The Evolution of Welfare Participation Among Canadian Lone Mothers From 1973 ­ 1991

The objective of this paper is to analyse changes in the welfare participation of Canadian lone mothers between 1973 and 1991. Lone mothers under age 35 do show an increasing reliance on SA income accompanied by stagnant wages and declining levels of market work and earnings. In contrast, lone mothers age 35 and over exhibit a declining reliance on SA income accompanied by rising levels of market work, wages and earnings income. Estimates of a simple economic­demographic probit model of welfare participation are both consistent with theoretical expectations and capable of accounting for a large portion of the very different observed trends for older and younger lone mothers. Much of the declining welfare use among older lone mothers can be explained by decreasing family size, increasing education and market wages which grew at the same rate as welfare benefits. Much of the rising welfare use among younger lone mothers can be explained by a decline in wages relative to welfare benefits accompanied by a mixed pattern of demographic change for this age group. Among younger lone mothers, modest declines in family size and increases in schooling were offset by a large increase in the proportion never married.

Integration of a Precolouring Matrix in the Random Demodulator model for improved Compressive Ppectrum Estimation

The random demodulator (RD) is a compressive sensing (CS) architecture for acquiring frequency sparse, bandlimited signals. Such signals occur in cognitive radio networks for instance, where efficient sampling is a critical design requirement. A recent RD-based CS system has been shown to effectively acquire and recover frequency sparse, high-order modulated multiband signals which have been precoloured by an autoregressive (AR) filter. A shortcoming of this AR-RD architecture is that precolouring imposes additional computational cost on the signal transmission system. This paper introduces a novel CS architecture which seamlessly embeds a precolouring matrix (PM) into the signal recovery stage of the RD model (iPM-RD) with the PM depending only upon the AR filter coefficients, which are readily available. Experimental results using sparse wideband quadrature phased shift keying (QPSK) and 64 quadrature amplitude modulation 64QAM) signals confirm the iPM-RD model provides improved CS performance compared with the RD, while incurring no performance degradation compared with the original AR-RD architecture

Gestalt Theory in Visual Screen Design — A New Look at an old subject

Although often presented as a single basis for educational visual screen design, Gestalt theory is not a single small set of visual principles uniformly applied by all designers. In fact, it appears that instructional visual design literature often deals with only a small set of Gestalt laws. In this project Gestalt literature was consulted to distil the most relevant Gestalt laws for educational visual screen design. Eleven laws were identified. They deal with balance/symmetry, continuation, closure, figure-ground, focal point, isomorphic correspondence, prŠgnanz, proximity, similarity, simplicity, and unity/harmony. To test the usefulness of these laws in visual screen design they were applied to the redesign of an instructional multimedia application, 'WoundCare', designed to teach nursing students wound management. The basic text-based screens in the original WoundCare application were replaced with graphical user interface screens, that were designed according to these principles. The new screen designs were then evaluated by asking students and others to compare the designs. The viewers were also asked to rate directly the value of using the eleven Gestalt design principles in the redesign, both for improving the product's appearance and improving its value for learning. The evaluation results were overwhelmingly positive. Both the new design and the value of applying the eleven Gestalt laws to improve learning were strongly supported by the students' opinions. However, some differences in the value of applying particular Gestalt laws to the interface design were identified and this forms a useful direction for future research

Financial Repression and Capital Mobility: Why Capital Flows and Covered Interest Rate Differentials Fail to Measure Capital Market Integration

Required reserves on banks' deposit liabilities have been utilized by both industrial and developing countries to discourage and sterilize international capital flows. In this paper, we utilize an open economy macro model incorporating bank credit to evaluate this policy. The model suggests that high levels of reserve requirements are a perverse policy tool in that they amplify the effects of foreign monetary shocks, but changes in reserve requirements can insulate a repressed financial market from international financial shocks. The model also suggests that traditional measures of capital mobility such as interest parity conditions or the scale of gross private capital flows are of no value in assessing the openness of repressed financial systems.

