Measurement Outcomes and Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics

The decision-theoretic account of probability in the Everett or many-worlds interpretation, advanced by David Deutsch and David Wallace, is shown to be circular. Talk of probability in Everett presumes the existence of a preferred basis to identify measurement outcomes for the probabilities to range over. But the existence of a preferred basis can only be established by the process of decoherence, which is itself probabilistic

Review of Richard Healey, Gauging What's Real.

Review of Richard Healey's 2008 book. To appear in MIND

Unlocking care: continuing mental health care for prisoners and their families

Summary People in prison have a higher incidence of mental illness than the general population. The prevalence of mental health issues is higher again for women prisoners. Although evidence suggests that some improvement can be achieved during imprisonment, new research reported in this paper finds that average mental health deteriorates in the year following release. The imprisonment of a close family member also places strains on families, including increased mental distress. The effects on children can be long lasting. While the mental health needs of prisoners have been recognised by federal, state and territory governments, the needs of their families has received less attention. Providing continued care from prison into the community is known as ‘throughcare’. The continuation of health services helps overcome some of the barriers people face re-connecting with services in the community and may contribute to a reversal of the decline in mental health following release. Accessing mental health services will often be one challenge among many, including the reestablishment of relationships with children and partners, finding secure housing, maintaining substance-use programs or counselling and finding a job. Coordinating social services for people returning to society will improve the overall success of transition. Families can also play an important role in supporting this transition – therefore, investing more resources into understanding their needs will have a flow-on benefit for former prisoners and society more generally. The design and delivery of mental health services for adults and children needs greater research and coordinated policy development. Federal leadership has led to the measuring and reporting of prisoner mental health. This program should be extended to include measurements following release and widened to include the families of prisoners. Interest in throughcare a decade ago resulted in a move towards the integration of prison and community health services. A majority of jurisdictions – Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia being the exceptions – now have an integrated health service, providing the foundation for the development of throughcare services. Improved delivery of mental health services potentially reduces the risk of re-imprisonment; providing wider personal, familial and community benefits

Representative Ryan's $30 Trillion Medicare Waste Tax

Representative Ryan's proposal to replace the current Medicare system with a system of vouchers or premium supports has been widely described as shifting costs from the government to beneficiaries. However, the size of this shift is actually small relative to the projected increase in costs that would result from having Medicare provided by private insurers instead of the government-run Medicare system. The Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) projections imply that the Ryan plan would add more than $30 trillion to the cost of providing Medicare equivalent policies over the program's 75-year planning period. This increase in costs -- from waste associated with using a less efficient health care delivery system -- has not received the attention that it deserves in the public debate

The Wealth of the Baby Boom Cohorts After the Collapse of the Housing Bubble

This report builds upon previous CEPR projections to more accurately describe the current wealth prospects for the baby boom cohorts aged 45 to 54 and 55 to 64. The severity of the housing market meltdown, coupled with the recent collapse of the stock market, has had a severe negative impact on the wealth of these cohorts. Using data from the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finance and the November 2008 Case-Shiller 20 City Price Index, the authors create three possible scenarios for baby boomer wealth and find these households will enter retirement with little wealth beyond Social Security. For each cohort in 2004 and 2009, the paper analyzes net worth, financial assets, equity in real estate, percent of households in each cohort who will need cash to close on their primary residence, net worth of homeowners, net worth of non-homeowners, and the percent of homeowners who would need cash to close on their primary residence

The Wealth of Households: An Analysis of the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances

This paper presents data on the wealth of households by age cohort based on new data from the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). It shows that the upward redistribution of wealth continued between 2010 and 2013. As a result, most households had less wealth in 2013 than they did in 2010 and much less than in 1989, the first year examined. This is in spite of the fact that households were much less likely to have traditionally-defined benefit pensions than in prior decades

