What Communities Can Do to Rein In Payday Lending: Strategies for Successful Local Ordinance Campaigns through a Texas Lens

Because New Mexico has one of the highest consumer usage rates and highest concentrations of payday and title loan shops in the nation,2 we thought it would be an ideal place to measure the public’s knowledge of and interest in these ubiquitous loans. We also measured knowledge of interest rate caps in the context of credit cards, as a point of comparison. Our data are consistent with that of previous studies showing that the general public overwhelmingly supports interest rate caps both in general and for certain types of loans. More uniquely, we also found that many consumers are unaware that there are no interest rate caps on many forms of consumer loans. These data are useful in explaining why consumers do not do more to change the law on interest rate caps

Imprint of DESI fiber assignment on the anisotropic power spectrum of emission line galaxies

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a multiplexed fiber-fed spectrograph, is a Stage-IV ground-based dark energy experiment aiming to measure redshifts for 29 million Emission-Line Galaxies (ELG), 4 million Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG), and 2 million Quasi-Stellar Objects (QSO). The survey design includes a pattern of tiling on the sky and the locations of the fiber positioners in the focal plane of the telescope, with the observation strategy determined by a fiber assignment algorithm that optimizes the allocation of fibers to targets. This strategy allows a given region to be covered on average five times for a five-year survey, but with coverage varying between zero and twelve, which imprints a spatially-dependent pattern on the galaxy clustering. We investigate the systematic effects of the fiber assignment coverage on the anisotropic galaxy clustering of ELGs and show that, in the absence of any corrections, it leads to discrepancies of order ten percent on large scales for the power spectrum multipoles. We introduce a method where objects in a random catalog are assigned a coverage, and the mean density is separately computed for each coverage factor. We show that this method reduces, but does not eliminate the effect. We next investigate the angular dependence of the contaminated signal, arguing that it is mostly localized to purely transverse modes. We demonstrate that the cleanest way to remove the contaminating signal is to perform an analysis of the anisotropic power spectrum $P(k,\mu)$ and remove the lowest $\mu$ bin, leaving $\mu>0$ modes accurate at the few-percent level. Here, $\mu$ is the cosine of the angle between the line-of-sight and the direction of $\vec{k}$. We also investigate two alternative definitions of the random catalog and show they are comparable but less effective than the coverage randoms method.Comment: Submitted to JCA

Nuclear star formation on 100 parsec scales: 10" resolution radio continuum, HI and CO observations

A program of radio line and continuum studies of star formation in nearby spiral galaxies is reported. The objective is a search for hot gas and peculiar dynamics in spiral nuclei with 10" to 30" angular resolution. Vigorous star formation is found to be a common phenomenon in the inner kpc of spirals. Arcsecond resolution observations of radio continuum emission at 6 and 2 cm were used to separate the thermal and nonthermal radio components. It was found that thermal and nonthermal emission are well mixed even on sizescales of 10 pc. To understand the reason for the increased level of star formation activity in spiral nuclei, HI and CO emission in these galaxies is studied. The CO transition was detected in M51, M82, NGC 253, NGC 6946 and IC 342 with T sub a approx. 0.5 to 2.0 K, at 20" angular resolution. The dynamics and spatial distribution of nuclear gas are being studied using VLA HI maps with 30" synthesized beams. Evidence for noncircular motions in HI was found in the nucleus of IC 342

Do We Have A New E-Conomy?

Used properly, the term 'new e-conomy' is warranted. Since 1995, there has been a wave of innovation associated with both the production and use of information technology that has been translated into improved US economic performance. In particular, there has been a substantial acceleration in trend total factor productivity growth. Most of this acceleration actually took place outside of the computer sector. Almost none of the acceleration was cyclical. There is now clear supportive evidence of an acceleration of productivity in service industries that are major purchasers of information technology such as finance and wholesale and retail trade. These gains reflect not only increased investment in information technology but also complementary innovations in business organization and policy. To be sure, as evidenced by recent financial market volatility, there have been speculative excesses, but these should not obscure the fundamental gains that have been made.

