Temporary Programs to Extend Unemployment Compensation

[From Summary] The federal/state unemployment compensation (UC) system is designed to provide temporary and partial wage replacement to workers who have become involuntarily unemployed. UC also helps to stabilize the economy by providing unemployed workers with additional purchasing power, which serves as an economic stimulus when unemployment rises during recessions. The UC system generally provides sufficient duration of benefits during periods of economic prosperity, as most UC beneficiaries experience fewer weeks of unemployment than their maximum entitlements and return to work before their benefit rights are exhausted. However, during periods of economic decline, people tend to remain unemployed longer because of the greater difficulty in finding new jobs, and a rising proportion of jobless workers exhaust UC benefits without finding new work. Thus, programs have been established to increase the number of weeks of assistance during periods of high unemployment

Sudden future singularities in FLRW cosmologies

The standard energy conditions of classical general relativity are applied to FLRW cosmologies containing sudden future singularities. Here we show, in a model independent way, that although such cosmologies can satisfy the null, weak and strong energy conditions, they always fail to satisfy the dominant energy condition. They require a divergent spacelike energy flux in all but the comoving frame.Comment: revtex4. Added references and a definition. To appear in CQ

How Cultural Transmission Through Objects Impacts Inferences About Cultural Evolution

The cross-fertilisation between biological and cultural evolution has led to an extensive borrowing of key concepts, theories, and statistical methods for studying temporal variation in the frequency of cultural variants. Archaeologists have been among the front-runners of those engaging with this endeavour, and the last 2 decades have seen a number of case studies where modes of social learning were inferred from the changing frequencies of artefacts. Here, we employ a simulation model to review and examine under-discussed assumptions shared by many of these applications on the nature of what constitutes the ‘population’ under study. We specifically ask (1) whether cultural transmission via ‘objects’ (i.e. public manifestations of cultural traits) generates distinct patterns from those expected from direct transmission between individuals and (2) whether basing inference on the frequency of objects rather than on the frequency of mental representations underlying the production of those objects may lead to biased interpretations. Our results show that the rate at which ideational cultural traits are embedded in objects, and shared as such, has a measurable impact on how we infer cultural transmission processes when analysing frequency-based archaeological data. At the same time, when cultural transmission is entirely mediated by the material representation of ideas, we argue that copying error should be interpreted as a two-step process which may occur in either one or both of embedding information in objects and retrieving it from them

Galactic Potentials

The information contained in galactic rotation curves is examined under a minimal set of assumptions. If emission occurs from stable circular geodesic orbits of a static spherically symmetric field, with information propagated to us along null geodesics, observed rotation curves determine galactic potentials without specific reference to any metric theory of gravity. Given the potential, the gravitational mass can be obtained by way of an anisotropy function of this field. The gravitational mass and anisotropy function can be solved for simultaneously in a Newtonian limit without specifying any specific source. This procedure, based on a minimal set of assumptions, puts very strong constraints on any model of the "dark matter".Comment: A somewhat longer form of the final version to appear in Physical Review Letters.Clarification and further reference

Enhancing the thermal performance of temporary fabric structures for the advanced energy efficient shelter system

The focus of this research is to characterize the thermal load on temporary fabric shelters deployed in the Middle East in order to establish realistic contract specification for the thermal performance of future shelters. Three different testing methods were utilized to evaluate shelter thermal performance. Small-scale tests allowed for economical comparisons of different shelter materials and configurations