Demographics and the foreign indebtedness of the United States

Population ; Debt ; Investments, Foreign - United States

When will the United States grow out of its foreign debt?

In a 1989 article in this Review, John K. Hill argued that the mere aging of the baby boom generation would cause the United States to become a major capital exporter by the end of the century. To reach that conclusion, he assumed that rising U.S. capital outflows could be absorbed by the rest of the world without a decline in real interest rates. In this article, he considers the reasonableness of that assumption and reevaluates the accuracy of his earlier projections. ; Hill first examines the demographics of other major countries to see if they could support a rapid turnaround in the U.S. capital account. The results are decidedly negative. An analysis of capital flows based on demographic conditions in the United States, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom suggests that the United States could remain a net capital importer throughout this decade and into the early part of the next century. Despite these findings, Hill continues to support his earlier projections. He argues that new capital demands of former Communist and developing countries will help prevent a slide in interest rates and raise the international investment positions of all industrialized countries, including the United States.Debts, External ; Investments, Foreign - United States

Using indirect methods to understand the impact of forced migration on long-term under-five mortality.

Despite the large numbers of displaced persons and the often-lengthy periods of displacement, little is known about the impact of forced migration on long-term under-five mortality. This paper looks at the Brass Method (and adaptations of this method) and the Preceding Birth Technique in combination with a classification of women by their migration and reproductive histories, in order to study the impact of forced migration on under-five mortality. Data came from the Demography of Forced Migration Project, a study on mortality, fertility and violence in the refugee and host populations of Arua District, Uganda and Yei River District, Sudan. Results indicate that women who did not migrate in a situation of conflict and women who repatriated before the age of 15, had children with the highest under-five mortality rates compared with women who were currently refugees and women who repatriated after the age of 15

A right to roam? A trans-species approach to understanding cathuman relations and social discourses associated with freeroaming urban cats (Felis catus)

This thesis employs thematic discourse analysis to elucidate prominent themes and points of contention associated with roaming cats (Felis catus). The data comprised 2476 online user comments responding to content related to roaming cats, 75 qualitative survey responses, 771 Facebook responses, and biographies reconstructed from eight case studies of cat-human relationships. These reflect broader social discourses surrounding more-than-human animals and human governance over other animals. Notions of guardian (owner) responsibilities are underpinned by different perceptions of companion cats (pets), ranging from childlike dependents who need to be protected and ‘parented’ to wild-like animals whose confinement would be morally wrong. Comments reveal how discourses from scientists, cat and wildlife advocacy groups, and the media are filtered through a local lens and often applied out of context. The data supports the notion that media reporting is instigating a moral panic over roaming cats by evoking emotive responses to predation by cats. These invariably become entangled within discourses related to cat safety, welfare, and complaints of ‘nuisance’ behaviours. Discourses surrounding cats in the community are further examined within a morethan- human biopolitical framework that describes how cohesive social mechanisms exert control over feline bodies through normalisation of practices such as desexing and confinement. Language was found to play a key role in biopolitical control by dominating the narrative of ‘responsible’ cat guardianship. Language is also central to moral panic theory, and the term ‘feral’ was shown to reinforce a ‘folk devil’ trope of free-living cats as transgressive and inherently different from companion cats. ‘Feral’ also invoked pity among those adamant cats need human love and care. However, cats are not without agency and can co-create meaning within a multispecies home or community. Case studies demonstrated cat-human intersubjectivity (joint meaning-making) and the various relationships formed between cats and non-feline animals (including human), both inside and outside of their homes

Variational calculation of many-body wave functions and energies from density-functional theory

A generating coordinate is introduced into the exchange-correlation functional of density-functional theory (DFT). The many-body wave function is represented as a superposition of Kohn-Sham (KS) Slater determinants arising from different values of the generating coordinate. This superposition is used to variationally calculate many-body energies and wave functions from solutions of the KS equation of DFT. The method works for ground and excited states, and does not depend on identifying the KS orbitals and energies with physical ones. Numerical application to the Helium isoelectronic series illustrates the method's viability and potential.Comment: 4 pages, 2 tables, J. Chem. Phys., accepte

Dimensional Deconstruction and Wess-Zumino-Witten Terms

A new technique is developed for the derivation of the Wess-Zumino-Witten terms of gauged chiral lagrangians. We start in D=5 with a pure (mesonless) Yang-Mills theory, which includes relevant gauge field Chern-Simons terms. The theory is then compactified, and the effective D=4 lagrangian is derived using lattice techniques, or ``deconstruction,'' where pseudoscalar mesons arise from the lattice Wilson links. This yields the WZW term with the correct Witten coefficient by way of a simple heuristic argument. We discover a novel WZW term for singlet currents, that yields the full Goldstone-Wilczek current, and a U(1) axial current for the skyrmion, with the appropriate anomaly structures. A more detailed analysis is presented of the dimensional compactification of Yang-Mills in D=5 into a gauged chiral lagrangian in D=4, heeding the consistency of the D=4 and D=5 Bianchi identities. These dictate a novel covariant derivative structure in the D=4 gauge theory, yielding a field strength modified by the addition of commutators of chiral currents. The Chern-Simons term of the pure D=5 Yang-Mills theory then devolves into the correct form of the Wess-Zumino-Witten term with an index (the analogue of N_{colors}=3) of N=D=5. The theory also has a Skyrme term with a fixed coefficient.Comment: 29 pages, no figures; replacement fixes a typographical minus sign error in eq.(16), an errant normalization factor, and clarifies some discussion issue

Behavior of Spherical Particles at Low Reynolds Numbers in a Fluctuating Translational Flow. Preliminary Experiments

The behavior of small spheres in non-steady translational flow has been studied experimentally' for values of Reynolds nunber from 0 to 3000. The aim of the work was to improve our quantitative understanding of particle transport in turbulent gaseous media, a process of extreme importance in powerplants and energy transfer mechanisms. Particles, subjected to strong sinusoidal oscillations parallel to the direction of steady translation, were found to have changes in average drag coefficient depending upon their translational Reynolds number, the frequency and amplitude of the oscillations. When the Reynolds number based on the sphere diameter was les s than 200, the synunetric translational oscillation had negligible effect on the aver age particle dr ago For Reynolds numbers exceeding 300, the effective drag coefficient was significantly increased in a particular frequency range. For example, an increase in drag coefficient of 25 per cent was observed at a Reynolds nwnber of 3000 when the amplitude of the oscillation was 2 per cent of the sphere diazneter and the disturbance frequency was approximately the Strouhal frequency. The occurrence of the maximum effect at frequencies between one and two times the Stroubal frequency strongly suggests non-linear interaction between wake vortex shedding and the oscillation in translational motions. Flow visualization studies support this suggestion