Direct Dark Matter Searches and the EDELWEISS-II Experiment

Direct searches for Dark Matter are experiment dedicated to the observation of the energetic recoiling ions produced by the scattering of WIMP particles from our galactic halo on terrestrial targets. The status and prospects of some currently running experiments are presented, together with new preliminary results of the experiments EDELWEISS-II.Comment: Talk presented at XLIVth Rencontres de Moriond, Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories Session, La Thuile, Italy, March 2009, to appear in the proceeding

This is not your father's recession ... or is it?

The current declines in employment and income are consistent with what happened in previous recessions going back to 1969. Unique this time are the major drop in home prices and the proactive response by policymakers.Recessions

Federal Reserve assets: understanding the pieces of the pie

One way to examine the composition of assets on the Fed's balance sheet is to group them according to the objectives of the programs used to acquire them.Government securities ; Fiscal policy

The current recession: how bad is it?

In a recession, the severity of the decline is just as relevant as the duration of the recession.Recessions

Variation in motion events: Theory and applications

This chapter analyses the role of intratypological and dialectal variation in the lexicalisation of motion events (Talmy 1991, 2000) and its application to second language acquisition. The first part discusses intratypological variation with respect to the semantic component of Path and proposes a cline of Path salience on the basis of twenty-one languages. Then, it describes dialectal variation in Spanish and Aragonese. Results show that dialects within these two Romance languages differ in the type of linguistic resources they use as well as in their quality and quantity. The second part briefly reviews some L2 problematic areas that can benefit from these approaches such as conceptual transfer, deixis, and idiomaticity. Examples are drawn from L2 Spanish and L2 Basque

Surface effects on the statistics of the local density of states in metallic nanoparticles: manifestation on the NMR spectra

In metallic nanoparticles, shifts in the ionization energy of surface atoms with respect to bulk atoms can lead to surface bands. Within a simple Tight Binding model we find that the projection of the electronic density of states on these sites presents two overlapping structures. One of them is characterized by the level spacing coming from bulk states and the other arises from the surface states. In very small particles, this contributes to an over-broadening of the NMR absorption spectra, determined by the Knight shift distribution of magnetic nuclei. We compare our calculated Knight shifts with experiments on aluminum nanoparticles, and show that the deviation of the scaling law as a function of temperature and particle size can be explained in terms of surface states.Comment: 1 tar.gz fil

Predicting consumption: a lesson in real-time data

Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index ; Consumption (Economics)

Convergence in the United States: a tale of migration and urbanization

We use non-parametric distribution dynamics techniques to reassess the convergence of per capita personal income (PCPI) across U.S. states and across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan portions of states for the period 1969-2005. The long-run distribution of PCPI is bimodal for both states and metro/nonmetro portions. Further- more, the high income mode of the distribution across metro and nonmetro portions corresponds to the single mode of the long-run distribution across metro portions only. These results (polarization or club-convergence) are reversed when weighting by population. The long run distributions across people are consistent with convergence. Migration and urbanization are the forces behind convergence.Migration, Internal ; Income distribution

Vacancies and unemployment

Expansions are usually associated with plentiful vacancies and a low number of unemployed workers. During recessions the unemployment pool swells while employers seek to fill fewer job openings.Unemployment ; Recessions ; Labor market