Federal Programs for Addressing Low-Income Housing Needs: A Policy Primer

Provides an overview of federal rental assistance programs, their scope, and their limitations, with data on recipients by type, region, family income and structure, and race/ethnicity. Outlines policy implications for children and community development

Has the incidence of empyema in Scottish children continued to increase beyond 2005?

Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions.Peer reviewedPostprin

ADDRESSING MARKET SEGMENTATION AND INCENTIVES FOR RISK SELECTION: HOW WELL DOES RISK EQUALISATION IN THE IRISH PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE MARKET WORK? ESRI Research Bulletin 2017/05

Community rating restricts health insurers from varying premiums based on insurees’ risk profiles. It is a key feature of many health insurance markets. While designed to promote equity, this regulation incentivises insurers to focus on attracting low-risk (profitable) consumers while avoiding high-risk (unprofitable) consumers. This phenomenon is known as “risk selection”. Risk selection has a number of negative consequences, such as market segmentation and poor quality service to high-risk individuals (e.g. the old and sick). It also causes inefficiency where investment focusses on attracting low-risk individuals (e.g. the young and healthy) rather than improving price and quality. The best strategy for reducing risk selection incentives is good risk equalisation. Commonly, this involves providing risk-adjusted premium subsidies to insurers based on insurees’ risk profiles. These subsidies are generally administered through a risk equalisation scheme. Our study investigated the performance of Ireland’s scheme. Despite the liberalisation of the Irish health insurance market in the mid-1990s, bona-fide risk equalisation payments only commenced in 2013. The current risk equalisation system allocates risk-adjusted subsidies to insurers based on the age, sex, level of cover, and hospital utilisation, of insurees

Taking the C out of CVMFS

The Cern Virtual Machine File System is most well known as a distribution mechanism for the WLCG VOs@@ experiment software; as a result, almost all the existing expertise is in installing clients mount the central Cern repositories. We report the results of an initial experiment in using the cvmfs server packages to provide Glasgow-based repository aimed at software provisioning for small UK-local VOs. In general, although the documentation is sparse, server configuration is reasonably easy, with some experimentation. We discuss the advantages of local CVMFS repositories for sites, with some examples from our test VOs, vo.optics.ac.uk and neiss.org.uk

A NeISS collaboration to develop and use e-infrastructure for large-scale social simulation

The National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS) project is focused on developing e-Infrastructure to support social simulation research. Part of NeISS aims to provide an interface for running contemporary dynamic demographic social simulation models as developed in the GENESIS project. These GENESIS models operate at the individual person level and are stochastic. This paper focuses on support for a simplistic demographic change model that has a daily time steps, and is typically run for a number of years. A portal based Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed as a set of standard portlets. One portlet is for specifying model parameters and setting a simulation running. Another is for comparing the results of different simulation runs. Other portlets are for monitoring submitted jobs and for interfacing with an archive of results. A layer of programs enacted by the portlets stage data in and submit jobs to a Grid computer which then runs a specific GENESIS model program executable. Once a job is submitted, some details are communicated back to a job monitoring portlet. Once the job is completed, results are stored and made available for download and further processing. Collectively we call the system the Genesis Simulator. Progress in the development of the Genesis Simulator was presented at the UK e- Science All Hands Meeting in September 2011 by way of a video based demonstration of the GUI, and an oral presentation of a working paper. Since then, an automated framework has been developed to run simulations for a number of years in yearly time steps. The demographic models have also been improved in a number of ways. This paper summarises the work to date, presents some of the latest results and considers the next steps we are planning in this work

Entropy Bounds and Dark Energy

Entropy bounds render quantum corrections to the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ finite. Under certain assumptions, the natural value of $\Lambda$ is of order the observed dark energy density $\sim 10^{-10} {\rm eV}^4$, thereby resolving the cosmological constant problem. We note that the dark energy equation of state in these scenarios is $w \equiv p / \rho = 0$ over cosmological distances, and is strongly disfavored by observational data. Alternatively, $\Lambda$ in these scenarios might account for the diffuse dark matter component of the cosmological energy density.Comment: 6 pages, Latex. Added discussion of non-cosmological limits on holographic dark energy. Version to appear in Physics Letters

Thomas's Tangles

Algorithmic thinking doesn’t just happen when coding. Scott Turner and his son Thomas have developed a game that uses an algorithm to produce drawings

Magnetized Accretion and Dead Zones in Protostellar Disks

The edges of magnetically-dead zones in protostellar disks have been proposed as locations where density bumps may arise, trapping planetesimals and helping form planets. Magneto-rotational turbulence in magnetically-active zones provides both accretion of gas on the star and transport of mass to the dead zone. We investigate the location of the magnetically-active regions in a protostellar disk around a solar-type star, varying the disk temperature, surface density profile, and dust-to-gas ratio. We also consider stellar masses between 0.4 and 2 $M_\odot$, with corresponding adjustments in the disk mass and temperature. The dead zone's size and shape are found using the Elsasser number criterion with conductivities including the contributions from ions, electrons, and charged fractal dust aggregates. The charged species' abundances are found using the approach proposed by S. Okuzumi. The dead zone is in most cases defined by the ambipolar diffusion. In our maps, the dead zone takes a variety of shapes, including a fish-tail pointing away from the star and islands located on and off the midplane. The corresponding accretion rates vary with radius, indicating locations where the surface density will increase over time, and others where it will decrease. We show that density bumps do not readily grow near the dead zone's outer edge, independently of the disk parameters and the dust properties. Instead, the accretion rate peaks at the radius where the gas-phase metals freeze out. This could lead to clearing a valley in the surface density, and to a trap for pebbles located just outside the metal freeze-out line.Comment: 58 pages, 25 figures, 2 tables, accepted to Ap