Way Forward on Healthcare?

In the wake of a remarkable visit from Pope Francis, is it time to ask, WWFD? What would Francis do with our half-fixed, highly fragmented healthcare system? [excerpt

Will They Read It?

The Pennsylvania Health Care Plan Saves Money, But Will Legislators Take Time to Read the Bill? Al the new year begins, it\u27s time to hitch up our britches and take a look at how things are going with healthcare insurance reform. [excerpt

Medicare at Fifty Needs to Grow

In America everybody has a healthcare story. A bill impossible to read, an inscrutable additional charge, trouble getting insurance, trouble keeping it, a friend or family member who\u27s fallen between the coverage cracks. [excerpt

Why the Higgs is light, why it has SM couplings to gauge bosons and fermions, where there are more Higgses to be found -- and a new result

Theortical particle physics seminar. Current LHC data indicate that H(125) is either the single Higgs of the Standard Model or, to a good approximation, an “aligned Higgs”. We propose that it is the pseudo-Goldstone dilaton of Gildener and Weinberg. This naturally and, we conjecture, uniquely accounts for its low mass and its alignment. It further implies the existence of additional Higgs bosons in the range ~200 to ~550 GeV. We illustrate this in a version of a 2HDM of Lee and Pilaftsis. Our version is consistent with all published precision EW (LEP) and LHC (ATLAS & CMS) data. We propose tests to confirm or exclude this model at the LHC. These include surprising results on cubic and quartic couplings and a prediction that di-Higgs production can be observed with Run2 data.Supporting documentatio

The Gildener-Weinberg~mechanism and new targets within reach today

Invited presentation to the ATLAS Higgs and Diboson Search Group.Supporting documentatio

Why the Higgs is light, why it has SM couplings to gauge bosons and fermions, and where there are more Higgses to be found

Invited seminar.Supporting documentatio

Tanzania: Pilot Rural Investment Climate Assessment. Stimulating Nonfarm Microenterprise Growth

Tanzania’s Pilot Rural Investment Climate Assessment (RICA) measures the economic environment of non-farm entrepreneurs. The pilot assessment has three key objectives: it aims to better understand the rural non-farm economy in Tanzania, shed light on rural enterprise dynamics and business constraints, and reflect on areas where government policies are readily directed to help promote rural non-farm enterprise activity. The RICA is based on an analysis of a unique survey data set collected by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) during January and March 2005, covering enterprises, households, and communities in all seven geographical zones of the country. Selected findings are: (i) Non-farm activities are an important source of income for approximately 1.4 million rural households, (ii) Tanzanian rural non-farm enterprises differ from their urban counterparts, (iii) the predominant entrepreneurial activity is trading, (iv) labor productivity is typically low, (v) formal enterprises have higher levels of labor productivity than informal, (vi) the rate of new firm creation appears to be lower than in other African countries, and (vii) only a minority of enterprises propels employment growth. The pilot approach call for a careful evaluation of the following recommendations, which presented to stimulate dialogue and future analysis: (i) favorable policies and investments for agriculture play a big role for rural enterprises, (ii) maintaining favorable internal trade policies may therefore be of utmost importance in determining enterprise performance, (iii) microcredit and savings may offer a tool for promoting rural non-farm activity in buoyant rural markets, (iv) easing bottlenecks in rural infrastructure is important, (v) exploring options for better telecommunications via private sector cell phone nodes may be an attractive policy option to stimulate entrepreneurial activities, (vi) continuation of business registration reform and effective implementation at the local level remains a high priority, and (vii) future analysis should address knowledge gaps.Tanzania; rural labor markets; enterprise performance; informal sector