Poverty Elimination Strategies that Work: A Human Rights Toolkit for Addressing Poverty in Your Community

This report highlights numerous local solutions that are currently being implemented in communities around the state and the country. This report is meant to be a resource to assist neighborhood groups, faith communities, service providers, policymakers, and others, in creating solutions to fundamentally address poverty. The report provides over 50 poverty elimination strategies that work along with hyperlinks to sources which contain information about highlighted solutions and additional resources that may be useful in developing and implementing poverty elimination strategies locally

It\u27s Time to Mind the GASB

[T]his article provides support for the “Public Employee Pension Transparency Act” (Transparency Bill). The Transparency Bill, introduced in all 111th to 114th Congress—however not yet became law—proposes making tax benefits related to bonds issued by a state or political subdivision conditional upon compliance with specific reporting requirements, regarding post-employment financial liabilities, established by Congress. However, and more importantly, the Article points to the fact that the Transparency Bill only deals with a symptom of a much deeper problem—the ability of public sector entities to “shop” their disclosures and therefore to avoid accountability and scrutiny. This Article proceeds as follows: In Part II, I review the institutional arrangements currently governing disclosures both for the business sector and the public sector; the normative framework that established the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the “FASB,” as the prominent accounting promulgator for the business sector; and the historical circumstances that led to the creation of the GASB as an alternative and almost equal authoritative standard setter for the public sector. In Part III, I discuss the existing justification supporting privatization of disclosure standard setting. I explain why these justifications, originally developed in the context of the business sector and the delegation of accounting standard setting powers from the SEC to the FASB, do not hold up in the case of the public sector. In Part IV, I discuss the implications for sovereignty of privatizing accounting standard setting for public entities. I explain how setting disclosure standards affects the ability of the public to control the public entity, its accountability, and the incentives given to the entity’s executives to serve the public good. In Parts V and VI, after the full meaning of delegating accounting standard-setting powers and the lack of justification thereof are brought to light, I turn to discussing how the GASB, the current prominent private accounting standard-setter for the public sector, has exercised its delegated powers. I expose how the GASB acted differently than other accounting standard-setters such as the Federal Advisory Board—a difference that contributed to the development of the current pension crisis. In Part VII, the last section of the Article, I draw directly from the lessons learned from the development of the pension crisis and the lack of justifications for accounting privatization in the public sector and propose reducing the extent of privatization involved in setting accounting standards for the public sector. My proposal focuses on providing state and local governments with incentives for replacing voluntary use of GASB standards with compulsory use of those of the Federal Advisory Board

Dust and molecules in the Local Group galaxy NGC 6822. III. The first-ranked HII region complex Hubble V

We present maps of the first-ranked HII region complex Hubble V in the metal-poor Local Group dwarf galaxy NGC 6822 in the first four transitions of CO, the 158 micron transition of C+, the 21-cm line of HI, the Pa-beta line of HII, and the continuum at 21 cm and 2.2 micron wavelengths. We have also determined various integrated intensities, notably of HCO+ and near-IR H2 emission. Although Hubble X is located in a region of relatively strong HI emission, our mapping failed to reveal any significant CO emission from it. The relatively small CO cloud complex associated with Hubble V is comparable in size to the ionized HII region. The CO clouds are hot (Tkin) = 150 K) and have high molecular gas densities (n(H2) = 10**4 cm**-3) Molecular hydrogen probably extends well beyond the CO boundaries. C+ column densities are more than an order of magnitude higher than those of CO. The total mass of the complex is about 10**6 M(sun) and molecular gas account for more than half of this. The complex is excited by luminous stars reddened or obscured at visual, but apparent at near-infrared wavelengths. The total embedded stellar mass may account for about 10% of the total mass, and the mass of ionized gas for half of that. Hubble V illustrates that modest star formation efficiencies may be associated with high CO destruction efficiencies in low-metallicity objects. The analysis of the Hubble V photon-dominated region (PDR) confirms in an independent manner the high value of the CO-to-H2 conversion factor X found earlier, characteristic of starforming low-metallicity regions.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

On the Transfer of Metric Fluctuations when Extra Dimensions Bounce or Stabilize

In this report, we study within the context of general relativity with one extra dimension compactified either on a circle or an orbifold, how radion fluctuations interact with metric fluctuations in the three non-compact directions. The background is non-singular and can either describe an extra dimension on its way to stabilization, or immediately before and after a series of non-singular bounces. We find that the metric fluctuations transfer undisturbed through the bounces or through the transients of the pre-stabilization epoch. Our background is obtained by considering the effects of a gas of massless string modes in the context of a consistent 'massless background' (or low energy effective theory) limit of string theory. We discuss applications to various approaches to early universe cosmology, including the ekpyrotic/cyclic universe scenario and string gas cosmology.Comment: V2. Minor Clarifications V3. appendix and 2 figures added, typos corrected, conclusions unchanged 12 pages, 6 figure

