DID VIETNAM VETERANS GET SICKER IN THE 1990s? THE COMPLICATED EFFECTS OF MILITARY SERVICE ON SELF-REPORTED HEALTH

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about costs as well as health. We use the draft lottery to study the long-term effects of Vietnam-era military service on health and work in the 2000 Census. These estimates show no significant overall effects on employment or work-related disability status, with a small effect on non-work-related disability for whites. On the other hand, estimates for white men with low earnings potential show a large negative impact on employment and a marked increase in non-work-related disability rates. The differential impact of Vietnam-era service on low-skill men cannot be explained by more combat or war-theatre exposure for the least educated, leaving the relative attractiveness of VDC for less skilled men and the work disincentives embedded in the VDC system as a likely explanation.

Did Vietnam Veterans Get Sicker in the 1990s? The Complicated Effects of Military Service on Self-Reported Health

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about costs as well as health. We use the draft lottery to study the long-term effects of Vietnam-era military service on health and work in the 2000 Census. These estimates show no significant overall effects on employment or work-related disability status, with a small effect on non-work-related disability for whites. On the other hand, estimates for white men with low earnings potential show a large negative impact on employment and a marked increase in non-work-related disability rates. The differential impact of Vietnam-era service on low-skill men cannot be explained by more combat or wartheatre exposure for the least educated, leaving the relative attractiveness of VDC for less skilled men and the work disincentives embedded in the VDC system as a likely explanation.Public economics, social security and public pensions, health, education, welfare,labour, demographic economics

Chapter 9: Aquatic Macroinvertebrates, Section A: Aquatic Macroinvertebrates (Exclusive of Mosquitoes)

Final Report. Excerpt (Chapter 9, Section A) from The Des Plaines River Wetlands Demonstration Project, Volume II, Baseline Survey, edited by Donald L. Hey and Nancy S. PhilippiReport issued on: October 1985INHS Technical Report prepared for Wetlands Research, Inc

Using New Selection Tools

The goal of most beef production systems is to increase or at least maintain profitability. Producers can attempt to increase profitability in a variety of ways that might include reducing feed costs, changing their marketing program, or perhaps by changing the performance of their herd through genetic improvement. Focusing on this latter option, there are two primary genetic tools available: selection and mating where selection refers to the selection of breeding animals and mating includes which females are mated to which bulls, for example, crossbreeding systems. This paper focuses on the former, the selection of the appropriate animals for a production system with the goal to improve profitability. The best tool available for making selection decisions is expected progeny differences (EPD). Over the years the number of EPD available to guide producers in making selection decisions has grown from 5 to over 15 in most cases. Simply put, the amount of information that the breeder must sift through to try to make a good selection decision has become overwhelming. The producer must determine which EPD have the greatest influence on their income and their expenses, and by how much—a daunting task. Historically this task has depended on the “intuition” and experience of the breeder. For instance, they know that selection for heavier weaning weight will increase the weight of calves sold at weaning, but that blind selection for weaning weight will also increase calving difficulty and if replacements are kept, likely increase cow size and feed costs. Breeders have been performing a balancing act with little concrete information on how important each of those traits is to their profitability. Fortunately, there are several tools that have recently become available to ease the process of combining the costs and the revenues of beef production with EPD to make selection decisions that will produce progeny which are more profitable

Did Vietnam Veterans Get Sicker in the 1990s? The Complicated Effects of Military Service on Self-Reported Health

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about costs as well as health. We use the draft lottery to study the long-term effects of Vietnam-era military service on health and work in the 2000 Census. These estimates show no significant overall effects on employment or work-related disability status, with a small effect on non-work-related disability for whites. On the other hand, estimates for white men with low earnings potential show a large negative impact on employment and a marked increase in non-work-related disability rates. The differential impact of Vietnam-era service on low-skill men cannot be explained by more combat or war-theatre exposure for the least educated, leaving the relative attractiveness of VDC for less skilled men and the work disincentives embedded in the VDC system as a likely explanation.

Fast Fourier Optimization: Sparsity Matters

Many interesting and fundamentally practical optimization problems, ranging from optics, to signal processing, to radar and acoustics, involve constraints on the Fourier transform of a function. It is well-known that the {\em fast Fourier transform} (fft) is a recursive algorithm that can dramatically improve the efficiency for computing the discrete Fourier transform. However, because it is recursive, it is difficult to embed into a linear optimization problem. In this paper, we explain the main idea behind the fast Fourier transform and show how to adapt it in such a manner as to make it encodable as constraints in an optimization problem. We demonstrate a real-world problem from the field of high-contrast imaging. On this problem, dramatic improvements are translated to an ability to solve problems with a much finer grid of discretized points. As we shall show, in general, the "fast Fourier" version of the optimization constraints produces a larger but sparser constraint matrix and therefore one can think of the fast Fourier transform as a method of sparsifying the constraints in an optimization problem, which is usually a good thing.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

Accurate and efficient method for the treatment of exchange in a plane-wave basis.

Published versio

Hierarchical search strategy for the detection of gravitational waves from coalescing binaries: Extension to post-Newtonian wave forms

The detection of gravitational waves from coalescing compact binaries would be a computationally intensive process if a single bank of template wave forms (i.e., a one step search) is used. In an earlier paper we had presented a detection strategy, called a two step search}, that utilizes a hierarchy of template banks. It was shown that in the simple case of a family of Newtonian signals, an on-line two step search was about 8 times faster than an on-line one step search (for initial LIGO). In this paper we extend the two step search to the more realistic case of zero spin 1.5 post-Newtonian wave forms. We also present formulas for detection and false alarm probabilities which take statistical correlations into account. We find that for the case of a 1.5 post-Newtonian family of templates and signals, an on-line two step search requires about 1/21 the computing power that would be required for the corresponding on-line one step search. This reduction is achieved when signals having strength S = 10.34 are required to be detected with a probability of 0.95, at an average of one false event per year, and the noise power spectral density used is that of advanced LIGO. For initial LIGO, the reduction achieved in computing power is about 1/27 for S = 9.98 and the same probabilities for detection and false alarm as above.Comment: 30 page RevTeX file and 17 figures (postscript). Submitted to PRD Feb 21, 199

Toward an Unsteady Aerodynamic ROM for Multiple Mach Regimes

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97065/1/AIAA2012-1708.pd

Approximate Quantum Fourier Transform and Decoherence

We discuss the advantages of using the approximate quantum Fourier transform (AQFT) in algorithms which involve periodicity estimations. We analyse quantum networks performing AQFT in the presence of decoherence and show that extensive approximations can be made before the accuracy of AQFT (as compared with regular quantum Fourier transform) is compromised. We show that for some computations an approximation may imply a better performance.Comment: 14 pages, 10 fig. (8 *.eps files). More information on http://eve.physics.ox.ac.uk/QChome.html http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~kasuomin http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~kira/group.htm