A methodology for the design of robust rollover prevention controllers for automotive vehicles: Part 1-Differential Braking

In this paper we apply recent results from robust control to the problem of rollover prevention in automotive vehicles. Specifically, we exploit the results of Pancake, Corless and Brockman, which provide controllers to robustly guarantee that the peak values of the performance outputs of an uncertain system do not exceed certain values. We introduce a new measure of performance for rollover prevention, the Load Transfer Ratio LTRd , and design differential-braking based rollover controllers to keep the value of this quantity below a certain level; we also obtain controllers which yield robustness to variations in vehicle speed. We present numerical simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of our controllers

The Power of Community Action:Anti‐Payday Loan Ordinances in Three Metropolitan Areas

Local ordinances that restrict payday lending constitute an important strategy in the overall attack on this problematic form of lending. In this report, made possible by the generous support of Silicon Valley Community Foundation, we describe and analyze campaigns in three locales that differ markedly in the opportunities and challenges faced by ordinance advocates. The locales are Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in California (“Silicon Valley”); Dallas, Denton, and Tarrant counties in Texas; and Salt Lake County in Utah. This report finds both commonalities and important variations among these campaigns. While there is no single recipe for a successful ordinance campaign, our comparative analysis suggests the following ten lessons for payday lending opponents and other advocates of social reform via local action

A methodology for the design of robust rollover prevention controllers for automotive vehicles: Part 2-Active steering

In this paper we apply recent results from robust control to the problem of rollover prevention in automotive vehicles. Specifically, we exploit the results of Pancake, Corless and Brockman, which provide controllers to robustly guarantee that the peak magnitudes of the performance outputs of an uncertain system do not exceed certain values.We use the dynamic Load Transfer Ratio LTRd as a performance output for rollover prevention, and design active-steering based rollover controllers to keep the magnitude of this quantity below a certain level, while we use control input u as an additional performance output to limit the maximum amount of control effort. We present numerical simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of our controllers

A Result On Implicit Consensus with Application to Emissions Control

This paper is concerned with a class of decentralised control problems that arise in contemporary applications where agents cooperate to control and regulate a global quantity, are limited in the manner in which they communicate with each other, and are required to reach consensus on some implicit variable (for instance, CO2 emissions). An algorithm is presented for achieving this goal. A simplified application of the algorithm to emissions control for a fleet of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) is given

Partition Function Zeros of a Restricted Potts Model on Lattice Strips and Effects of Boundary Conditions

We calculate the partition function $Z(G,Q,v)$ of the $Q$-state Potts model exactly for strips of the square and triangular lattices of various widths $L_y$ and arbitrarily great lengths $L_x$, with a variety of boundary conditions, and with $Q$ and $v$ restricted to satisfy conditions corresponding to the ferromagnetic phase transition on the associated two-dimensional lattices. From these calculations, in the limit $L_x \to \infty$, we determine the continuous accumulation loci ${\cal B}$ of the partition function zeros in the $v$ and $Q$ planes. Strips of the honeycomb lattice are also considered. We discuss some general features of these loci.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure

Preservation of Common Quadratic Lyapunov Functions and Padé Approximations

It is well known that the bilinear transform, or first order diagonal Padé approximation to the matrix exponential, preserves quadratic Lyapunov functions between continuous-time and corresponding discrete-time linear time invariant (LTI) systems, regardless of the sampling time. It is also well known that this mapping preserves common quadratic Lyapunov functions between continuous-time and discrete-time switched systems. In this note we show that while diagonal Padé approximations do not in general preserve other types of Lyapunov functions (or even stability), it is true that diagonal Padé approximations of the matrix exponential, of any order and sampling time, preserve quadratic stability. A consequence of this result is that the quadratic stability of switched systems is robust with respect to certain discretization methods