Heavy Quark Effective Field Theory at O(1/m_Q^2). II. QCD Corrections to the Currents

We present a calculation of the renormalized heavy-light and heavy-heavy currents in HQET at order O(1/m_Q^2).Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX (using amsmath.sty

Pricing to market of German exporters: evidence from panel data

This paper investigates price discrimination of German exporters across different foreign markets. We examine the degree of pass-through of exchange rate fluctuations in the pricing of 70 export items. The model is estimated using panel data on export unit values. Parameter estimation relies on GMM first difference, fixed effects, LAD, OLS first difference, and the random coefficients model. The main results for 70 manufactured goods and 15 destination countries between 1990-1994 are : The degree of pricing to market differs among destinations and products. Highest pricing to market is observed for U.S., Japan, Italy and Spain. Pricing to market is more prevalent in exports of chemicals and fertilisers than in machinery products. --Pricing to market,law of one price,panel data

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant: A Legislative History

[Excerpt] The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant was created by the 1996 welfare reform law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-193). It replaced the program of cash assistance for needy families that dated back to the New Deal, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and some of its related programs. The enactment of the 1996 welfare reform law was the culmination of a debate about how to overhaul programs providing cash assistance to needy families with children— specifically, those headed by single mothers—that spanned four decades: from the 1960s to the 1990s. Most of the legislative activity on TANF over the past 15 years has been to temporarily extend the program funding and financing authority for TANF. The 1996 welfare law provided both program authority and funding (appropriations) for TANF through the end of FY2002. Since then, with the exception of one long-term extension, TANF funding has been extended at various times on a short-term basis. Most of these extensions did not change TANF policy, though policy changes were included in extensions enacted in 2006, 2010, and 2012. The Consolidated Appropriation Act, 2017 (P.L. 115-31) extended TANF funding through the end of FY2018 and altered certain provisions related to research on TANF and its outcomes. This report will begin with a brief overview of the history of the AFDC program and the welfare reform debates of the 1960s to the 1990s. That overview will be followed by a summary of the 1996 welfare reform law and the changes made since 1996. The report concludes with a detailed chronology of TANF legislation

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant: A Primer on TANF Financing and Federal Requirements

[Excerpt] The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant provides federal grants for a wide range of benefits and activities. It is best known as the major source of funding for cash welfare for needy families with children. However, federal law allows TANF funds to be used for other benefits and services that provide economic help to low-income families with children and to support the goals of reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancies and promoting two-parent families.The TANF block grant was created in the 1996 welfare reform law (P.L. 104-193). At the federal level, TANF is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). TANF programs operate in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. American Samoa is eligible to operate a TANF program, but has not opted to do so.1 The Social Security Act designates all these jurisdictions as “states,” and thus that term will be used for them in this report.2 Federally recognized Indian tribes may also operate TANF programs. Tribal TANF programs are funded through allocations made from the TANF basic block grant to the state in which the tribe offers TANF benefits and services. It is the states and the tribes that provide TANF benefits and services to families and individuals. This report provides an overview of TANF financing and rules for state programs, describing federal TANF grants and state funds under a “maintenance-of-effort” (MOE) requirement; how federal TANF and state MOE funds may be used to help achieve the purpose and goals of the TANF block grant; rules that apply when TANF or MOE funds are used to provide “assistance” to needy families with children; rules that apply when TANF or MOE funds are used for benefits and services other than assistance; certain accountability requirements, including requirements that states submit plans and report data to the federal government; and provisions of TANF law not directly related to grants to states, such as competitive grants for promoting healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood, and tribal TANF provisions

Temporal Variability and Stability in Infant-Directed Sung Speech: Evidence for Language-specific Patterns.

In this paper, sung speech is used as a methodological tool to explore temporal variability in the timing of word-internal consonants and vowels. It is hypothesized that temporal variability/stability becomes clearer under the varying rhythmical conditions induced by song. This is explored crosslinguistically in German – a language that exhibits a potential vocalic quantity distinction – and the non-quantity languages French and Russian. Songs by non-professional singers, i.e. parents that sang to their infants aged 2 to 13 months in a non-laboratory setting, were recorded and analyzed. Vowel and consonant durations at syllable contacts of trochaic word types with ¦CVCV or ¦CVːCV structure were measured under varying rhythmical conditions. Evidence is provided that in German non-professional singing, the two syllable structures can be differentiated by two distinct temporal variability patterns: vocalic variability (and consonantal stability) was found to be dominant in ¦CVːCV structures whereas consonantal variability (and vocalic stability) was characteristic for ¦CVCV structures. In French and Russian, however, only vocalic variability seemed to apply. Additionally, findings suggest that the different temporal patterns found in German were also supported by the stability pattern at the tonal level. These results point to subtle (supra) segmental timing mechanisms in sung speech that affect temporal targets according to the specific prosodic nature of the language in question

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant

[Excerpt] The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant was created in the 1996 welfare reform law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, P.L. 104-193). That law was the culmination of a series of legislative changes that altered the rules for providing benefits and services to needy families with children

Coherent Photon-Pomeron and Photon-Photon Interactions in Ultra-Peripheral Collisions at RHIC

Ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions involve long range electromagnetic interactions at impact parameters larger than twice the nuclear radius, where no nucleon-nucleon collisions occur. The first observation of coherent rho^0 production with and without accompanying nuclear breakup, AuAu->Au*Au*rho^0 and AuAu->Au Au rho^0 respectively, and the observation of e+e- pair production AuAu->Au*Au*e+e- are presented by the STAR collaboration. The transverse momentum spectra are peaked at low pT, showing the coherent coupling to the nuclei. A clear rho^0 signal is observed in the two pion invariant mass spectrum.Comment: Proceedings Photon 2001, Ascona Switzerland, 2.-7. Sep. 2001 4 pages, 6 figure

Noise threshold for universality of 2-input gates

Evans and Pippenger showed in 1998 that noisy gates with 2 inputs are universal for arbitrary computation (i.e. can compute any function with bounded error), if all gates fail independently with probability epsilon and epsilon<theta, where theta is roughly 8.856%. We show that formulas built from gates with 2 inputs, in which each gate fails with probability at least theta cannot be universal. Hence, there is a threshold on the tolerable noise for formulas with 2-input gates and it is theta. We conjecture that the same threshold also holds for circuits.Comment: International Symposium on Information Theory, 2007, minor corrections in v