Florida: Round 1 - State-Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.Florida's governor and legislative leadership declined to participate in setting up an Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchange and, indeed, refused or returned federal grants awarded to facilitate exchange planning. Instead, the state provided funding for an existing state-funded exchange for small business and individuals unrelated to the ACA that opened with limited services in spring 2014. Florida led the way in opposition to the ACA. Its then attorney general, Republican Bill McCollum, filed suit against the Obama administration aiming to have the law blocked as unconstitutional in both its individual mandate and its requirement for Medicaid expansion

Why the extensive use of executive orders by state governors may not be a threat to democracy

Like the president, state Governors frequently make use of executive orders in order to pursue their agendas. But do these unilateral actions undermine democracy? No, argue Alexandra G. Cockerham and Robert E. Crew, Jr, who find that legislatures can be willing to delegate policy-making authority to governors if they are of the same party or if the legislature is fragmented

Resurgence of Habiro elements

We prove resurgence properties for the Borel transform of elements in the Habiro ring which satisfy a general type of strange identity. As an application, we provide evidence for (and against) conjectures in quantum topology due to Costin and Garoufalidis

Welfare to Web to Work: Internet Job Searching Among Former Welfare Clients in Florida

This study provides the first empirical test of whether searching for jobs on the Internet can help people gain access to high quality jobs. Using new data from former welfare clients in Florida, we present results from a multivariate regression analysis of Internet job searching on wages and on a number of job benefits. On average, Internet job searchers receive better jobs than people who conducted more traditional job searches, net of numerous control variables. These findings suggest that welfare recipients have a great deal to gain from searching for their jobs on the Internet

The Covid-19 pandemic shows the power and limits of American federalism

While there has been a great deal of attention paid to how President Trump has responded to the Covid-19 pandemic, Alexandra Cockerham and Robert E. Crew Jr. argue that, to get a true sense of the country’s response, we should look at the actions of state governors and mayors within states. While the federal government has tried to coordinate some efforts, federalism has meant that governors and local administrators have been able to adapt their responses, with the hardest hit states like New York setting a precedent for others

Detection of intrinsic source structure at ~3 Schwarzschild radii with Millimeter-VLBI observations of SAGITTARIUS A*

We report results from very long baseline interferometric (VLBI) observations of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic center, Sgr A*, at 1.3 mm (230 GHz). The observations were performed in 2013 March using six VLBI stations in Hawaii, California, Arizona, and Chile. Compared to earlier observations, the addition of the APEX telescope in Chile almost doubles the longest baseline length in the array, provides additional {\it uv} coverage in the N-S direction, and leads to a spatial resolution of $\sim$30 $\mu$as ($\sim$3 Schwarzschild radii) for Sgr A*. The source is detected even at the longest baselines with visibility amplitudes of $\sim$4-13% of the total flux density. We argue that such flux densities cannot result from interstellar refractive scattering alone, but indicate the presence of compact intrinsic source structure on scales of $\sim$3 Schwarzschild radii. The measured nonzero closure phases rule out point-symmetric emission. We discuss our results in the context of simple geometric models that capture the basic characteristics and brightness distributions of disk- and jet-dominated models and show that both can reproduce the observed data. Common to these models are the brightness asymmetry, the orientation, and characteristic sizes, which are comparable to the expected size of the black hole shadow. Future 1.3 mm VLBI observations with an expanded array and better sensitivity will allow a more detailed imaging of the horizon-scale structure and bear the potential for a deep insight into the physical processes at the black hole boundary.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, accepted to Ap

Persistent Asymmetric Structure of Sagittarius A* on Event Horizon Scales

The Galactic Center black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) is a prime observing target for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which can resolve the 1.3 mm emission from this source on angular scales comparable to that of the general relativistic shadow. Previous EHT observations have used visibility amplitudes to infer the morphology of the millimeter-wavelength emission. Potentially much richer source information is contained in the phases. We report on 1.3 mm phase information on Sgr A* obtained with the EHT on a total of 13 observing nights over 4 years. Closure phases, the sum of visibility phases along a closed triangle of interferometer baselines, are used because they are robust against phase corruptions introduced by instrumentation and the rapidly variable atmosphere. The median closure phase on a triangle including telescopes in California, Hawaii, and Arizona is nonzero. This result conclusively demonstrates that the millimeter emission is asymmetric on scales of a few Schwarzschild radii and can be used to break 180-degree rotational ambiguities inherent from amplitude data alone. The stability of the sign of the closure phase over most observing nights indicates persistent asymmetry in the image of Sgr A* that is not obscured by refraction due to interstellar electrons along the line of sight.Comment: 11 pages, accepted to Ap

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio