Just Get Me to the Church: Assessing Policies to Promote Marriage among Fragile Families

This article examines alternative approaches to encourage family formation among fragile families, including higher cash benefits, more liberal acceptance of welfare applications, more effective child support enforcement, and efforts to increase education and employment of low-income parents. We examine these approaches by refining and expanding previous work on a generalized logit model of the mothers’ actual family formation outcomes, in a hierarchy that includes father absence, father involvement, cohabitation, and marriage. Refinements involve measurements of family formation that make our results more comparable to other studies and new controls for previous fertility with the father of the focal child and with another partner (multiple partner fertility). We estimate these models using interim data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being 12 month follow-up Survey. The results indicate that, unlike their effects on mature families, cash benefits increase the odds of family formation (short of marriage) among fragile families and effective child support enforcement increases the odds of marriage. However, the father’s employment status outweighs the effects of these traditional income security policies on family formation, because it affects outcomes all along the hierarchy, including marriage, and its effects are larger. Unlike previous research, our data on previous fertility enables us to separate the effects of previous children in common from multiple partner fertility on family formation. Both significantly affect family formation (though in opposite directions), but even after including these variables, blacks, who are more likely to bring children from previous unions into a new union, have substantially lower odds of cohabitation and marriage than non-Hispanic whites.

The M Word: The Rise and Fall of Interracial Coalitions On Fathers And Welfare Reform

Buoyed by the success of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), whose time limits and work requirements played a large role in the reduction of the welfare rolls, conservative advocates of welfare reform are now moving to ensure that our welfare system reflects traditional family values as well. Responding to this sentiment, the Bush Administration is encouraging states to use TANF to support marriage promotion efforts and the Administration's 2002 budget includes $100 million in support of demonstration projects to promote marriage (source). By contrast, the$60 million President Bush had committed to support efforts to promote responsible fatherhood, not restricted to marriage, has been pared back to $20 million, along with cutbacks in other domestic initiatives that are needed to pay for the "war against terrorism."

SGPN: Similarity Group Proposal Network for 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation

We introduce Similarity Group Proposal Network (SGPN), a simple and intuitive deep learning framework for 3D object instance segmentation on point clouds. SGPN uses a single network to predict point grouping proposals and a corresponding semantic class for each proposal, from which we can directly extract instance segmentation results. Important to the effectiveness of SGPN is its novel representation of 3D instance segmentation results in the form of a similarity matrix that indicates the similarity between each pair of points in embedded feature space, thus producing an accurate grouping proposal for each point. To the best of our knowledge, SGPN is the first framework to learn 3D instance-aware semantic segmentation on point clouds. Experimental results on various 3D scenes show the effectiveness of our method on 3D instance segmentation, and we also evaluate the capability of SGPN to improve 3D object detection and semantic segmentation results. We also demonstrate its flexibility by seamlessly incorporating 2D CNN features into the framework to boost performance

A semi-empirical representation of the temporal variation of total greenhouse gas levels expressed as equivalent levels of carbon dioxide

Abstract and PDF report are also available on the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change website (http://globalchange.mit.edu/).In order to examine the underlying longer-term trends in greenhouse gases, that are driven for example by anthropogenic emissions or climate change, it is useful to remove the recurring effects of natural cycles and oscillations on the sources and/or sinks of those gases that have strong biological (e.g., CO2, CH4, N2O) and/or photochemical (e.g. CH4) influences on their global atmospheric cycles. We use global observations to calculate monthly estimates of greenhouse gas levels expressed as CO2 equivalents, and then fit these estimates to a semi-empirical model that includes the natural seasonal, QBO, and ENSO variations, as well as a second order polynomial expressing longer-term variations. We find that this model provides a reasonably accurate fit to the observation-based monthly data. We also show that this semiempirical model has some predictive capability; that is it can be used to provide a reasonably reliable estimate of CO2 equivalents at the current time using validated observations that lag real time by a few to several months.This study received support from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is funded by a consortium of government, industry and foundation sponsors

Fully Coherent X-ray Pulses from a Regenerative Amplifier Free Electron Laser

We propose and analyze a novel regenerative amplifier free electron laser (FEL) to produce fully coherent x-ray pulses. The method makes use of narrow-bandwidth Bragg crystals to form an x-ray feedback loop around a relatively short undulator. Self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) from the leading electron bunch in a bunch train is spectrally filtered by the Bragg reflectors and is brought back to the beginning of the undulator to interact repeatedly with subsequent bunches in the bunch train. The FEL interaction with these short bunches not only amplifies the radiation intensity but also broadens its spectrum, allowing for effective transmission of the x-rays outside the crystal bandwidth. The spectral brightness of these x-ray pulses is about two to three orders of magnitude higher than that from a single-pass SASE FEL.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Passive wireless antenna sensor for strain, temperature, crack and fatigue measurement

An apparatus and method is provided for monitoring a condition of a structure using a passive wireless antenna sensor having a known resonant frequency when mounted on the structure. A series of radio frequency signals are transmitted with sweeping frequencies around the known resonant frequency to the passive wireless antenna sensor. The passive wireless antenna sensor includes a dielectric substrate disposed between an antenna pattern and a ground plane such that a change in the condition of the structure will cause a change in one or more characteristics of the passive wireless sensor. A signal is received from the passive wireless antenna sensor and a resonant frequency of the passive wireless antenna sensor is determined based on the received signal. The determined resonant frequency is then compared to the known resonant frequency, whereby a change in the resonant frequency indicates a change in the condition of the structure.Board of Regents, University of Texas Syste

Guaranteeing benefits in generational pension plans

In this paper we analyze the possibilities of intergenerational risk sharing in a generational DB pension fund. Each generation is subject to discretionary investment, indexation and contribution policies, thereby losing intergenerational diversification gains. Intergenerational risk sharing is repaired by introducing contingent claims on the generational surplus or deficit. We find that in some circumstances the values of these options can be substantial

The Design of Reliable Protocols for Wireless Traffic Signal System

Electronic traffic signal has the advantage of being easily visible to machines. It is expected to augment the traditional traffic light system in future intelligent transportation environments, where intelligent vehicles interact with each other and with traffic systems and give informed advisories to drivers. One problem with wireless signals is that they are essentially omnidirectional. Even if one uses directional wireless signaling source, it is not clear how any recipient of a signal can reliably determine whether the signal is meant for him or her, in the presence of signal reflections. In this paper, we present a basic electronic traffic signaling protocol framework and two reliable protocols for intersection traffic signal and stop sign signal. These protocols enable recipient vehicles to robustly differentiate the signal’s designated directions despite of potential threats(confusions) caused by reflections. We demonstrate how touse one of the protocol to construct a sample application: a red-light alert system. We also address potential inconsistency threats caused by the uncertainty of location system being used and discuss means to handle them

Efficient estimation of binding free energies between peptides and an MHC class II molecule using coarse‐grained molecular dynamics simulations with a weighted histogram analysis method

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137767/1/jcc24845.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137767/2/jcc24845_am.pd