Bringing "Honest Capital" to Poor Borrowers: The Passage of the Uniform Small Loan Law, 1907-1930

The Uniform Small Loan Law (USLL) was the Russell Sage Foundation’s primary device for fighting what it viewed as the scourge of high-rate lending to poor people in the first half of the twentieth century. The USLL created a new class of lenders who could make small loans at interest rates exceeding those allowed for banks under the normal usury laws. About two-thirds of the states had passed the USLL by the 1930. This paper describes the USLL and then uses econometric models to investigate the state characteristics that influenced the law’s passage. We find that urbanization and state-level economic characteristics played significant roles. So did measures of the state’s banking system. We find no evidence that party-political affiliations had any effect, which is consistent with the USLL’s “progressive” character. Finally, we find little evidence that the passage of the USLL in one state made passage more likely in neighboring or similar states. If anything, the cross-state influences were negative. Our findings suggest that the Russell Sage Foundation only imperfectly understood the political economy of the USLL, and that a different overall approach might have produced a result closer to their aims.Uniform law, small loans, consumer credit, usury laws

Apollo 16 far-ultraviolet imagery and spectra of the Large Magellanic Cloud

The Large Magellanic Cloud was observed by the far ultraviolet camera spectrograph from the lunar surface during the Apollo 16 mission 22 April 1972. Images were obtained with about 3 arc min resolution, in the 1,050 to 1,600 and 1,250 to 1,600 A wavelength ranges, of nearly the entire LMC. Spectra were also obtained in the 1,050 to 1,600 and 900 to 1,600 A ranges along a strip 1/4 deg wide (determined by the instrument's grid collimator) passing across the LMC. The images and spectra have been scanned with a PDS microdensitometer, and isodensity contour plots have been prepared using the Univac 1108 computer

Distribution of hot stars and hydrogen in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Imagery of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), in the wavelength ranges 1050 to 1600 A and 1250 to 1600 A, was obtained by the S201 far ultraviolet camera during the Apollo 16 mission. These images were reduced to absolute far-UV intensity distributions over the area of the LMC, with 3 to 5 arc min angular resolution. Comparison of these far-UV measurements in the LMC with H sub alpha and 21 cm surveys reveals that interstellar hydrogen in the LMC is often concentrated in 100 pc clouds within 500 pc clouds. Furthermore, at least 25 associations of O-B stars in the LMC are outside the interstellar hydrogen clouds; four of them appear to be on the far side. Far-UV and mid-UV spectra were obtained of stars in 12 of these associations, using the International Ultraviolet Explorer. Equivalent widths of L alpha and six other lines, and relative intensities of the continuum at seven wavelength from 1300 A to 2900 A, were measured. These spectra are also discussed

An extreme ultraviolet spectrometer experiment for the Shuttle Get Away Special Program

An extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectrometer experiment operated successfully during the STS-7 mission in an experiment to measure the global and diurnal variation of the EUV airglow. The spectrometer is an F 3.5 Wadsworth mount with mechanical collimator, a 75 x 75 mm grating, and a bare microchannel plate detector providing a spectral resolution of 7 X FWHM. Read-out of the signal is through discrete channels or resistive anode techniques. The experiment includes a microcomputer, 20 Mbit tape recorder, and a 28V, 40 Ahr silver-zinc battery. It is the first GAS payload to use an opening door. The spectrometer's 0.1 x 4.2 deg field of view is pointed vertically out of the shuttle bay. During the STS-7 flight data were acquired continuously for a period of 5 hours and 37 minutes, providing spectra of the 570 A to 850 A wavelength region of the airglow. Five diurnal cycles of the 584 A emission of neutral helium and the 834 A emission of ionized atomic oxygen were recorded. The experiment also recorded ion events and pressure pulses associated with thruster firings. The experiment is to fly again on Mission 41-F

Integral correlation measures for multiparticle physics

We report on a considerable improvement in the technique of measuring multiparticle correlations via integrals over correlation functions. A modification of measures used in the characterization of chaotic dynamical sytems permits fast and flexible calculation of factorial moments and cumulants as well as their differential versions. Higher order correlation integral measurements even of large multiplicity events such as encountered in heavy ion collisons are now feasible. The change from ``ordinary'' to ``factorial'' powers may have important consequences in other fields such as the study of galaxy correlations and Bose-Einstein interferometry.Comment: 23 pages, 6 tar-compressed uuencoded PostScript figures appended, preprint TPR-92-4

Soft-core meson-baryon interactions. II. πN\pi N and K+NK^+ N scattering

The $\pi N$ potential includes the t-channel exchanges of the scalar-mesons $\sigma$ and f_0, vector-meson $\rho$, tensor-mesons f_2 and f_2' and the Pomeron as well as the s- and u-channel exchanges of the nucleon N and the resonances $\Delta$, Roper and S_{11}. These resonances are not generated dynamically. We consider them as, at least partially, genuine three-quark states and we treat them in the same way as the nucleon. The latter two resonances were needed to find the proper behavior of the phase shifts at higher energies in the corresponding partial waves. The soft-core $\pi N$-model gives an excellent fit to the empirical $\pi N$ S- and P-wave phase shifts up to T_{lab}=600 MeV. Also the scattering lengths have been reproduced well and the soft-pion theorems for low-energy $\pi N$ scattering are satisfied. The soft-core model for the $K^+ N$ interaction is an SU_f(3)-extension of the soft-core $\pi N$-model. The $K^+ N$ potential includes the t-channel exchanges of the scalar-mesons a_0, $\sigma$ and f_0, vector-mesons $\rho$, $\omega$ and $\phi$, tensor-mesons a_2, f_2 and f_2' and the Pomeron as well as u-channel exchanges of the hyperons $\Lambda$ and $\Sigma$. The fit to the empirical $K^+ N$ S-, P- and D-wave phase shifts up to T_{lab}=600 MeV is reasonable and certainly reflects the present state of the art. Since the various $K^+ N$ phase shift analyses are not very consistent, also scattering observables are compared with the soft-core $K^+ N$-model. A good agreement for the total and differential cross sections as well as the polarizations is found.Comment: 24 pages, 20 PostScript figures, revtex4, submitted to Phys. Rev.

The Fractal Properties of the Source and BEC

Using simple space-time implementation of the random cascade model we investigate numerically influence of the possible fractal structure of the emitting source on Bose-Einstein correlations between identical particles. The results are then discussed in terms of the non-extensive Tsallis statistics.Comment: LaTeX file and 2 PS files with figures, 8 pages altogether. Talk presented at the 12th Indian Summer School "Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics, Prague, Czech Republic, 30 August-3 Sept. 1999; to be published in Czech J. Phys. (1999). Some typos correcte

Criticality, Fractality and Intermittency in Strong Interactions

Assuming a second-order phase transition for the hadronization process, we attempt to associate intermittency patterns in high-energy hadronic collisions to fractal structures in configuration space and corresponding intermittency indices to the isothermal critical exponent at the transition temperature. In this approach, the most general multidimensional intermittency pattern, associated to a second-order phase transition of the strongly interacting system, is determined, and its relevance to present and future experiments is discussed.Comment: 15 pages + 2 figures (available on request), CERN-TH.6990/93, UA/NPPS-5-9