168 research outputs found
Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and America's Families
Since the onset of the Great Recession, the nation has been focused on a steady stream of mostly discouraging unemployment, poverty and housing foreclosure numbers. While this data is important, it tells us only about those suffering the most severe of financial crises. It does not help identify the millions within the United States who live above the poverty line and yet struggle to pay ever-increasing housing, food, health care and other expenses. Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) has compared working-age adults' earnings and household incomes to The Basic Economic Security Tables (BEST) for the United States, a measure of the basic needs and assets workers and their households require for economic security. This report compares pre-tax incomes from 2007 through 2011 to BEST basic needs budgets for more than 400 family types,and finds that approximately 45% of Americans live on incomes that fail to provide basic economic security.This report identifies who, specifically, within the United States is living below the BEST Indexes. It tells an important story about the contemporary value of work and the relationship between economic security and gender, race/ethnicity, family structure and education
New Measures of Economic Security and Development: Savings Goals for Short-Term and Long-Term Economic Needs
The long-term economic security and development of a family depend largely upon saving and asset-accumulation, yet most measures of economic well-being focus on short-term consumption needs. This study takes a broader view, developing precautionary, retirement, homeownership and education savings goals. Together these savings goals constitute a new set of asset-based measures of family financial well-being. Estimated savings needs depend upon family type and other assumptions, and we consider investment gains and differences in dollar values over time in our calculations. This study shows that families should save 572 every month to address all four savings needs. The number of children in a family affects total monthly savings goals considerably, but the number of adults has limited impact. The study’s savings goals can assist families in making financial plans and provide target savings amounts to inform public discussion and policies
Banking (on) the Brain:From Consent to Authorisation and the Transformative Potential of Solidarity
Modern technologies and biomedicine ambitions have given rise to new models of
medical research, including population biobanking. One example of biobanking is brain
banking, which refers to the collection and storage of brain and spinal cord samples for
research into neurological diseases. Obviously, brain banking involves taking brains and
tissue from deceased people, a fact which complicates the role of recruiters and makes
consent a poor tool for stakeholders. After contextualising brain banking and considering
the public health issues at stake, this article explores the legal definitions and
demands of, and actual processes around, consent in England/Wales/Northern Ireland
and authorisation in Scotland, articulating and evaluating their conceptual and practical
differences. It then argues for an expanded but improved operation of ‘authorisation’ in
the brain banking (and broader biobanking) setting, adopting ‘solidarity’ as our foundation
and the improvement of the ‘public good’ our objective
Estimating survival rates of quagga mussel (Dreissena rostriformis bugensis) veliger larvae under summer and autumn temperature regimes in residual water of trailered watercraft at Lake Mead, USA
On 6 January 2007, invasive quagga mussels [Dreissena rostriformis bugensis (Andrusov, 1897)] were discovered in the Boulder Basin ofLake Mead, Nevada, a popular site for recreational boating in the southwestern United States. Recreational watercraft are considered aprimary vector for overland dispersal of quagga mussel veliger larvae between water bodies. Thus, effective decontamination of veligers inresidual water carried by trailered recreation boats is critical to controlling this species’ spread. The survival rate of quagga mussel veligerswas measured during exposure to environmental temperature conditions mimicking those experienced in the residual water of traileredvessels during warm summer and cooler autumn months in the semi-arid southwestern United States. Under warm summer conditions,quagga mussel veligers survived approximately five days while under cooler autumn conditions they survived 27 days. When tested underautumn temperature conditions veliger survival times increased with increased level of larval development. The results suggested a greaterlikelihood of veliger transport in the residual water of trailered watercraft during autumn months. The results indicated that presentlyrecommended vessel quarantine times to kill all externally attached juvenile and adult dreissenid mussels prior to launching in an uninfested water body should be increased to generate 100% veliger mortality in residual water unable to be fully drained from the internal areas of watercraft
(6R)-2-tert-Butyl-6-[(4R,5S)-3-isopropyl-4-methyl-5-phenyloxazolidin-2-yl]phenol
In the title compound, C23H31NO2, the lone pair on the nitrogen atom is oriented to facilitate intramolecular hydrogen bonding with the hydroxy group residing on the phenyl substituent. The five-membered ring adopts an envelope confornmation with the O atom at the flap. The absolute stereochemistry was verified by measurement of optical activity using a digital polarimeter
(6S)-2,4-Di-tert-butyl-6-[(4S,5R)-3-isopropyl-4-methyl-5-phenyloxazolidin-2-yl]phenol
