Limiting Family Size Through the Sufficient Provision of Basic Necessities and Social Services: The Case of Pasay, Eastern Samar, and Agusan Del Sur

The socio-economic quandaries of rapid population growth and poverty have always been coupled. It is evident that the poorest households are those who have larger family size. Consequently, these households have to support more people with fewer resources, making the family live a life of inherited poverty. With this, the state has been on the pursuit of looking for solutions such as the Reproductive Heath (RH) Bill to address rapid population growth and eventually poverty. However, the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) condemns the RH Bill because it is contradictory to Catholic principles. For this reason, we will explore other possibilities to limit family size by highlighting whether the availability of water, electricity, decent housing, sustainable income, employment, and other welfare enhancing programs limits family size. By showing whether the provision of these basic sustenance affects family size via the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) procedure, it is then possible to propose an alternative solution other than the use of contraceptives. Likewise, the government can improve on its socio-economic policies that will address the problem of overpopulation. Results have shown that Pasay, Eastern Samar, and Agusan Del Sur responded differently to various stimuli such as living conditions, educational attainment, employment status, as well as government-funded programs among others insofar as population dynamics is concerned. This suggests a need to peer into the distinction of each region’s socioeconomic context and underlying psyche. The milieu within which an individual resides may greatly influence his rational calculus and decision-making process. Also, beyond tailoring-fitting population control programs, there is also a need to calibrate policies based on relevant socioeconomic, political, and cultural nuances each region may possess

Can the Provision of Social Services Limit Family Size? The Case of Pasay, Eastern Samar, and Agusan Del Sur

Rapid population growth is deemed by economists as one of the root causes of the Philippines’ underdevelopment, economic stagnation, resource depletion, and high crime rate, among others. According to Todaro and Smith (2008), it gives rise to poverty since economic growth cannot outpace and sustain the rate at which population expands

Divergence-free Nonrenormalizable Models

A natural procedure is introduced to replace the traditional, perturbatively generated counter terms to yield a formulation of covariant, self-interacting, nonrenormalizable scalar quantum field theories that has the added virtue of exhibiting a divergence-free perturbation analysis. To achieve this desirable goal it is necessary to reexamine the meaning of the free theory about which such a perturbation takes place.Comment: 22 pages. Version accepted for publication; involves modest addition to the end of Sec.

Climate Change Meets the Law of the Horse

The climate change policy debate has only recently turned its full attention to adaptation - how to address the impacts of climate change we have already begun to experience and that will likely increase over time. Legal scholars have in turn begun to explore how the many different fields of law will and should respond. During this nascent period, one overarching question has gone unexamined: how will the legal system as a whole organize around climate change adaptation? Will a new distinct field of climate change adaptation law and policy emerge, or will legal institutions simply work away at the problem through unrelated, duly self-contained fields, as in the famous Law of the Horse? This Article is the first to examine that question comprehensively, to move beyond thinking about the law and climate change adaptation to consider the law of climate change adaptation. Part I of the Article lays out our methodological premises and approach. Using a model we call Stationarity Assessment, Part I explores how legal fields are structured and sustained based on assumptions about the variability of natural, social, and economic conditions, and how disruptions to that regime of variability can lead to the emergence of new fields of law and policy. Case studies of environmental law and environmental justice demonstrate the model’s predictive power for the formation of new distinct legal regimes. Part II applies the Stationarity Assessment model to the topic of climate change adaptation, using a case study of a hypothetical coastal region and the potential for climate change impacts to disrupt relevant legal doctrines and institutions. We find that most fields of law appear capable of adapting effectively to climate change. In other words, without some active intervention, we expect the law and policy of climate change adaptation to follow the path of the Law of the Horse - a collection of fields independently adapting to climate change - rather than organically coalescing into a new distinct field. Part III explores why, notwithstanding this conclusion, it may still be desirable to seek a different trajectory. Focusing on the likelihood of systemic adaptation decisions with perverse, harmful results, we identify the potential benefits offered by intervening to shape a new and distinct field of climate change adaptation law and policy. Part IV then identifies the contours of such a field, exploring the distinct purposes of reducing vulnerability, ensuring resiliency, and safeguarding equity. These features provide the normative policy components for a law of climate change adaptation that would be more than just a Law of the Horse. This new field would not replace or supplant any existing field, however, as environmental law did with regard to nuisance law, and it would not be dominated by substantive doctrine. Rather, like the field of environmental justice, this new legal regime would serve as a holistic overlay across other fields to ensure more efficient, effective, and just climate change adaptation solutions

On the de Haas-van Alphen effect in inhomogeneous alloys

We show that Landau level broadening in alloys occurs naturally as a consequence of random variations in the local quasiparticle density, without the need to consider a relaxation time. This approach predicts Lorentzian-broadened Landau levels similar to those derived by Dingle using the relaxation-time approximation. However, rather than being determined by a finite relaxation time $\tau$, the Landau-level widths instead depend directly on the rate at which the de Haas-van Alphen frequency changes with alloy composition. The results are in good agreement with recent data from three very different alloy systems.Comment: 5 pages, no figure

Mass Determination in SUSY-like Events with Missing Energy

We describe a kinematic method which is capable of determining the overall mass scale in SUSY-like events at a hadron collider with two missing (dark matter) particles. We focus on the kinematic topology in which a pair of identical particles is produced with each decaying to two leptons and an invisible particle (schematically, $pp\to YY+jets$ followed by each $Y$ decaying via $Y\to \ell X\to \ell\ell'N$ where $N$ is invisible). This topology arises in many SUSY processes such as squark and gluino production and decay, not to mention t\anti t di-lepton decays. In the example where the final state leptons are all muons, our errors on the masses of the particles $Y$, $X$ and $N$ in the decay chain range from 4 GeV for 2000 events after cuts to 13 GeV for 400 events after cuts. Errors for mass differences are much smaller. Our ability to determine masses comes from considering all the kinematic information in the event, including the missing momentum, in conjunction with the quadratic constraints that arise from the $Y$, $X$ and $N$ mass-shell conditions. Realistic missing momentum and lepton momenta uncertainties are included in the analysis.Comment: 41 pages, 14 figures, various clarifications and expanded discussion included in revised version that conforms to the version to be publishe