Latinos, African Americans and the Coalitional Case for a Federal Jobs Program

In the late 1970s, amidst growing unemployment in black and Latino communities, the newly-formed Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) supported the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in its call for full employment in the run up to the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1 978. Never fully implemented, the act has been de facto an unfunded mandate for close to 40 years. Only recently has it been resurrected by a handful of lawmakers, while both discussion and support for a national jobs program has begun to gain steam in the media and the general public. With support from labor market research and other empirical evidence, we propose and outline for a bold policy: a National Investment Employment Corps to provide a permanent job guarantee for all citizens with the purpose of maintaining and expanding the nation\u27s physical and human infrastructure. Given the disproportionate effect of the recent economic downturn and labor market bias on African Americans and Latinos, we argue that a National Investment Employment Corps program would address the employment needs for blacks and Latinos by assuring full-employment and simultaneously ensuring long-term benefits for the nation\u27s well-being

Relative decompression risks of spacecraft cabin atmospheres

Relative decompression risk studies of spacecraft cabin atmosphere using miniature pig

Viscous compressible flow about blunt bodies using a numerically generated orthogonal coordinate system

A numerical solution to the Navier-Stokes equations was obtained for blunt axisymmetric entry bodies of arbitrary shape in supersonic flow. These equations are solved on a finite difference mesh obtained from a simple numerical technique which generates orthogonal coordinates between arbitrary boundaries. The governing equations are solved in time dependent form using Stetter's improved stability three step predictor corrector method. For the present application, the metric coefficients were obtained numerically using fourth order accurate, finite difference relations and proved to be totally reliable for the highly stretched mesh used to resolve the thin viscous boundary layer. Solutions are obtained for a range of blunt body nose shapes including concavities

Beyond Broke: Why Closing the Racial Wealth Gap is a Priority for National Economic Security

Despite overwhelming evidence that the racial wealth gap persists in the U.S., it remains a taboo topic in mainstream policy circles and most officials studiously avoid offering targeted solutions to help close this gap. However, this issue is ignored at our nation's peril given the anticipated growth of racial and ethnic groups over the next few decades.This report uses the most recently available data from the U. S. Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) along with the National Asset Scorecard in Communities of Color (NASCC) in order to highlight the current state of America's racial wealth gap. With these tools, we provide an in-depth analysis of housing wealth and liquid wealth, while also evaluating how wealth disparities manifest across racial and ethnic categories and within racial and ethnic subpopulations in four geographically diverse U.S. cities

Human Response to Late Holocene Climate Change at the Patrick Site (40MR40) in East Tennessee

Current archaeological research links Late Holocene climate variability to patterns of dispersal and reorganization during the Archaic-Woodland transition in the Southeast (3200-2400 cal BP). This study uses geomorphic and archaeological proxy data from curated soil monoliths collected at the Patrick site (40MR40), located in Monroe County along the Little Tennessee River in Tennessee, to the assess the impact of Late Holocene climate change on the Late Archaic and Early Woodland groups that utilized the river valley. The results of these analyses indicate that the progressive downcutting of the river, apparent in sediments dating between 5700-3600 cal BP, had an ameliorating effect on the floodplain landscape that preceded the intensified use of first river terrace during the Terminal Late Archaic Iddins phase and Early Woodland Watts Bar phase.Decreases in coarse grain sediments associated with high-energy flooding and subsequent increases in cumulic soil formation at the Patrick site demonstrate that the floodplain environment had begun to stabilized during the Late Archaic period at approximately 3600 cal BP. This pattern is followed by dense midden accumulation, increases in the occurrence of cultivated plant foods, and a precipitous increase in pottery associated with Early Woodland Watts Bar and Patrick phase occupations at the site; suggesting that local populations took advantage the increasingly inhabitable floodplain environment. This study posits that the relatively cooler and wetter climate conditions of the Late Holocene Subboreal climate period (5000-2400 cal BP) may not have had a disruptive effect on prehistoric populations in the lower Little Tennessee River valley, contrasting what has been observed elsewhere in the Southeast during the Archaic-Woodland transition

Late Cenozoic growth and exhumation of the northern Lunggar extensional basin, west-central Tibetan plateau

textDespite major shortening during India-Asia convergence, the dominant late Cenozoic geological features across the southern to central Tibetan plateau are north-trending rifts and associated strike-slip faults. Fault orientations and slip directions suggest broadly distributed east-west extension, but the dominant modes of extensional deformation and basin formation are unclear. The Lunggar extensional basin in west-central Tibet is bounded by a <40° low-angle normal fault (detachment), contains active high-angle normal faults, and displays higher topography toward the basin center with outward axial drainage toward the northern and southern basin terminations. Structural and stratigraphic features of the Lunggar extensional system are variably consistent with a high-angle half-graben geometry or a low-angle fault-related supradetachment basin, possibly suggesting a change in deformational style. This study aims to constrain the depositional and exhumational history of the Lunggar extensional basin and bounding fault system by assessing the sedimentologic, structural, and thermochronological record of basin fill. Clastic sedimentary facies filling the Lunggar extensional basin include alluvial-fan debris-flow conglomerates and fluviolacustrine sandstones and siltstones. Sandstone petrographic point count data, conglomerate clast compositions, and detrital zircon U-Pb age spectra suggest systematic unroofing of the western footwall (including Upper Jurassic-Cretaceous and Miocene granitic crystalline rocks that intruded Permian to Cretaceous strata), which strongly influenced sediment transport and basin sedimentation. Paleoflow measurements are effectively opposite to the current flow regime, suggesting that the modern topographic high in the central basin modified the original basin configuration. As a proxy for cooling histories of previously eroded footwall rocks, 4 sandstones and 11 leucogranite boulder clasts from proximal hanging-wall strata were sampled for low-temperature thermochronometry. Apatite and zircon (U-Th)/He results support conglomerate clast compositional trends in suggesting rapid footwall exhumation and a pattern of hanging-wall exhumation in which the youngest exposed range-front deposits are focused along the central segment of the basin-bounding detachment fault. Collectively, the sedimentologic, structural, and thermochronological results support a model of rift evolution predicting upper crustal thinning, supradetachment basin subsidence, and subsequent isostatic rebound that intiates along the more-evolved central segments of Tibetan extensional systems.Geological Science