The Safety Net as a Network

The lack of a coherent understanding of what is meant by the American safety net made it difficult to have a meaningful discourse on the current condition. This paper proposes an alternative formulation of the social safety net based in network theory to overcome the shortcomings of the previous literature. The first part of the paper describes this approach, attempting to develop an alternative understanding of the safety net grounded in the actions of anti-poverty actors. Next is a list of propositions for measuring five dimensions of a safety net: the frame, structure, positions, influences, and the context. Three policy implications are derived from this new paradigm. First, shifting the level of analysis to network level allows policy makers to broaden the scope of the modern social safety net. Second, quantifying the interaction among actors reveals interdependency, which in turn redefines the power and influence of each actor within the network. Finally, the modern safety net could demonstrate a core-periphery structure. It calls for a new way of thinking about resource distribution and decision making channels of such unique structure.LBJ School of Public Affair

X-shaped radio galaxies as observational evidence for the interaction of supermassive binary black holes and accretion disk at pc scale

A supermassive black hole binary may form during galaxy mergering. we investigate the interaction of the supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) and an accretion disk and show that the detected X-shaped structure in some FRII radio galaxies may be due to the interaction-realignment of inclined binary and accretion disk occurred within the pc scale of the galaxy center. We compare in detail the model and observations and show that the configuration is consistent very well with the observations of X-shaped radio sources. X-shaped radio feature form only in FRII radio sources due to the strong interaction between the binary and a standard disk, while the absence of X-shaped FRI radio galaxies is due to that the interaction between the binary and the radiatively inefficient accretion flow in FRI radio sources is negligible. It is suggested that the binary would keep misaligned with the outer disk for most of the life time of FRII radio galaxies and the orientation of jet in most FRII radio galaxies distributes randomly, while the jets in most FRI radio galaxies is expected to be vertical to the accretion disk and thus the major axis of host galaxy. We discuss the relationship of X-shaped and double-double radio galaxies (DDRGs). The model is applied in paticular to two X-shaped radio sources 4C+01.30 and 3C293 and one DDRG source J0116-473 and show that the SMBBHs in the three objects have black hole mass ratios $q \sim 0.1 - 0.3$.Comment: 35 pages, no figure, no table. Accepted for publication in MNRA