Making Ends Meet: Private Food Assistance and the Working Poor

Concern is growing that large segments of low-income Americans are slipping through, or are not adequately served by, the public food assistance safety net. Many of these individuals are turning to the private network of food pantries and soup kitchens for their nourishment. In particular, a significant percentage of individuals seeking private food assistance are the working poor. In this paper, we look at the characteristics of a sample of employed Virginia households who depend on soup kitchens or food pantries to help them make ends meet. Our data indicate that these individuals have demographic characteristics that do not bode well for their being able to earn high enough wages to all allow them to meet basic family needs without some type of additional supports.

Variance Reduction For A Discrete Velocity Gas

We extend a variance reduction technique developed by Baker and Hadjiconstantinou [1] to a discrete velocity gas. In our previous work, the collision integral was evaluated by importance sampling of collision partners [2]. Significant computational effort may be wasted by evaluating the collision integral in regions where the flow is in equilibrium. In the current approach, substantial computational savings are obtained by only solving for the deviations from equilibrium. In the near continuum regime, the deviations from equilibrium are small and low noise evaluation of the collision integral can be achieved with very coarse statistical sampling. Spatially homogenous relaxation of the Bobylev-Krook-Wu distribution [3,4], was used as a test case to verify that the method predicts the correct evolution of a highly non-equilibrium distribution to equilibrium. When variance reduction is not used, the noise causes the entropy to undershoot, but the method with variance reduction matches the analytic curve for the same number of collisions. We then extend the work to travelling shock waves and compare the accuracy and computational savings of the variance reduction method to DSMC over Mach numbers ranging from 1.2 to 10.Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanic

Web-based Tools for the Analysis of DNA Microarrays

End of project reportDNA microarrays are widely used for gene expression profiling. Raw data resulting from microarray experiments, however, tends to be very noisy and there are many sources of technical variation and bias. This raw data needs to be quality assessed and interactively preprocessed to minimise variation before statistical analysis in order to achieve meaningful result. Therefore microarray analysis requires a combination of visualisation and statistical tools, which vary depending on what microarray platform or experimental design is used.Bioconductor is an existing open source software project that attempts to facilitate analysis of genomic data. It is a collection of packages for the statistical programming language R. Bioconductor is particularly useful in analyzing microarray experiments. The problem is that the R programming language’s command line interface is intimidating to many users who do not have a strong background in computing. This often leads to a situation where biologists will resort to using commercial software which often uses antiquated and much less effective statistical techniques, as well as being expensively priced. This project aims to bridge this gap by providing a user friendly web-based interface to the cutting edge statistical techniques of Bioconductor

Lie symmetries of (1+2) nonautonomous evolution equations in Financial Mathematics

We analyse two classes of $(1+2)$ evolution equations which are of special interest in Financial Mathematics, namely the Two-dimensional Black-Scholes Equation and the equation for the Two-factor Commodities Problem. Our approach is that of Lie Symmetry Analysis. We study these equations for the case in which they are autonomous and for the case in which the parameters of the equations are unspecified functions of time. For the autonomous Black-Scholes Equation we find that the symmetry is maximal and so the equation is reducible to the $(1+2)$ Classical Heat Equation. This is not the case for the nonautonomous equation for which the number of symmetries is submaximal. In the case of the two-factor equation the number of symmetries is submaximal in both autonomous and nonautonomous cases. When the solution symmetries are used to reduce each equation to a $(1+1)$ equation, the resulting equation is of maximal symmetry and so equivalent to the $(1+1)$ Classical Heat Equation.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure, to be published in Mathematics in the Special issue "Mathematical Finance

Excitation of the molecular gas in the nuclear region of M82

We present high-resolution HIFI spectroscopy of the nucleus of the archetypical starburst galaxy M 82. Six ^(12)CO lines, 2 ^(13)CO lines and 4 fine-structure lines have been detected. Besides showing the effects of the overall velocity structure of the nuclear region, the line profiles also indicate the presence of multiple components with different optical depths, temperatures, and densities in the observing beam. The data have been interpreted using a grid of PDR models. It is found that the majority of the molecular gas is in low density (n = 10^(3.5) cm^(-3)) clouds, with column densities of N_H = 10^(21.5) cm^(-2) and a relatively low UV radiation field (G_0 = 10^2). The remaining gas is predominantly found in clouds with higher densities (n = 10^5 cm^(-3)) and radiation fields (G_0 = 10^(2.75)), but somewhat lower column densities (N_H = 10^(21.2) cm^(-2)). The highest J CO lines are dominated by a small (1% relative surface filling) component, with an even higher density (n = 10^6 cm^(-3)) and UV field (G_0 = 10^(3.25)). These results show the strength of multi-component modelling for interpretating the integrated properties of galaxies

Possible Wormhole Solutions in (4+1) Gravity

We extend previous analyses of soliton solutions in (4+1) gravity to new ranges of their defining parameters. The geometry, as studied using invariants, has the topology of wormholes found in (3+1) gravity. In the induced-matter picture, the fluid does not satisfy the strong energy conditions, but its gravitational mass is positive. We infer the possible existance of (4+1) wormholes which, compared to their (3+1) counterparts, are less exotic.Comment: 3 pages, latex, 1 figure