The title oxazolidine compound, C27H39NO2, was synthesized from N-isopropylnorephedrine. The dihedral angle between the aromatic rings is 70.33 (5)°. The N atom of the heterocycle is oriented to allow intramolecular O—H⋯N hydrogen bonding with the hydroxy substituent
BFORE: The B-mode Foreground Experiment
The B-mode Foreground Experiment (BFORE) is a proposed NASA balloon project
designed to make optimal use of the sub-orbital platform by concentrating on
three dust foreground bands (270, 350, and 600 GHz) that complement
ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) programs. BFORE will survey ~1/4
of the sky with 1.7 - 3.7 arcminute resolution, enabling precise
characterization of the Galactic dust that now limits constraints on inflation
from CMB B-mode polarization measurements. In addition, BFORE's combination of
frequency coverage, large survey area, and angular resolution enables science
far beyond the critical goal of measuring foregrounds. BFORE will constrain the
velocities of thousands of galaxy clusters, provide a new window on the cosmic
infrared background, and probe magnetic fields in the interstellar medium. We
review the BFORE science case, timeline, and instrument design, which is based
on a compact off-axis telescope coupled to >10,000 superconducting detectors.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, conference proceedings published in Journal of
Low Temperature Physic
Growth in marine mammals : a review of growth patterns, composition and energy investment
Funded under award from Office of Naval Research: N000142012392. DPC and SA were funded under the E&P Sound and Marine Life Joint Industry Programme of the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP; grant 00-07-23). CRM is supported by the Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), IMOS s enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.Growth of structural mass and energy reserves influences individual survival, reproductive success, population and species life history. Metrics of structural growth and energy storage of individuals are often used to assess population health and reproductive potential, which can inform conservation. However, the energetic costs of tissue deposition for structural growth and energy stores and their prioritization within bioenergetic budgets are poorly documented. This is particularly true across marine mammal species as resources are accumulated at sea, limiting the ability to measure energy allocation and prioritization. We reviewed the literature on marine mammal growth to summarize growth patterns, explore their tissue compositions, assess the energetic costs of depositing these tissues and explore the tradeoffs associated with growth. Generally, marine mammals exhibit logarithmic growth. This means that the energetic costs related to growth and tissue deposition are high for early postnatal animals, but small compared to the total energy budget as animals get older. Growth patterns can also change in response to resource availability, habitat and other energy demands, such that they can serve as an indicator of individual and population health. Composition of tissues remained consistent with respect to protein and water content across species; however, there was a high degree of variability in the lipid content of both muscle (0.1–74.3%) and blubber (0.4–97.9%) due to the use of lipids as energy storage. We found that relatively few well-studied species dominate the literature, leaving data gaps for entire taxa, such as beaked whales. The purpose of this review was to identify such gaps, to inform future research priorities and to improve our understanding of how marine mammals grow and the associated energetic costs.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Precision Epoch of Reionization studies with next-generation CMB experiments
Future arcminute resolution polarization data from ground-based Cosmic
Microwave Background (CMB) observations can be used to estimate the
contribution to the temperature power spectrum from the primary anisotropies
and to uncover the signature of reionization near in the small
angular-scale temperature measurements. Our projections are based on combining
expected small-scale E-mode polarization measurements from Advanced ACTPol in
the range with simulated temperature data from the full Planck
mission in the low and intermediate region, . We show that
the six basic cosmological parameters determined from this combination of data
will predict the underlying primordial temperature spectrum at high multipoles
to better than accuracy. Assuming an efficient cleaning from
multi-frequency channels of most foregrounds in the temperature data, we
investigate the sensitivity to the only residual secondary component, the
kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) term. The CMB polarization is used to break
degeneracies between primordial and secondary terms present in temperature and,
in effect, to remove from the temperature data all but the residual kSZ term.
We estimate a detection of the diffuse homogeneous kSZ signal from
expected AdvACT temperature data at , leading to a measurement of
the amplitude of matter density fluctuations, , at precision.
Alternatively, by exploring the reionization signal encoded in the patchy kSZ
measurements, we bound the time and duration of the reionization with
and . We find that
these constraints degrade rapidly with large beam sizes, which highlights the
importance of arcminute-scale resolution for future CMB surveys.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure
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