fb of integrated luminosity, collected with the CDF Detector of the Tevatron collider, we reconstruct the stop mass of candidate events and set 95% C. L. upper limits on masses of the stop quark, chargino and neutralino and the branching ratio of chargino to neutralino+lepton+neutrino.Comment: ICHEP08 poster, Philadelphia, USA, July 2008. 3 pages, LaTeX, 3 figure

Is Unemployment Good for the Environment?

Environmental quality is a public good, potentially impacted by everybody. Individual level pro-environmental behavior affects environmental quality in the aggregate. Therefore, it is important to understand what causes individual’s pro-environmental behaviors to change. We quantify the causal effect of one determinant, unemployment, using an EU-27 population representative Eurobarometer survey. Drawing on results from the theory of the private provision of public goods, and recognizing that unemployment decreases income and the opportunity cost of time, we formulate testable predictions that unemployment will decrease the extent of pro-environmental behaviors that require monetary contributions and increase the extent of pro-environmental behaviors that mainly require time/effort. Instrumental variables regressions provide empirical evidence to support these hypotheses. Changes in the unemployment rate within a sub-national region provide the exogenous variation needed to identify the causal effect. Several supplemental questions on the survey provide evidence that environmental issues lose saliency and economic issues gain saliency when one becomes unemployed, suggesting that interested parties may wish to emphasize cost savings of pro-environmental behavior rather than environmental benefits during times of increased unemployment

Introduction to Library Trends 52 (2) 2003: Organizing the Internet

published or submitted for publicatio

An Introduction to Gauge Gravity Duality and Its Application in Condensed Matter

The past few years have witnessed a remarkable crossover of string theoretical ideas from the abstract world of geometrical forms to the concrete experimental realm of condensed matter physics. The basis for this --- variously known as holography, the AdS/CFT correspondence or gauge-gravity duality --comes from notions right at the cutting edge of string theory. Nevertheless, the insights afforded can often be expressed in ways very familiar to condensed matter physicists, such as relationships between response functions and new sum rules. The aim of this short, introductory review is to survey the ideas underpinning this crossover, in a way that -- as far as possible -- strips them of sophisticated mathematical formalism, whilst at the same time retaining their fundamental essence. I will sketch the areas in which progress has been made to date and highlight where the challenges and open questions lie. Finally, I will attempt to give a perspective upon these ideas. What contribution can we realistically expect from this approach and how might it be accommodated into the canon of condensed matter theory? Inevitably, any attempt to do this in such a rapidly evolving field will be superseded by events. Nevertheless, I hope that this will provide a useful way to think about gauge-gravity duality and the uncharted directions in which it might take us.Comment: Unedited version of article published in Contemporary Physics. Intended for advanced final-year undergraduate

Entitlements: Not Just a Health Care Problem

[Excerpt] “A new consensus on entitlement reform has developed in Washington: rising per-capita health care spending is the only real crisis besetting the government‘s entitlement programs, while America‘s aging population and Social Security play minor roles at best. Some cite this view to shift the policy emphasis from entitlement cost control to the restructuring of the U.S. health sector, including private health care. But this new consensus is flawed. Using standard accounting practices and including all major government entitlement programs, population aging will play an equal role with health care cost growth over the next seventy-five years and a significantly larger role than health spending over the next few decades. While rising health care spending is indeed a pressing issue, discounting population aging leaves out half of the problem and ignores half of the potential solutions.

City-regionalism as a politics of collective provision : regional transport infrastructure in Denver, USA

The rise of the city-region concept has focused attention on the nature of territorial politics underpinning city-regionalism. This paper investigates the relationship between territorial politics, city-regionalism and the collective provision of mass transport infrastructure in the USA. It deploys a case study of the Denver region, examining the state and governance structures driving forward FasTracks, a long-term project to expand the Denver Regional Transportation District’s light and commuter rail system. FasTracks represents a programme to retrofit the Denver city-region for integrated mass transit but its funding has fostered tensions around new regionalist governance arrangements. The paper uses the findings of the case study to reflect upon the balance of bottom–up versus top–down geopolitical forces shaping the landscape of city-regionalism in the USA. It emphasises the variety of ways in which struggles around infrastructure provision shape the emergence of new city-regionalist structures inside the competition state