To Have and To Hold: Congressional Vows on Marriage and Sex

This article discusses what the government has already done to promote abstinence-unless-married programs and marriage, and what it proposes to do with the reauthorization of the welfare law. The article then discusses the relationship between marriage and pregnancy prevention, including research findings on the influence of childbearing on marriage. It then concludes with some recommendations on what Congress could do in the reauthorization of PRWORA to ensure that funding for abstinence-unless-married programs and marriage promotion truly meet the needs of the populations for which it is intended

Presenteeism and Paid Sick Days

Employers who do not provide paid sick days may feel it is too expensive to pay for workers who do not come to work. However, new research suggests that when workers are sick on the job, their presence comes at a cost to employers -- the "hidden" cost of reduced productivity. This four-page paper defines "presenteeism" and discusses what can and is being done about it

Teen Parents and Abstinence Education: Research Findings 2003

Research Findings: 2003 is designed as a reference tool for practitioners, policymakers, and others interested in teen parents (and particularly their relationship to welfare programs) and abstinence education. Research Findings: 2003 pulls together research that focuses specifically on these topics, as well as selected broader studies that include findings on teen parents or abstinence education. Not included in this listing is the wealth of research on the broad topic of teen pregnancy prevention, except as it relates to welfare. The following summaries are drawn directly from or paraphrase the research papers themselves. This compilation does not evaluate the validity of the studies or their methodology. Each summary includes a link to a web posting of the full research report, article, or presentation or the e-mail address of one of the researchers. Readers are encouraged to contact CLASP ([email protected] and [email protected]) with suggestions for research released in 2003 that should be included in this summary. We also encourage researchers and others to send us research that might be included in Research Findings: 2004

Taking the Next Step: What Can the U.S. Learn about Sick Leave from New Zealand?

This policy brief, based on the report "High Wire Act" and the second in the Work-Life Balance Series, looks at what New Zealand has done to provide paid sick days for its workers. Drawing from the New Zealand experience, the brief then provides recommendations on what United States policymakers can do to ensure that workers have paid sick days. 8 pages

AFPTAS results for common variants of bin packing: A new method to handle the small items

We consider two well-known natural variants of bin packing, and show that these packing problems admit asymptotic fully polynomial time approximation schemes (AFPTAS). In bin packing problems, a set of one-dimensional items of size at most 1 is to be assigned (packed) to subsets of sum at most 1 (bins). It has been known for a while that the most basic problem admits an AFPTAS. In this paper, we develop methods that allow to extend this result to other variants of bin packing. Specifically, the problems which we study in this paper, for which we design asymptotic fully polynomial time approximation schemes, are the following. The first problem is "Bin packing with cardinality constraints", where a parameter k is given, such that a bin may contain up to k items. The goal is to minimize the number of bins used. The second problem is "Bin packing with rejection", where every item has a rejection penalty associated with it. An item needs to be either packed to a bin or rejected, and the goal is to minimize the number of used bins plus the total rejection penalty of unpacked items. This resolves the complexity of two important variants of the bin packing problem. Our approximation schemes use a novel method for packing the small items. This new method is the core of the improved running times of our schemes over the running times of the previous results, which are only asymptotic polynomial time approximation schemes (APTAS)

Improved approximation guarantees for weighted matching in the semi-streaming model

We study the maximum weight matching problem in the semi-streaming model, and improve on the currently best one-pass algorithm due to Zelke (Proc. of STACS2008, pages 669-680) by devising a deterministic approach whose performance guarantee is 4.91+epsilon. In addition, we study preemptive online algorithms, a sub-class of one-pass algorithms where we are only allowed to maintain a feasible matching in memory at any point in time. All known results prior to Zelke's belong to this sub-class. We provide a lower bound of 4.967 on the competitive ratio of any such deterministic algorithm, and hence show that future improvements will have to store in memory a set of edges which is not necessarily a feasible matching

Increasing low-income access to opportunity

The author describes how state and city governments are taking the lead in giving visibility to poverty and opportunity through task-force initiatives, summits, and state poverty targets.Poverty - New England