Youth Perspectives on Permanency

"What do foster youth think about permanency?" CPYP, in partnership with the California Youth Connection (CYC), held interviews and focus groups with several foster youth to talk about this question. This document explores some of their answers

The half-filled Hubbard chain in the Composite Operator Method: A comparison with Bethe Ansatz

The one-dimensional Hubbard model at half-filling is studied in the framework of the Composite Operator Method using a static approximation. A solution characterized by strong antiferromagnetic correlations and a gap for any nonzero on-site interaction U is found. The corresponding ground-state energy, double occupancy and specific heat are in excellent agreement with those obtained within the Bethe Ansatz. These results show that the Composite Operator Method is an appropriate framework for the half-filled Hubbard chain and can be applied to evaluate properties, like the correlation functions, which cannot be obtained by means of the Bethe Ansatz, except for some limiting cases.Comment: 7 pages, 3 embedded Postscript figures, EuroTeX, submitted to EuroPhysics Letter

Optimal State-Contingent Unemployment Insurance

Since the probability of finding a job is affected not only by individual effort but also by the aggregate state of the economy, designing unemployment insurance payments conditional on the business cycle could be valuable. This paper answers a fundamental question related to this issue: How should the payments vary with the aggregate state of the economy?Unemployment Insurance; Aggregate Fluctuations; Recursive Contracts and Moral Hazard

Dynamics of drive systems for wind energy conversion

Calculations are performed to determine the dynamic effects of mechanical power transmission from the nacelle of a horizontal axis wind machine to the ground or to an intermediate level. It is found that resonances are likely at 2 or 4/REV, but they occur at low power only, and seem easily correctable. Large reductions are found in the harmonic torque inputs to the generator at powers near rated

Ancillary Documentation on the Union Army Migration Data set (UMAD)

migration; economic history; economics of aging

Turbine blade-tip clearance excitation forces

The results of an effort to assess the existing knowledge and plan the required experimentation in the area of turbine blade tip excitation forces is summarized. The work was carried out in three phases. The first was a literature search and evaluation, which served to highlight the state of the art and to expose the need for an articulated theoretical experimental effort to provide not only design data, but also a rational framework for their extrapolation to new configurations and regimes. The second phase was a start in this direction, in which several of the explicit or implicit assumptions contained in the usual formulations of the Alford force effect were removed and a rigorous linearized flow analysis of the behavior of a nonsymmetric actuator disc was carried out. In the third phase a preliminary design of a turbine test facility that would be used to measure both the excitation forces themselves and the flow patterns responsible for them were conducted and do so over a realistic range of dimensionless parameters

Orbit control of asteroids in libration point orbits for resource exploitation

The fascinating idea of shepherding asteroids for science and resource utilisation is being considered as a very credible concept in a not too distant future. Past studies have identified asteroids which could be injected into manifolds which wind onto periodic orbits around collinear Lagrangian points of the Sun-Earth system, by means of a low-cost manoeuvre. However, the periodic orbits as well as the manifolds are highly unstable, and small errors in the capture manoeuvre would bring to complete mission failure, with potential danger of collision with the Earth itself. The main source of injection error in position and velocity is the epistemic uncertainty of the asteroid mass, which cannot be measured directly. For this reason, asteroid orbit control will be a strict requirement for such mission. This paper investigates the controllability of some asteroids during the transfer and along the period orbits, assuming the use of a solar-electric low-thrust engine. The control scheme is based on a linear quadratic regulator. A stochastic simulation with a Monte Carlo approach is used to simulate a range of different perturbed initial conditions. Results show that only a small subset of the considered combinations of trajectories/asteroids are reliably controllable, and therefore controllability must be taken into account in the selection of potential targets