Multiple Criteria Decision Making: Method Selection And Application To Three Contrasting Agricultural Case Studies

Agribusiness, farm business and agricultural-environmental decisions which varied in their characteristics were used to evaluate multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) in an agricultural context. This paper discusses differences between the case studies, strengths and weaknesses of the methods used, and the success of the MCDM process based on participants’ expectations and experiences. While MCDM can help identify the best decision, the main benefits identified in using MCDM included better understanding of their own and other’s perspectives, a means to explain the decision and a structured way to work through the decision process. Key problem areas identified included time limitations, understanding and ownership.Multiple criteria decision making, agriculture, decision making, Agribusiness, Agricultural Finance, Consumer/Household Economics, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

Latin America and East Asia in the Context of an Insurance Model of Currency Crises

This paper focuses on the 1995 Latin American and 1997 East Asian crises using an insurance-based model of financial crises. First the model of Dooley (forthcoming) is described. Second, some empirical evidence for an insurance model is presented. The key variables in this approach include the ratio of foreign exchange reserves to bank loans (domestic credit) extended to the private sector, the ability of the private sector to appropriate government assets, and appropriation as measured by capital flight. We argue that the insurance model is consistent with the observed evolution of these variables in the recent crises in Latin America and Asia. Finally, we examine the statistical evidence in favor of the model using panel regressions. We find that the econometric results are consistent with the insurance model, and tend to support this approach over some competing explanations.

Whimsy and Wisdom: Fairyland as a Window to Reality in the Fiction of Chesterton and MacDonald

A comparison of how fairyland is employed in the fiction of G.K. Chesterton and George MacDonald, and the role fairyland plays in the personal development of their fictional characters, reveals parallels and important divergences between the two writers\u27 philosophies. Their treatments of fairyland share the context of fixed moral standards that are clearly understood by fairyland\u27s habitants and visitors, but disclose the authors\u27 differing definitions of the relationship between personal responsibility and consequences. Fairyland, with its mysterious, imperative rules, and glorious generosity of rewards, provides a framework for explicating with startling clarity the dangerous immediacy of the consequences of moral choice. Chesterton and MacDonald\u27s unique approaches to fairyland, its moral rules and its purpose, provide a window into their fundamental beliefs about reality, and the ultimate nature of the moral universe

Romance and the Pocket Pistol: The Armed Poet in The Man Who Was Thursday

“But the more [Syme] felt this glittering desolation in the moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him – the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol – took on exactly that concrete and material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey or a bun with him to bed. The swordstick and the brandy-flask, though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the expressions of this own more healthy romance.” Chesterton’s poet-protagonists bear arms as a matter of course, and take up the pocket pistol as readily as the pen. Why is that? What is the romance of the pocket pistol? In The Man Who Was Thursday, both the poet Syme and the anarchist Gregory were able to perceive the real and practical consequences of ideas. The policeman and the anarchist alike knew that anarchy was not an intangible creed, but an imminent and practical plan of attack. Though dismissed in Saffron Park, anarchy was real, so real that Syme could duel it – and he did. The romance of the pocket pistol is that the poet, who knows the value of life, also knows that there is something worth dying for. Syme “felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things” (TMWWT, Chapter X) before his duel with the Marquis, who embodied in a single opponent all the horror of the conscienceless, implacable purpose of anarchy. But the very diabolical impossibility of the fact that the Marquis was impervious to injury filled Syme with a renewed sense of reality. “After all,” he said to himself, “I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do – I can die” (TMWWT, Chapter X). In the glow of his “chivalric folly,” Syme knew the power and the horror of anarchy, its unthinkable intentions, and incredible imminence. That is why the pocket pistol takes on such chivalric significance; it has become a tool, not to kill a man, but to combat an idea. The romance of the pocket pistol is that an idea may become a man