High-energy effective theory for matter on close Randall Sundrum branes

Extending the analysis of hep-th/0504128, we obtain a formal expression for the coupling between brane matter and the radion in a Randall-Sundrum braneworld. This effective theory is correct to all orders in derivatives of the radion in the limit of small brane separation, and, in particular, contains no higher than second derivatives. In the case of cosmological symmetry the theory can be obtained in closed form and reproduces the five-dimensional behaviour. Perturbations in the tensor and scalar sectors are then studied. When the branes are moving, the effective Newtonian constant on the brane is shown to depend both on the distance between the branes and on their velocity. In the small distance limit, we compute the exact dependence between the four-dimensional and the five-dimensional Newtonian constants.Comment: Updated version as published in PR

Brane Cosmology in an Arbitrary Number of Dimensions

We derive the effective cosmological equations for a non-$\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetric codimension one brane embedded in an arbitrary D-dimensional bulk spacetime, generalizing the $D=5,6$ cases much studied previously. As a particular case, this may be considered as a regularized codimension (D-4) brane avoiding the problem of curvature divergence on the brane. We apply our results to the case of spherical symmetry around the brane and to partly compactified AdS-Schwarzschild bulks.Comment: 23 page

Globalize Me: Regulating Distributed Ledger Technology

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)—the technology underlying cryptocurrencies—has been identified by many as a game-changer for data storage. Although DLT can solve acute problems of trust and coor- dination whenever entities (e.g., firms, traders, or even countries) rely on a shared database, it has mostly failed to reach mass adoption outside the context of cryptocurrencies. A prime reason for this failure is the extreme state of regulation, which was largely absent for many years but is now pouring down via uncoordinated regulatory initiatives by different countries. Both of these extremes-—under-regulation and over-regulation—-are consistent with traditional concepts from law and economics. Specifically, when- ever DLT implements a “public blockchain”-—where there is no screening of who joins the network-—both the technology and its regulation constitute what economists call “non-excludable goods.” For these types of goods, two classical incentive problems emerge: (i) over-regulation, due to the “tragedy of the commons,” and (ii) under-regulation, due to the “free-rider problem.” We argue that these problems are best solved using some form of global regulation. Comparing alternative paths to such regulation, including (i) centralized regulation, (ii) decentralized regulation, and (iii) international standards, we analyze how global regulation of DLT could be implemented using a mixture of “on-chain” (embedded in the technology itself) and “off-chain” measures. Our Article is the first to analyze why global regulation of DLT makes sense from a law and economics perspective and is also the first to provide concrete suggestions on how to implement such regulation

Globalize Me: Regulating Distributed Ledger Technology

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)—the technology underlying cryptocurrencies—has been identified by many as a game-changer for data storage. Although DLT can solve acute problems of trust and coor- dination whenever entities (e.g., firms, traders, or even countries) rely on a shared database, it has mostly failed to reach mass adoption out- side the context of cryptocurrencies. A prime reason for this failure is the extreme state of regulation, which was largely absent for many years but is now pouring down via uncoordinated regulatory initiatives by different countries. Both of these extremes—under-regulation and over-regulation—are consistent with traditional concepts from law and economics. Specifically, when- ever DLT implements a “public blockchain”—where there is no screening of who joins the network—both the technology and its regula- tion constitute what economists call “non-excludable goods.” For these types of goods, two classical incentive problems emerge: (i) over- regulation, due to the “tragedy of the commons,” and (ii) under- regulation, due to the “free-rider problem.” We argue that these problems are best solved using some form of global regulation. Comparing alternative paths to such regulation, including (i) centralized regulation, (ii) decentralized regulation, and (iii) international standards, we analyze how global regulation of DLT could be implemented using a mixture of “on-chain” (embedded in the technology itself) and “off-chain” measures. Our Article is the first to analyze why global regulation of DLT makes sense from a law and economics perspective and is also the first to provide concrete suggestions on how to implement such regulation

Slowly rotating voids in cosmology

We consider a spacetime consisting of an empty void separated from an almost Friedmann-Lema\^\i tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) dust universe by a spherically symmetric, slowly rotating shell which is comoving with the cosmic dust. We treat in a unified manner all types of the FLRW universes. The metric is expressed in terms of a constant characterizing the angular momentum of the shell, and parametrized by the comoving radius of the shell. Treating the rotation as a first order perturbation, we compute the dragging of inertial frames as well as the apparent motion of distant stars within the void. Finally, we discuss, in terms of in principle measurable quantities, 'Machian' features of the model.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures, REVTex, accepted for publication in Class.Quant.Gravit