Control of Public Spending - Approaches to Balanced Budgets in the United States, Canada, and Europe in Comparison

The national debt and federal deficit spending has far-reaching economic consequences in the United States and abroad. This thesis focuses on the legal aspects involved in controlling public expenditure, seeking to develop procedural and substantive legal rules to restrain public spending and help balance the federal budget. Since other governments face similar budget concerns, the anti-deficit measures utilized by the governments of Canada, European nations, and U.S. states are examined. The successful measures from these other governments along with improvements to the current federal approach are proposed to optimize the federal approach to the budget crisis

Excited nucleons with chirally improved fermions

We study positive and negative parity nucleons on the lattice using the chirally improved lattice Dirac operator. Our analysis is based on a set of three operators chi_i with the nucleon quantum numbers but in different representations of the chiral group and with different diquark content. We use a variational method to separate ground state and excited states and determine the mixing coefficients for the optimal nucleon operators in terms of the chi_i. We clearly identify the negative parity resonances N(1535) and N(1650) and their masses agree well with experimental data. The mass of the observed excited positive parity state is too high to be interpreted as the Roper state. Our results for the mixing coefficients indicate that chiral symmetry is important for N(1535) and N(1650) states. We confront our data for the mixing coefficients with quark models and provide insights into the physics of the nucleon system and the nature of strong decays.Comment: Tables added, small modifications in the tex

Nova Aquilae 1918 (V603 Aql) Faded by 0.44 mag/century from 1938-2013

We present the light curve of the old nova V603 Aql (Nova Aql 1918) from 1898-1918 and 1934-2013 using 22,721 archival magnitudes. All of our magnitudes are either in, or accurately transformed into, the Johnson $B$ and $V$ magnitude systems. This is vital because offsets in old sequences and the visual-to-$V$ transformation make for errors from 0.1-1.0 magnitude if not corrected. Our V603 Aql light curve is the first time that this has been done for any nova. Our goal was to see the evolution of the mass accretion rate on the century time scale, and to test the long-standing prediction of the Hibernation model that old novae should be fading significantly in the century after their eruption is long over. The 1918 nova eruption was completely finished by 1938 when the nova decline stopped, and when the star had faded to fainter than its pre-nova brightness of $B=11.43 \pm 0.03$ mag. We find that the nova light from 1938-2013 was significantly fading, with this being seen consistently in three independent data sets (the Sonneberg plates in $B$, the AAVSO $V$ light curve, and the non-AAVSO $V$ light curve). We find that V603 Aql is declining in brightness at an average rate of $0.44 \pm 0.04$ mag per century since 1938. This work provides remarkable confirmation of an important prediction of the Hibernation model.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, 2 electronic online data tables, Accepted for publication ApJLet