7,751 research outputs found
The Impact of Placing Adolescent Males into Foster Care on their Education, Income Assistance and Incarcerations
Understanding the causal impacts of taking youth on the margins of risk into foster care is an element of the evidence-base on which policy development for this crucial function of government relies. Yet, there is little research looking at these causal impacts; neither is there much empirical work looking at long-term outcomes. This paper focuses on estimating the impact of placing 16 to 18 year old male youth into care on their rates of high school graduation, and post-majority income assistance receipt and incarceration. Two distinct sources of exogenous variation are used to generate instrumental variables, the estimates from which are interpreted in a heterogeneous treatment effects framework as local average treatment effects (LATEs). And, indeed, each source of exogenous variation is observed to estimate different parameters. While both instruments are in accord in that placement in foster care reduces (or delays) high school graduation, the impact of taking youth into care on income assistance use has dramatically different magnitudes across the two margins explored, and, perhaps surprisingly, one source of exogenous variation causes an increase, and the other a decrease, in the likelihood of the youth being incarcerated by age 20. Our results suggest that it is not enough to ask whether more or fewer children should be taken into care; rather, which children are, and how they are, taken into care matter for long-term outcomes.foster care, local average treatment effects
Particle on the Innermost Stable Circular Orbit of a Rapidly Spinning Black Hole
We compute the radiation emitted by a particle on the innermost stable
circular orbit of a rapidly spinning black hole both (a) analytically, working
to leading order in the deviation from extremality and (b) numerically, with a
new high-precision Teukolsky code. We find excellent agreement between the two
methods. We confirm previous estimates of the overall scaling of the power
radiated, but show that there are also small oscillations all the way to
extremality. Furthermore, we reveal an intricate mode-by-mode structure in the
flux to infinity, with only certain modes having the dominant scaling. The
scaling of each mode is controlled by its conformal weight, a quantity that
arises naturally in the representation theory of the enhanced near-horizon
symmetry group. We find relationships to previous work on particles orbiting in
precisely extreme Kerr, including detailed agreement of quantities computed
here with conformal field theory calculations performed in the context of the
Kerr/CFT correspondence.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, v2: reference added, minor changes, matches
published versio
Quantum and Classical in Adiabatic Computation
Adiabatic transport provides a powerful way to manipulate quantum states. By
preparing a system in a readily initialised state and then slowly changing its
Hamiltonian, one may achieve quantum states that would otherwise be
inaccessible. Moreover, a judicious choice of final Hamiltonian whose
groundstate encodes the solution to a problem allows adiabatic transport to be
used for universal quantum computation. However, the dephasing effects of the
environment limit the quantum correlations that an open system can support and
degrade the power of such adiabatic computation. We quantify this effect by
allowing the system to evolve over a restricted set of quantum states,
providing a link between physically inspired classical optimisation algorithms
and quantum adiabatic optimisation. This new perspective allows us to develop
benchmarks to bound the quantum correlations harnessed by an adiabatic
computation. We apply these to the D-Wave Vesuvius machine with revealing -
though inconclusive - results
Breaking the cycle? The effect of education on welfare receipt among children of welfare recipients
We examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare backgrounds use welfare themselves. Our data consists of administrative educational records for grade 12 students in a Canadian province linked with their own and their parents' welfare records. We address potential endogeneity problems by: 1) controlling for ability using past test scores; 2) using an instrument for graduation based on school principal fixed effects; and 3) using a Heckman- Singer type unobserved heterogeneity estimator. Graduation would reduce welfare receipt of dropoutsby Ă to 3/4. Effects are larger for individuals from troubled family backgrounds and low income neighbourhoods.
Thermal fluctuations in moderately damped Josephson junctions: Multiple escape and retrapping, switching- and return-current distributions and hysteresis
A crossover at a temperature T* in the temperature dependence of the width s
of the distribution of switching currents of moderately damped Josephson
junctions has been reported in a number of recent publications, with positive
ds/dT and IV characteristics associated with underdamped behaviour for lower
temperatures T<T*, and negative ds/dT and IV characteristics resembling
overdamped behaviour for higher temperatures T>T*. We have investigated in
detail the behaviour of Josephson junctions around the temperature T* by using
Monte Carlo simulations including retrapping from the running state into the
supercurrent state as given by the model of Ben-Jacob et al. We develop
discussion of the important role of multiple escape and retrapping events in
the moderate-damping regime, in particular considering the behaviour in the
region close to T*. We show that the behaviour is more fully understood by
considering two crossover temperatures, and that the shape of the distribution
and s(T) around T*, as well as at lower T<T*, are largely determined by the
shape of the conventional thermally activated switching distribution. We show
that the characteristic temperatures T* are not unique for a particular
Josephson junction, but have some dependence on the ramp rate of the applied
bias current. We also consider hysteresis in moderately damped Josephson
junctions and discuss the less commonly measured distribution of return
currents for a decreasing current ramp. We find that some hysteresis should be
expected to persist above T* and we highlight the importance, even well below
T*, of accounting properly for thermal fluctuations when determining the
damping parameter Q.Comment: Accepted for publication in PR
Welfare and ethical issues in invasive species management
Cowan, P., Warburton, B., Fisher, P
A low-loss, broadband antenna for efficient photon collection from a coherent spin in diamond
We report the creation of a low-loss, broadband optical antenna giving highly
directed output from a coherent single spin in the solid-state. The device, the
first solid-state realization of a dielectric antenna, is engineered for
individual nitrogen vacancy (NV) electronic spins in diamond. We demonstrate a
directionality close to 10. The photonic structure preserves the high spin
coherence of single crystal diamond (T2>100us). The single photon count rate
approaches a MHz facilitating efficient spin readout. We thus demonstrate a key
enabling technology for quantum applications such as high-sensitivity
magnetometry and long-distance spin entanglement.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures and supplementary information (5 pages, 8
figures). Comments welcome. Further information under
http://www.quantum-sensing.physik.unibas.c
Power-law carrier dynamics in semiconductor nanocrystals at nanosecond time scales
We report the observation of power law dynamics on nanosecond to microsecond
time scales in the fluorescence decay from semiconductor nanocrystals, and draw
a comparison between this behavior and power-law fluorescence blinking from
single nanocrystals. The link is supported by comparison of blinking and
lifetime data measured simultaneously from the same nanocrystal. Our results
reveal that the power law coefficient changes little over the nine decades in
time from 10 ns to 10 s, in contrast with the predictions of some diffusion
based models of power law behavior.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, compressed for submission to Applied Physics
Letter
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