Failing by a Wide Margin: Methods and Findings in the 2003 Social Security Trustees Report

On March 17, 2003, the trustees of the Social Security program released their annual report on the system's financial status. Many observers took the report's extension of the trust fund's solvency one year to 2042 to mean that Social Security's financial health had improved. In fact, Social Security's actuarial balance declined and its cash flow deficits over the next 75 years increased to $25.33 trillion (in 2003 dollars). More important, the report contained significant new methodologies that are central to the debate over personal retirement accounts. The trustees now measure Social Security's deficits over the infinite horizon, providing remedies to the previous 75-year scoring window that substantially understates the costs of the current program and overstates the costs of personal account plans. Under this new perpetuity benchmark, the present value of Social Security's cash flow shortfalls totals$11.9 trillion, versus only $4.9 trillion over 75 years. To cover Social Security's cash deficits permanently would demand an immediate tax increase equal to 4.47 percent of payroll. The 2003 report also includes a "stochastic analysis" accounting for the variability of the economic and demographic factors affecting Social Security's finances, finding there is less than a 1-in-40 chance of Social Security remaining solvent for even 75 years without reform. The 2003 Trustees Report shows that Social Security's cash deficits are large, growing, and unlikely to fix themselves without action. Only personal account proposals have been certified to eliminate Social Security's multitrillion dollar cash shortfalls

The Second Subconstituent of some Strongly Regular Graphs

This is a report on a failed attempt to construct new graphs that are strongly regular with no triangles. The approach is based on the assumption that the second subconstituent has an equitable partition with four parts. For infinitely many odd prime powers we construct a graph that is a plausible candidate for the second subconstituent. Unfortuantely we also show that the corresponding graph is strongly regular only when the prime power is 3, in which case the graph is already known.Comment: 9 page

Doctorateness: where should we look for evidence?

This chapter considers the possibility of an “institutional theory of artistic research”. It proposes four distinct quadrants in which one might look for evidence for such a theory, which needs to have the capacity to accommodate the diverse positions on artistic research in the literature. The quadrants ("explicit", "implicit", "generic", and "specific") form a Boolean square with which one may also consider the contested term “doctorateness” in any field. The chapter concludes in due course, artistic research will gain a voice that causes researchers to re-describe activity in other disciplines owing to the way in which artistic research will be described.Peer reviewe

The rhetoric of research

In 1993 Christopher Frayling, the Rector of the Royal College of Art in London, published an article about the nature of research in art and design. The present paper revisits his threefold distinction of "research- in art, research-through art and research-for art", and considers why Frayling found the third category to be problematic. The analytical methods used are linguistic (a constructionist approach to the rhetorical effect of construing various prepositions with "research"), and philosophical (a Wittgensteinian approach, distinguishing between socially agreed normative criteria, and non-normative indicators or symptoms). The paper argues that the instrumentality of terms such as "research" should be contrasted by observations of how the register of artefacts is used in the advancement of the field. If one adopts a constructionist approach then one is forced to be sceptical about the reification of publicly agreed criteria. The paper uses Wittgenstein's distinction between criteria and symptoms to identify three indicators of research that may point towards a solution to Frayling's problem through the re-description of his category "research- for" art as "a work-of" art.Final Accepted Versio