The Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study: Questions, Design, and a Few Preliminary Results

Nonmarital childbearing is important because it is increasing and because there is concern (and some evidence) that it is damaging to children and perhaps parents as well. We refer to the unions of unwed parents as fragile families because they are similar to traditional families in many respects, but more vulnerable. Most people believe that children in fragile families would be better off if their parents lived together and their fathers were more involved in their upbringing. Indeed, public policy is now attempting to enlarge the role of unwed fathers both by cutting public cash support for single mothers and by strengthening paternity establishment and child support enforcement. Yet the scientific basis for these policies is weak. We know very little about the men who father children outside marriage, and we know even less about the nature of their relationships with their children and their children’s mothers. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFS) is designed to remedy this situation by following a new birth cohort of approximately 4,700 children, including 3,600 children born to unmarried parents. The new data will be representative of nonmarital births in each of 20 cities and in U.S. cities with populations over 200,000. Both mothers and fathers will be followed for at least 4 years, and in-home assessments of children’s heath and development will be carried out when the child is 4 years old. The survey is designed to address the following questions: (1) What are the conditions and capabilities of new unwed parents, especially fathers? (2) What is the nature of the relationships in fragile families? (3) What factors push new unwed parents together and what factors pull them apart? In particular, how do labor markets, welfare, and child support public policies affect family formation? (4) How do children fare in fragile families and how is their well-being affected by parental capacities and relationships, and by public policies? The paper discusses what we know about each of these questions and how the FFS addresses each of them. It also presents preliminary findings based on data from Austin, Texas, and Oakland, California.

Towards the right standards : the intersection of open science, responsible research and innovation, and standards

The introduction of standards in research and development leading to new products or innovative processes can be thought of as a particularly technical approach to framing scientific enterprises. At the other end of the spectrum, open science or responsible research and innovation may be initially thought of as concepts with no underlying technical approaches to support them. In reality as currently practiced, the development and use of standards engages significant non-technical aspects, needing to take into account research cultures or desired societal outcomes. Similarly, open science, and responsible research and innovation can operate using very practical and technical approaches. This essay focuses at the intersections of these concepts to try to contribute to larger discussions in both the research and governance communities as to how researchers should conduct their research, and what respective responsibilities of researchers, their institutes, and their supporters are

Unmarried Fathers’ Earnings Trajectories: Does Partnership Status Matter?

Married men earn more than unmarried men. Previous research suggests that marriage itself causes some of the difference, but includes few men who fathered children out of wedlock. This paper asks whether increasing marriage (and possibly cohabitation) following a non-marital birth is likely to increase fathers’ earnings and labor supply. The analyses are based on a new birth cohort study the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study which follows unmarried parents for the first five years after their child’s birth. Results provide some support for the idea that increasing marriage will lead to increased fathers’ earnings.Cohabitation, marriage, income, men, males, earnings, income, children

Size-Dependent Transition to High-Dimensional Chaotic Dynamics in a Two-Dimensional Excitable Medium

The spatiotemporal dynamics of an excitable medium with multiple spiral defects is shown to vary smoothly with system size from short-lived transients for small systems to extensive chaos for large systems. A comparison of the Lyapunov dimension density with the average spiral defect density suggests an average dimension per spiral defect varying between three and seven. We discuss some implications of these results for experimental studies of excitable media.Comment: 5 pages, Latex, 4 figure

Child support reform: some analysis of the 1999 white paper

This paper uses a sample of lone mothers (and former lone mothers who are now repartnered) drawn from the 1997 Family Resources Survey to analyse the potential effects of reforming the UK system of Child Support. The main deficiency of the data is that non-resident fathers cannot be matched to the mothers in the data and this is overcome by exploiting information from another dataset which gives the joint distribution of the characteristics of separated parents. The effects of reforming the Child Support system is simulated for the amount of maintenance liabilities, the amount paid and the net incomes of households containing mothers with care and households containing non-resident fathers. The likely effects of the reform are simulated at various levels of compliance. The analysis highlights the need for further research into the incentive effects of Child Support on individual behaviour

Unmarried fathers' earnings trajectories: does partnership status matter?

Married men earn more than unmarried men. Previous research suggests that marriage itself "causes" some of the difference, but includes few men who fathered children out of wedlock. This paper asks whether increasing marriage (and possibly cohabitation) following a non-marital birth is likely to increase fathers' earnings and labor supply. The analyses are based on a new birth cohort study—the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study—which follows unmarried parents for the first five years after their child's birth. Results provide some support for the idea that increasing marriage will lead to increase

Improvement of the GEOS-5 AGCM upon Updating the Air-Sea Roughness Parameterization

The impact of an air-sea roughness parameterization over the ocean that more closely matches recent observations of air-sea exchange is examined in the NASA Goddard Earth Observing System, version 5 (GEOS-5) atmospheric general circulation model. Surface wind biases in the GEOS-5 AGCM are decreased by up to 1.2m/s. The new parameterization also has implications aloft as improvements extend into the stratosphere. Many other GCMs (both for operational weather forecasting and climate) use a similar class of parameterization for their air-sea roughness scheme. We therefore expect that results from GEOS-5 are relevant to other models as well

TOWARDS FULLY AUTOMATED DIGITAL ALIBIS WITH SOCIAL INTERACTION

Digital traces found on local hard drives as a result of online activities have become very valuable in reconstructing events in digital forensic investigations. This paper demonstrates that forged alibis can be created for online activities and social interactions. In particular, a novel, automated framework is presented that uses social interactions to create false digital alibis. The framework simulates user activity and supports communications via email as well as instant messaging using a chatbot. The framework is evaluated by extracting forensic artifacts and comparing them with the results obtained from a human user study