62,221 research outputs found
Limiting the Collective Right to Exclude
For decades, society’s disparate interests and priorities have stymied attempts to resolve issues of housing affordability and equity. Zoning law and servitude law, both of which have been robustly empowered by decades of jurisprudence, effectively grant communities the legal right and ability to exclude various sorts of residences from their wealthiest neighborhoods. Exclusion by housing type results in exclusion of categories of people, namely, renters, the relatively poor, and racial minorities. Although our society’s housing woes may indeed be intractable if we continue to treat a group’s right to exclude with the level of deference that such exclusionary efforts currently enjoy, this treatment is unjustifiable. Courts should acknowledge and consider the broad public and private costs that are created by a group’s unfettered right to exclude. A more balanced approach would weigh individual autonomy to control property and various public harms resulting from community exclusions against legitimate community needs to exclude certain residents and uses. Judicial limits of the collective right to exclude may enable real progress toward fair and affordable housing to be achieved at last
The Economics of Suicide: An Empirical Study
This study uses economic theory to investigate the impact of socioeconomic factors on the
suicide rate in the United States. Using a utility maximization framework based on
Hamermesh and Soss’ 1974 model, a panel data set from 2000-2010 is constructed for the 50
states and District of Columbia. This research adds to the literature in the field by focusing on
the more recent past and providing additional variables consistent with today’s challenges.
The results from the multiple regression analysis can be used to advocate policies that may
reduce the suicide rate in the future
“There Was Nothing in Sight but Nature, Nothing...”: Nineteenth-Century Gendered Perceptions of the Overland Trail
One hundred and seventeen years ago, between 1841 and 1867, the Overland Trail saw approximately 350,000 Oregon and California bound North Americans traverse its landscape. This westward migration painted the American frontier with a white sea of wagon covers, spotted the grassy plains with brown patches of oxen herds, and lighted the night sky with open cooking fires. Men and women Overlanders experienced this life-changing event in different ways, which are crucial to understanding the dynamics and interaction between these people and their frontier context. Gender-specific roles and social standards of masculinity and femininity carried from emigrants’ previous lives influenced their perception of the Overland Trail, interaction with the environment, and their future on the western frontier. These influences affected the settlers throughout the entire journey, beginning with their decision for such a move
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The potential of the GRID for small scale GIS use: a proposal from the UK
Chronicle of a Pandemic Foretold. CEPS Policy Insights No 2020-05 / March 2020
In just a few weeks, COVID-19 appeared in China and quickly spread to the rest of the world,
including Europe and the United States. Many have rushed to describe the outbreak as a ‘black
swan’ – an unpredictable event with extremely severe consequences. However, COVID-19 was not
only predictable ex post: it was amply predicted ex ante. This allows us to draw some preliminary
lessons:
• First, economic policy will need to shift from its current focus on efficiency, towards a greater
emphasis on resilience and sustainability.
• Second, a more centralised governance to address health emergencies is needed.
• Third, Europe should create a centre for the prevention of large-scale risks.
• Fourth, digital technologies, if handled with care, can be an important part of both a mitigation
and a response strategy.
• Fifth, Europe should improve its science advice and communication functions.
Finally, there are many ways to pursue enhanced resilience and responsiveness, but not all of them
are compatible with sustainability and democratic values. The challenge is to find an adequate
policy mix, which safeguards individual rights and liberties, protects the economy, and at the same
time strengthens government preparedness for cases of epidemics and pandemics
Information Recovery from Pairwise Measurements
A variety of information processing tasks in practice involve recovering
objects from single-shot graph-based measurements, particularly those taken
over the edges of some measurement graph . This paper concerns the
situation where each object takes value over a group of different values,
and where one is interested to recover all these values based on observations
of certain pairwise relations over . The imperfection of
measurements presents two major challenges for information recovery: 1)
: a (dominant) portion of measurements are
corrupted; 2) : a significant fraction of pairs are
unobservable, i.e. can be highly sparse.
Under a natural random outlier model, we characterize the , that is, the critical threshold of non-corruption rate
below which exact information recovery is infeasible. This accommodates a very
general class of pairwise relations. For various homogeneous random graph
models (e.g. Erdos Renyi random graphs, random geometric graphs, small world
graphs), the minimax recovery rate depends almost exclusively on the edge
sparsity of the measurement graph irrespective of other graphical
metrics. This fundamental limit decays with the group size at a square root
rate before entering a connectivity-limited regime. Under the Erdos Renyi
random graph, a tractable combinatorial algorithm is proposed to approach the
limit for large (), while order-optimal recovery is
enabled by semidefinite programs in the small regime.
The extended (and most updated) version of this work can be found at
(http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01369).Comment: This version is no longer updated -- please find the latest version
at (arXiv:1504.01369
Asteroseismology of Solar-Type and Red-Giant Stars
We are entering a golden era for stellar physics driven by satellite and
telescope observations of unprecedented quality and scope. New insights on
stellar evolution and stellar interiors physics are being made possible by
asteroseismology, the study of stars by the observation of natural, resonant
oscillations. Asteroseismology is proving to be particularly significant for
the study of solar-type and red-giant stars. These stars show rich spectra of
solar-like oscillations, which are excited and intrinsically damped by
turbulence in the outermost layers of the convective envelopes. In this review
we discuss the current state of the field, with a particular emphasis on recent
advances provided by the Kepler and CoRoT space missions and the wider
significance to astronomy of the results from asteroseismology, such as stellar
populations studies and exoplanet studies.Comment: The following paper will appear in the 2013 volume of Annual Reviews
of Astronomy and Astrophysics (88 pages, 7 figures; references updated;
further corrections to typos during galley-proof review
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