Missing the Story: The OECD's Analysis of Inequality

The OECD recently published a lengthy volume examining the causes of rising inequality in most wealthy countries over the last three decades. This paper examines that study, finding that the OECD misses most of the story of inequality because its primary focus is the ratio of the annual wage of the 90th percentile worker to the 10th percentile worker, while most of the benefits of rising inequality were concentrated much further up the income ladder. In contrast to the OECD, this paper finds that the impact of technology is negligible and actually trivially negative over the period examined. It also finds many errors in the use of data in the OECD's study, most importantly by exaggerating the number of independent observations when many of the data points are simply extrapolations. This causes the OECD to exaggerate the statistical significance of its findings. Finally, this paper suggests that the growth of the financial sector may have been an important factor contributing to the growth in inequality over the past 30 years

The Impact of the Housing Crash on Family Wealth

This paper extrapolates from data from the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finance to project household wealth, by wealth quintile, in 2009 under three alternative scenarios. The first scenario assumes that real house prices fall no further than their level as of March 2008. The second scenario assumes that real house prices fall an additional 10 percent as a 2009 average. The third scenario assumes that real house prices fall an additional 20 percent for a 2009 average. The projections show that the vast majority of families will see a substantial reduction in wealth by 2009 in any of these scenarios and that the cohorts just approaching retirement will have very little to support themselves in retirement other than their Social Security. The projections also show that a large number of families will have little or no equity in their homes in 2009

Aspects of the biology of the Australasian harrier (Circus aeruginosus approximans Peale 1848) : a thesis presented for the degree of Master of Science by thesis only in Zoology at Massey University

The study is based on 18 months intensive field-work during which 212 Australasian harriers were trapped, retrapped, measured, sexed, aged, individually marked and observed. Fortnightly observations of the individually marked population were made over a further seven months. The Australasian harrier and European marsh harrier are considered to be conspecific. Evidence is presented showing that there is no valid reason for considering Circus aeruginosus of the Pacific Islands to be a different subspecies from C. aeruginosus of Australia and New Zealand. During the breeding season ten territories in the 12 km 2 study area averaged 31 ha, nest sites averaged 910 m apart, pairs' overlapping home ranges averaged 9 km. 2 and favourite hunting areas 3 km, 2. A high population density of one bird per 50 ha was calculated. A low fledging success rate of 1.8 young per successful pair and 1.1 young per nest site, and two cases of polygyny were recorded during two breeding seasons. Territorial and courtship behaviour, nest parameters and the parental division of labour is described. Seasonal movements and the dispersion of all age and sex classes from the study area at the end of the breeding season are described. Most (66.7%) individually marked adults returned after the autumn dispersal phase and established winter home ranges averaging 9 km. 2 . The home range of an adult female in open farmland was calculated to be 14 km 2 using radio-telemetry techniques. A non-breeding season population density of one bird per 80 ha was calculated. Communal roosting, which occurred throughout the year, is discussed. Four hundred and seventy food items were identified in the diet from pellets, prey remains, stomach contents and field observations. In descending order of numerical importance in the diet were mammals (46.4%), introduced passerines (29.0%), insects (7.6%), game birds (6.7%), birds' eggs (4.8%) and aquatic prey (4.6%). Australasian harriers ate significantly greater numbers of live prey than carrion annually. Adults took significantly greater numbers of agile food items than juveniles. Females ate significantly more large (>200 g) and fewer agile food items than did males. Seven search techniques and five attack techniques, including some buteonine techniques, are identified and described in the Australasian harriers' wide range of hunting techniques. Ninety five attacks on prey are recorded and 15.8% of these were successful. Adults were significantly more successful hunters than juveniles. Co-operative hunting, hunting in the daily cycle, feeding behaviour at carrion, interspecific competition for carrion, interspecific disruption of hunting and prey escape tactics are described. From a computer analysis of hunting behaviour data it is concluded that adult males are more manoeuverable and less conspicuous than adult females and juveniles because they flew significantly lower and faster. Adult males also hunted, to a significantly greater degree, those habitats where there were greater numbers of agile prey. The hunting inexperience of juveniles was quantified. The Australasian harrier is moderately sexually dimorphic. Current hypotheses proposed to explain the degree of sexual dimorphism in raptors and why the females of most raptor species are larger than males are critically reviewed