Becoming the Community's Foundation: Insight and Change in New Haven

FSG helped the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven to develop a new donor development strategy based on an understanding of three critical questions: What motivates different segments of donors? Which services and offerings would be most attractive to each segment? How does the community perceive CFGNH?This article describes that process and features an interview with Will Ginsburg, CFGNH's CEO

Biofuel Boom, Aquifer Doom?

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Five years of social security reforms in the UK

The current Labour Government was elected in 1997 with few specific social security proposals. This paper argues that after five years, consistent trends in social security policy have emerged: there is a willingness to increase benefits; a “work-first” focus; increasing centrality for benefits that relate to ‘need’, which has involved expanded means-testing; a downgrading of contributory benefits; and, a desire to reduce poverty by redistributing to particular demographic groups. Many of these characteristics of Labour policy, such as the size of caseloads or aggregate expenditure, are yet to show up in various aggregate data, and we argue that this is probably due to various counter-balancing socio-economic changes since 1997. Looking forward, we discuss what the introduction of new forms of means-test might achieve. We also suggest that it might be considered odd that Labour has left Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit unreformed, especially since a good chance to reform them without significant cost or low-income losers, has been missed.

The Effects of Beam Stabilization on Mode Coupling in a Hollow Cylindrical Waveguide

High Harmonic Generation is a non-linear process that enables the tabletop production of coherent laser-like beams in the extreme ultraviolet and soft x-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. In order to achieve significant high harmonic flux, the generated high harmonics must be phase matched. We achieve this by coupling the incident driving laser into a hollow cylindrical waveguide. The power coupling efficiency of this waveguide has an important dependence on spatial beam stability. This thesis discusses the power coupling efficiency of the incident beam into the waveguide with respect to beam position and angle at the entrance of the waveguide. It also presents an active beam stabilization technique which stabilizes both the angle and position of the beam. The performance of this beam stabilization is then be correlated to an increase in the stability of power coupling efficiency with the waveguide

Gate count estimates for performing quantum chemistry on small quantum computers

As quantum computing technology improves and quantum computers with a small but non-trivial number of N > 100 qubits appear feasible in the near future the question of possible applications of small quantum computers gains importance. One frequently mentioned application is Feynman's original proposal of simulating quantum systems, and in particular the electronic structure of molecules and materials. In this paper, we analyze the computational requirements for one of the standard algorithms to perform quantum chemistry on a quantum computer. We focus on the quantum resources required to find the ground state of a molecule twice as large as what current classical computers can solve exactly. We find that while such a problem requires about a ten-fold increase in the number of qubits over current technology, the required increase in the number of gates that can be coherently executed is many orders of magnitude larger. This suggests that for quantum computation to become useful for quantum chemistry problems, drastic algorithmic improvements will be needed.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables. Added references and clarified key aspects. Accepted for publication in Physical Review