Child support judgments: comparing public policy to the public's policy

Any child support regime necessarily makes policy choices about how parental income should be shared between the two parental households. Those choices involve balancing the claims of the child, the claims of the custodial parent for help with the expense of providing for the child, and the claims of the support obligor for autonomy in deciding how to spend his own earnings. That balancing task is complicated by the fact that the child and the custodial parent necessarily share a living standard, so that any child support transfer, large or small, will unavoidably benefit the custodial parent as well as the child. This article reports the findings of an empirical study designed to reveal how the British public believe this balance should be struck. It then compares the public’s preferred policies to the policy choices implicit in the current UK child support schedule. It concludes that there are important gaps between the two, and recommends that consideration be given to amending the current UK law to better align it with the public’s values on these matters

Second harmonic light scattering induced by defects in the twist-bend nematic phase of liquid crystal dimers

The nematic twist-bend (NTB) phase, exhibited by certain thermotropic liquid crystalline (LC) dimers, represents a new orientationally ordered mesophase -- the first distinct nematic variant discovered in many years. The NTB phase is distinguished by a heliconical winding of the average molecular long axis (director) with a remarkably short (nanoscale) pitch and, in systems of achiral dimers, with an equal probability to form right- and left-handed domains. The NTB structure thus provides another fascinating example of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in nature. The order parameter driving the formation of the heliconical state has been theoretically conjectured to be a polarization field, deriving from the bent conformation of the dimers, that rotates helically with the same nanoscale pitch as the director field. It therefore presents a significant challenge for experimental detection. Here we report a second harmonic light scattering (SHLS) study on two achiral, NTB-forming LCs, which is sensitive to the polarization field due to micron-scale distortion of the helical structure associated with naturally-occurring textural defects. These defects are parabolic focal conics of smectic-like ``pseudo-layers", defined by planes of equivalent phase in a coarse-grained description of the NTB state. Our SHLS data are explained by a coarse-grained free energy density that combines a Landau-deGennes expansion of the polarization field, the elastic energy of a nematic, and a linear coupling between the two

Time Domain Explorations With Digital Sky Surveys

One of the new frontiers of astronomical research is the exploration of time variability on the sky at different wavelengths and flux levels. We have carried out a pilot project using DPOSS data to study strong variables and transients, and are now extending it to the new Palomar-QUEST synoptic sky survey. We report on our early findings and outline the methodology to be implemented in preparation for a real-time transient detection pipeline. In addition to large numbers of known types of highly variable sources (e.g., SNe, CVs, OVV QSOs, etc.), we expect to find numerous transients whose nature may be established by a rapid follow-up. Whereas we will make all detected variables publicly available through the web, we anticipate that email alerts would be issued in the real time for a subset of events deemed to be the most interesting. This real-time process entails many challenges, in an effort to maintain a high completeness while keeping the contamination low. We will utilize distributed Grid services developed by the GRIST project, and implement a variety of advanced statistical and machine learning techniques.Comment: 5 pages, 2 postscript figures, uses adassconf.sty. To be published in: "ADASS XIV (2004)", Eds. Patrick Shopbell, Matthew Britton and Rick Ebert, ASP Conference Serie

The fundamental problem of command : plan and compliance in a partially centralised economy

When a principal gives an order to an agent and advances resources for its implementation, the temptations for the agent to shirk or steal from the principal rather than comply constitute the fundamental problem of command. Historically, partially centralised command economies enforced compliance in various ways, assisted by nesting the fundamental problem of exchange within that of command. The Soviet economy provides some relevant data. The Soviet command system combined several enforcement mechanisms in an equilibrium that shifted as agents learned and each mechanism's comparative costs and benefits changed. When the conditions for an equilibrium disappeared, the system collapsed.Comparative Economic Studies (2005) 47, 296–314. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ces.810011

Interlayer pair tunneling and gap anisotropy in YBa2_2Cu3_3O7−δ_{7-\delta}

Recent ARPES measurement observed a large $ab$-axis gap anisotropy, $\Delta(0,\pi)/\Delta(\pi,0)=1.5$, in clean YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-\delta}$. This indicates that some sub-dominant component may exist in the $d_{x^2-y^2}$-wave dominant gap. We propose that the interlayer pairing tunneling contribution can be determined through the investigation of the order parameter anisotropy. Their potentially observable features in transport and spin dynamics are also studied.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure