Understanding the relative generosity of government financial support for families with children

The principal of horizontal equity can be interpreted as requiring that households with the same pre-transfer incomes and the same consumption needs should receive the same post-transfer incomes. We argue the generosity of government financial support to families with children should be analysed with respect to such a baseline. Although not without problems, equivalence scales form an important part of such a procedure. The comparison of financial support to families with children with a corresponding equivalence scale, both over time and between countries, should give a more accurate picture of generosity than comparisons of cash values alone. We discuss potential advantages and drawbacks of such comparisons, illustrating with comparisons of the US and UK systems. The main drawback is that we can only evaluate the generosity of support for children relative to that for adults. With this restriction, horizontal equity is more likely to be achieved for couples with 1 child than for those with 2 children. For some groups, the US is more generous to children (relative to adults) than the UK, but this difference is partly generated by the US system being less generous to childless households than the UK.

Elaboration versus suppression of cued memories: influence of memory recall instruction and success on parietal lobe, default network, and hippocampal activity.

Functional imaging studies of episodic memory retrieval consistently report task-evoked and memory-related activity in the medial temporal lobe, default network and parietal lobe subregions. Associated components of memory retrieval, such as attention-shifts, search, retrieval success, and post-retrieval processing also influence regional activity, but these influences remain ill-defined. To better understand how top-down control affects the neural bases of memory retrieval, we examined how regional activity responses were modulated by task goals during recall success or failure. Specifically, activity was examined during memory suppression, recall, and elaborative recall of paired-associates. Parietal lobe was subdivided into dorsal (BA 7), posterior ventral (BA 39), and anterior ventral (BA 40) regions, which were investigated separately to examine hypothesized distinctions in sub-regional functional responses related to differential attention-to-memory and memory strength. Top-down suppression of recall abolished memory strength effects in BA 39, which showed a task-negative response, and BA 40, which showed a task-positive response. The task-negative response in default network showed greater negatively-deflected signal for forgotten pairs when task goals required recall. Hippocampal activity was task-positive and was influenced by memory strength only when task goals required recall. As in previous studies, we show a memory strength effect in parietal lobe and hippocampus, but we show that this effect is top-down controlled and sensitive to whether the subject is trying to suppress or retrieve a memory. These regions are all implicated in memory recall, but their individual activity patterns show distinct memory-strength-related responses when task goals are varied. In parietal lobe, default network, and hippocampus, top-down control can override the commonly identified effects of memory strength

Child poverty in the UK since 1998-99: lessons from the past decade

As a result of the Child Poverty Act (2010), current and future governments are committed to reducing the rate of relative income child poverty in the UK to 10% by 2020-21. This paper looks in detail at the progress made towards this goal under the previous Labour administrations. Direct tax and benefit reforms are very important in explaining at least three things: the large overall reduction in child poverty since 1998-99; the striking slowdown in progress towards the child poverty targets between 2004-05 and 2007-08; and some of the variation in child poverty trends between different groups of children. However, some of the child poverty-reducing impact of those reforms acted simply to stop child poverty rising as real earnings grew over the period, which increases median income and thus the relative poverty line. The performance of parents in the labour market is important too: between regions, parental employment and child poverty trends are closely related; the overall reduction in child poverty since 1998-99 has been helped by higher lone parent employment rates; and the overall rise in child poverty since 2004-05 has been most concentrated on children of one-earner couples, whose real earnings have fallen.

A Monte Carlo Analysis of Ordinary Least Squares Versus Equal Weights

Equal weights are an alternative weighting procedure to the optimal weights offered by ordinary least squares regression analysis. Also called units weights, equal weights are formed by standardizing scores on the predictor variables and averaging these standardized scores to create a composite score. Research is limited regarding the conditions under which equal weights result in cross-validated 2 values that meet or exceed optimal weights. In this study, I explored the effect of various predictor-criterion correlations, predictor intercorrelations, and sample sizes to determine the relative performance of equal and optimal weighting schemes upon cross-validation. Results indicated that optimally weighted predictors explained more criterion variance upon cross-validation as the variability in predictor-criterion correlations increased. Similarly, it appears that as predictor intercorrelations and sample size increase, optimally weighted predictors cross-validate to explain more criterion variance than equally weighted predictors. Implications and directions for future research are discussed

The impact of a time-limited, targeted in-work benefit in the medium-term: an evaluation of In Work Credit

Conventional in-work benefits or tax credits are now well established as a policy instrument for increasing labour supply and tackling poverty. A different sort of in-work credit is one where the payments are time-limited, conditional on previous receipt of welfare, and, perhaps, not means-tested. Such a design is cheaper, and perhaps better targeted, but potentially less effective. Using administrative data, this paper evaluates one such policy for lone parents in the UK which was piloted in around one third of the country. It finds that the policy did increase flows off welfare and into work, and that these positive effects did not diminish after recipients reached the 12 month time-limit for receiving the supplement. Most of the impact arose by speeding up welfare off-flows: the job retention of programme recipients was good, but this cannot be attributed to the programme itself.In-work benefits, labour supply, time-limits, welfare, lone parents.

Observations and Simulations of Fire Weather Phenomena Across Scales

The need for a better understanding of wildfires and how the atmosphere affects them provided the motivation for this work. The November 2018 Camp Fire quickly became the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. In chapter 1, we investigate the contribution of meteorological conditions and a downslope windstorm event that occurred during the 2018 Camp Fire. Results show that this event was associated with mid-level and surface synoptic scale processes which created conditions favorable for a North wind event. Sustained surface winds between 3–6 m s-1 were observed with gusts of over 25 m s-1. The meteorological conditions of the event were well forecasted, and the severity of the fire was not surprising given the fire danger potential for that day. The usage of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS), may help to provide new observations in extreme environments such as the Camp Fire. The Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment offered a unique opportunity of a large controlled wildfire, which allowed measurements that cannot generally be taken during an active wildfire. This study highlights the use of DJI Matrice 200 that was equipped with a TriSonica Mini Wind and Weather station sonic anemometer in order to sample the fire environment in an experimental and controlled setting. The system was tested against an RM-Young 81000 sonic anemometer mounted at 6 and 2 m AGL to assess any bias in the sUAS platform. Preliminary data show that this system can be useful for taking vertical profiles, in addition to being used in place of tower measurements

The Differential Vector Phase-Locked Loop for Global Navigation Satellite System Signal Tracking

A novel differential vector phase-locked loop (DVPLL) is derived that takes GNSS code-phase and carrier-phase measurements from a base station and uses them to maintain an integer ambiguity resolved quality solution directly in the vector tracking loop of a rover receiver. The only state variables estimated and used to create the replica code and carrier signals from the base station measurements are three position and two clock states for a static test. Closing the individual loops solely through the navigation filter makes this a pure vector method. For short baselines, where differential atmospheric errors are small, the DVPLL can be used on single-frequency data. An L1-only live-sky static test was performed using the method resulting in a 3D accuracy of 5.3 mm for an 18.5 m baseline. An acquisition algorithm is also developed to initialize the DVPLL. The algorithm performs a search in the space-time domain vice the measurement domain. An upper bound on the failure rate of the algorithm can be set by the user. The algorithm was tested on 24-h dual- and single-frequency CORS data sets with close to a 100% success rate and on a 15- min data set of single-frequency IF samples with a 100% success rate