Comments on The Findings and Policy Implications of the GAO Report and the Urban Institute Hiring Audit by Michael Fix

This article is a collection of commentary on an article written by Michael Fix

Undocumented Immigrants: Myths and Reality

In this article, six common myths about immigrants are debunked

Civic Contributions: Taxes Paid by Immigrants in the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area

This report estimates the taxes paid by immigrants in the Washington, D.C., area in 1999-2000 and documents their demographics, household composition, income, and dispersal across jurisdictions in the region. The findings in this report are based mostly on analysis of 2000 U.S. Census data, because the census provides the most recent comprehensive data that allow disaggregation by country of origin groups and by many of the region's local jurisdictions. The demographic data in the report are updated through 2004 using the U.S. Current Population Survey. We calculate taxes at both the individual level (e.g., income and payroll taxes) and the household level (e.g., property taxes), but aggregate them up to the household level. Throughout the report we refer to households headed by immigrants (whether citizens, legal immigrants, or unauthorized migrants) as "immigrant households" and compare their incomes and tax payments to households headed by native-born U.S. citizens

The New Neighbors: A User's Guide to Data on Immigrants in U.S. Communities

Provides a guide for identifying characteristics, contributions, and needs of immigrant populations. Discusses national immigration trends, and addresses public policy questions. Includes a profile of the immigrant population in Providence, Rhode Island

A Profile of Immigrants in Arkansas

Discusses key demographic trends, economic factors, and public policy issues associated with immigrants in Arkansas, which has the fourth-fastest-growing immigrant population in the nation

The banking crisis as an elite debacle – again

The troubles of the Co-op Bank remind us that crisis and fragility are still engrained in the banking system. Evidently setting things right is about more than finding a technocratic fix. Michael Moran and fellow Researchers at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester have been exploring the more fundamental causes

Biproportional Techniques in Input-Output Analysis: Table Updating and Structural Analysis

This paper is dedicated to the contributions of Sir Richard Stone, Michael Bacharach, and Philip Israilevich. It starts out with a brief history of biproportional techniques and related matrix balancing algorithms. We then discuss the RAS algorithm developed by Sir Richard Stone and others. We follow that by evaluating the interpretability of the product of the adjustment parameters, generally known as R and S. We then move on to discuss the various formal formulations of other biproportional approaches and discuss what defines an algorithm as “biproportionalâ€. After mentioning a number of competing optimization algorithms that cannot fall under the rubric of being biproportional, we reflect upon how some of their features have been included into the biproportional setting (the ability to fix the value of interior cells of the matrix being adjusted and of incorporating data reliability into the algorithm). We wind up the paper by pointing out some areas that could use further investigation.Input-Output Economics; RAS; data raking; iterative proportional fitting; estimating missing data

The Health and Well-Being of Young Children of Immigrants

Provides an overview of immigration trends and their effects on the composition of the young child population. Looks at poverty, family structure, parental work patterns, immigrant parents' education, health status, and health insurance coverage

Latent Heat Flux Profiles from Collocated Airborne Water Vapor and Wind Lidars during IHOP_2002

Latent heat flux profiles in the convective boundary layer (CBL) are obtained for the first time with the combination of the DLR water vapor differential absorption lidar (DIAL) and the NOAA high resolution Doppler wind lidar (HRDL). Both instruments were integrated nadir viewing on board the DLR “Falcon” research aircraft during the International H2O Project (IHOP_2002) over the U.S. Southern Great Plains. Flux profiles from 300 – 2500 m AGL are computed from high spatial resolution (150 m horizontal and vertical) two-dimensional water vapor and vertical velocity lidar cross sections using the eddy covariance technique. All cospectra show significant contributions to the flux between 1 and 10 km wavelength, with peaks between 2 and 6 km, originating from large eddies. The main flux uncertainty is due to low sampling (55 % rmse at mid-CBL), while instrument noise (15 %) and systematic errors (7 %) play a minor role. The combination of a water vapor and a wind lidar on an aircraft appears as an attractive new tool that allows measuring latent heat flux profiles from a single over-flight of the investigated area

Area preserving group actions on surfaces

Suppose G is an almost simple group containing a subgroup isomorphic to the three-dimensional integer Heisenberg group. For example any finite index subgroup of SL(3,Z) is such a group. The main result of this paper is that every action of G on a closed oriented surface by area preserving diffeomorphisms factors through a finite group.Comment: Published by Geometry and Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol7/paper21.abs.htm