Preaching in and out of season

Reviewed Book: Long, Thomas G. Preaching in and out of season. Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Pr, 1990

Promoting Homeownership Among Low-Income Households

Argues that the current system of low-income housing assistance is strongly biased against homeownership. Examines the performance of past housing programs and implications for the future design of efficient low-income homeownership programs

Remote systems development

Potential space missions of the nineties and the next century require that we look at the broad category of remote systems as an important means to achieve cost-effective operations, exploration and colonization objectives. This paper addresses such missions, which can use remote systems technology as the basis for identifying required capabilities which must be provided. The relationship of the space-based tasks to similar tasks required for terrestrial applications is discussed. The development status of the required technology is assessed and major issues which must be addressed to meet future requirements are identified. This includes the proper mix of humans and machines, from pure teleoperation to full autonomy; the degree of worksite compatibility for a robotic system; and the required design parameters, such as degrees-of-freedom. Methods for resolution are discussed including analysis, graphical simulation and the use of laboratory test beds. Grumman experience in the application of these techniques to a variety of design issues are presented utilizing the Telerobotics Development Laboratory which includes a 17-DOF robot system, a variety of sensing elements, Deneb/IRIS graphics workstations and control stations. The use of task/worksite mockups, remote system development test beds and graphical analysis are discussed with examples of typical results such as estimates of task times, task feasibility and resulting recommendations for design changes. The relationship of this experience and lessons-learned to future development of remote systems is also discussed

Subsidized Housing, Emergency Shelters, and Homelessness: An Empirical Investigation Using Data from the 1990 Census

This paper uses data on the only systematic count of the homeless throughout the United States to estimate the effect on the rate of homelessness of a wide variety of potentially important determinants, including several major policy responses to homelessness that have not been included in previous studies. It improves upon estimates of the effect of previously studied determinants by using measures that correspond more closely to underlying theoretical constructs, especially by accounting for geographical price differences. It also conducts numerous sensitivity analyses and analyzes the consequences of the undercount of the homeless for point estimates and hypothesis tests. The paper's most important finding from a policy perspective is that targeting the current budget authority for housing assistance on the poorest eligible households will essentially eliminate homelessness among those who apply for assistance. Achieving this goal without concentrating the poorest households in housing projects and without spending more money requires vouchering out project-based assistance. The primary methodological finding of the paper is that the 1990 Decennial Census did not produce sufficiently accurate counts, especially of the street homeless, to permit very precise estimates of the effects of many factors which surely affect the rate of homelessness. The main exceptions are the price of housing and average March temperature. Plausible models of the undercount imply that in regressions with a rate of homelessness as the dependent variable estimators of the coefficients of explanatory variables will be biased towards zero. In regressions with the logarithm of a rate of homelessness as the dependent variable, only the estimator of the constant term will be biased downwards. The unknown magnitude of the undercount precludes predicting the effects of policy interventions on the number of homeless based on the results in this paper and previous studies.Homelessness

The Effect on Program Participation of Replacing Current Low-Income Housing Programs with an Entitlement Housing Voucher Program

This paper estimates the effect on participation rates of families of various types of replacing HUD’s largest low-income housing programs with alternative tenure-neutral entitlement housing voucher programs that differ in their taxpayer cost and the relative generosity of the subsidy to households of different types. The estimates of participation in the entitlement programs are based primarily on the five-percent household sample from the 2000 Decennial Census and participation experience in the only entitlement housing assistance programs that have been operated in the United States. HUD’s administrative records provide data on current recipients of low-income housing assistance. The paper explores the sensitivity of the results to the equations used to predict participation. The results indicate that even the entitlement housing voucher program that costs 10 percent less than the current system would serve 50 percent more households in total and many more of each type – white, black, and Hispanic; elderly and nonelderly; families living in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas; small, medium, and large families; and households in the first two real income deciles.Low-income housing assistance, housing vouchers, welfare reform two-sided markets, junk mail, email, telemarketing, Do Not Call List, message pricing, the Medium is the Message, market research. Classification-H53, I38, R00

A noise assessment and prediction system

A system has been designed to provide an assessment of noise levels that result from testing activities at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. The system receives meteorological data from surface stations and an upper air sounding system. The data from these systems are sent to a meteorological model, which provides forecasting conditions for up to three hours from the test time. The meteorological data are then used as input into an acoustic ray trace model which projects sound level contours onto a two-dimensional display of the surrounding area. This information is sent to the meteorological office for verification, as well as the range control office, and the environmental office. To evaluate the noise level predictions, a series of microphones are located off the reservation to receive the sound and transmit this information back to the central display unit. The computer models are modular allowing for a variety of models to be utilized and tested to achieve the best agreement with data. This technique of prediction and model validation will be used to improve the noise assessment system

Improving Homeownership Among Poor and Moderate-Income Households

Looks at rates of homeownership, trends in federal low-income rental housing assistance, and types of homeownership programs for low-income households

Bright tripartite entanglement in triply concurrent parametric oscillation

We show that a novel optical parametric oscillator, based on concurrent $\chi^{(2)}$ nonlinearities, can produce, above threshold, bright output beams of macroscopic intensities which exhibit strong tripartite continuous-variable entanglement. We also show that there are {\em two} ways that the system can exhibit a new three-mode form of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, and calculate the extra-cavity fluctuation spectra that may be measured to verify our predictions.Comment: title change, expanded intro and discussion of experimental aspects, 1 new figure. Conclusions unaltere