Hollywood Homeless Youth Point-in-Time Estimate Project: An Innovative Method for Enumerating Unaccompanied Homeless Youth

Homeless youth are greatly undercounted in the United States.  Census methods for homeless adults are inappropriate for homeless youth; thus, nationally, organizations are determining new methods for counting homeless youth.  In collaboration with the Hollywood Homeless Youth Partnership, we utilized an agency-based approach to count and survey all homeless youth entering their facilities and encountered on their outreach activities. Between October 19 and October 25, 2012, 460 unique homeless youth were counted and surveyed in Hollywood. Of these, 222 experienced literal homelessness on the night of Thursday, October 18, 2012, and 381 experienced literal homelessness within the previous year.  Literal homelessness refers to youth who are either living in emergency or transitional housing or living on the streets or in parks, abandoned buildings, cars, subway tunnels, or other places not meant for human habitation. Of the surveyed youth who experienced literal homelessness in the last year, 65% were male, their average age was 21 years, their average age of first literal homelessness experience was17 years, and 43% were from Los Angeles. Our week-long, agency-based approached was successful in enumerating homeless youth in Hollywood.

Timothy McGee, editor, with A. G. Rigg and David N. Klausner. Singing Early Music: The Pronunciation of European Languages in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance

Singing Early Music is designed primarily as a practical handbook for performers based on sound linguistic scholarship. It offers important advice to singers and choral conductors, and it is of interest to musicologists and literary scholars as well. Much of the information presented was not easily accessible to performers prior to the book's publication, and this information has been gathered and presented in a clear, concise, interesting, and, above all, convenient fashion. This is an eminently useful book, but it needs to be used with discretion

Vortices in self-gravitating disks

Vortices are believed to greatly help the formation of km sized planetesimals by collecting dust particles in their centers. However, vortex dynamics is commonly studied in non-self-gravitating disks. The main goal here is to examine the effects of disk self-gravity on the vortex dynamics via numerical simulations. In the self-gravitating case, when quasi-steady gravitoturbulent state is reached, vortices appear as transient structures undergoing recurring phases of formation, growth to sizes comparable to a local Jeans scale, and eventual shearing and destruction due to gravitational instability. Each phase lasts over 2-3 orbital periods. Vortices and density waves appear to be coupled implying that, in general, one should consider both vortex and density wave modes for a proper understanding of self-gravitating disk dynamics. Our results imply that given such an irregular and rapidly changing, transient character of vortex evolution in self-gravitating disks it may be difficult for such vortices to effectively trap dust particles in their centers that is a necessary process towards planet formation.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of Cool Stars, Stellar Systems and The Sun, 15th Cambridge Workshop, St. Andrews, Scotland, July 21-25, 200

Fiscal Paradise: Foreign Tax Havens and American Business

The offshore tax haven affiliates of American corporations account for more than a quarter of US foreign investment, an nearly a third of the foreign profits of US firms. This paper analyzes the origins of this tax haven activity and its implications for the US and foreign governments. Based on the behavior of US fins in 1982, it appears that American companies report extraordinarily high profit rates on both their real and their financial investments in tax havens. We calculate from this behavior that the tax rate that maximizes tax revenue for a typical haven is around 6%. The revenue implications for the US are more complicated, since tax havens may ultimately enhance the ability of the US government to tax the foreign earnings of American companies.

Introducing a Hybrid Method of Radiative Transfer in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

We present a new method of incorporating radiative transfer into Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). There have been many recent attempts at radiative transfer in SPH (Stamatellos et al 2005, 2005, Mayer et al 2007, Whitehouse and Bate 2006), however these are becoming increasingly complex, with some methods requiring the photosphere to be mapped (which is often of non-trivial geometric shape), and extra conditions to be applied there (matching atmospheres as in Cai et al (2008), or specifying cooling at the photosphere as in Mayer et al (2007)). The method of identifying the photosphere is usually a significant addition to the total simulation runtime, and often requires extra free parameters, the changing of which will affect the final results. Our method is not affected by such concerns, as the photosphere is constructed implicitly by the algorithm without the need for extra free parameters. The algorithm used is a synergy of two current formalisms for radiative effects: a) the polytropic cooling formalism proposed by Stamatellos et al (2007), and b) flux-limited diffusion, used by many authors to simulate radiation transport in the optically thick regime (e.g. Mayer et al 2007). We present several tests of this method: (1) The evolution of a 0.07 solar mass protoplanetary disc around a 0.5 solarmass star (Pickett et al 2003, Mejia et al 2005, Boley et al 2006, Cai et al 2008); (2) The collapse of a non-rotating 1 solar mass molecular cloud (Masunaga & Inutsuka 2000, Stamatellos et al 2007); (3) The thermal relaxation of temperature fluctuations in an static homogeneous sphere (Masunaga et al 1998, Spiegel 1957, Stamatellos et al 2007)Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the Cool Stars 15 conferenc

Simulation and Phases of Macroscopic Particles in Vortex Flow

Granular materials are an interesting class of media in that they exhibit many disparate characteristics depending on conditions. The same set of particles may behave like a solid, liquid, gas, something in-between, or something completely unique depending on the conditions. Practically speaking, granular materials are used in many aspects of manufacturing, therefore any new information gleaned about them may help refine these techniques. For example, learning of a possible instability may help avoid it in practical application, saving machinery, money, and even personnel. To that end, we intend to simulate a granular medium under tornado-like vortex airflow by varying particle parameters and observing the behaviors that arise. The simulation itself was written in Python from the ground up, starting from the basic simulation equations in Pöschel [1]. From there, particle spin, viscous friction, and vertical and tangential airflow were added. The simulations were then run in batches on a local cluster computer, varying the parameters of radius, flow force, density, and friction. Phase plots were created after observing the behaviors of the simulations and the regions and borders were analyzed. Most of the results were as expected: smaller particles behaved more like a gas, larger particles behaved more like a solid, and most intermediate simulations behaved like a liquid. A small subset formed an interesting crossover region in the center, and under moderate forces began to throw a few particles at a time upward from the center in a fountain-like effect. Most borders between regions appeared to agree with analysis, following a parabolic critical rotational velocity at which the parabolic surface of the material dips to the bottom of the mass of particles. The fountain effects seemed to occur at speeds along and slightly faster than this division

Rhetoric of Global Warming: Multimodal Arguments in Public and Scientific Contexts

Public opinion about scientific issues guides behavior and policy decisions with local and global ramifications. This report analyzes techniques for communicating about scientific issues used in visual media aimed at two distinct audiences, scientific communities and the public. It compares their practices in samples from the current issue of global warming, using an article from the journal Nature as an example of scientific communication and the popular documentary An Inconvenient Truth as an example of public argumentation

Managing the transition : enhancing the efficiency of Eastern European governments

The transition to a market economy in Eastern Europe requires eliminating some institutions and practices and introducing new agencies with new goals, staffed by people with different attitudes and behavior. After interviewing 42 World Bank experts and other experts in the donor and academic communities, the author synthesizes their views on World Bank member countries in Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia): Giving a broad-brush overview of what is known about capacity constraints in key public institutions involved in the transition. Identifying current and proposed actions of the World Bank and other donors. Indicating critical institutional issues on which future operational work and research might focus. The author finds that a consensus has emerged on five principles that establish the socially acceptable domain for government economic activity in Eastern Europe: (1) Retreat from the discredited central government, as subnational governments and private enterprises assume many functions of central government. (2) Improved channels of communication between governments and their citizens, in response to increasing demand for more transparent policy and an institutionalized voice for the public in policymaking. (3) A hospitable business environment, which means clarification of property rights; policy stability, consistency, and accountability; low-cost provision of government services and infrastructure; and the protection of agents from abuses in the marketplace. (4) Concern for public welfare and social justice, as citizens of post-communist Eastern Europe hope to obtain both the familiar basic securities (job security, subsidized consumption, and universal access to basic health care and education) as well as new rights and freedoms. (5) Efficient government administration at all levels, under the scrutiny ofelected legislatures, citizens groups, and internal audit and review agencies. The author identifies five areas in which external institutional assistance is needed: (1) policy advice on a range of issues; (2) more in-depth technical assistance; (3) a large-scale training effort to help close Eastern Europe's massive skills gap in economics and business; (4) diagnostic research; and (5) the design of broad, medium-term action plans. For each of these issues, the author describes numerous measures to be pursued.National Governance,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,ICT Policy and Strategies,Public Sector Economics&Finance

Analysis of permanent magnets as elasmobranch bycatch reduction devices in hook-and-line and longline trials

Previous studies indicate that elasmobranch fishes (sharks, skates and rays) detect the Earth’s geomagnetic field by indirect magnetoreception through electromagnetic induction, using their ampullae of Lorenzini. Applying this concept, we evaluated the capture of elasmobranchs in the presence of permanent magnets in hook-and-line and inshore longline fishing experiments. Hooks with neodymium-iron-boron magnets significantly reduced the capture of elasmobranchs overall in comparison with control and procedural control hooks in the hook-and-line experiment. Catches of Atlantic sharpnose shark (Rhizoprionodon terraenovae) and smooth dogfish (Mustelus canis) were signif icantly reduced with magnetic hook-and-line treatments, whereas catches of spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias) and clearnose skate (Raja eglanteria) were not. Longline hooks with barium-ferrite magnets significantly reduced total elasmobranch capture when compared with control hooks. In the longline study, capture of blacktip sharks (Carcharhinus limbatus) and southern stingrays (Dasyatis americana) was reduced on magnetic hooks, whereas capture of sandbar shark (Carcharhinus plumbeus) was not affected. Teleosts, such as red drum (Sciaenops ocellatus), Atlantic croaker (Micropogonias undulatus), oyster toadfish (Opsanus tau), black sea bass (Centropristis striata), and the bluefish (Pomatomas saltatrix), showed no hook preference in either hook-and-line or longline studies. These results indicate that permanent magnets, although eliciting species-specific capture trends, warrant further investigation in commercial longline and recreational fisheries, where bycatch mortality is a leading contributor to declines in elasmobranch populations