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Daily Archives: November 2, 2014

Concentration of Poverty in the New Millennium – Paper

Concentration of Poverty in the New Millennium: Changes in the Prevalence, Composition, and Location of High-Poverty Neighborhoods by Paul Jargowsky. December 17, 2013. [Paul A. Jargowsky is a fellow with The Century Foundation, professor of public policy and director, Center for Urban Research and Education, at Rutgers University – Camden, and a senior research affiliate of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan.]

Concentration of Poverty in the New Millennium is the first to compare the 2000 census data with the 2007-11 American Community Survey (ACS), revealing the extent to which concentrated poverty has returned to, and in some ways exceeded, the previous peak level in 1990. [NOTE: Updated figures for the 2008–2012 period are available here.] Concentrated poverty is defined as census tracts where more than 40 percent of households live below the federal poverty threshold, currently set at approximately $23,000 per year for a family of four.

“In the USA, there are now more census tracts of concentrated poverty than have ever been recorded before, resulting in more than 11 million Americans, or 4 percent of the population, living in severely distressed neighborhoods,” said Jargowsky. “The increase in concentrated poverty was highest in the Midwest, which experienced a 132 percent increase in the number of people living in high poverty neighborhoods, to 2.7 million; followed by the South, which suffered a 66 percent increase to 4.6 million.”

The Century Foundation/CURE report further reveals that the most significant increases in concentrated poverty occurred., not in the major cities, but rather in small to mid-sized metropolitan areas.”

Law is Code: A Software Engineering Approach to Analyzing the United States Code

William Li, Pablo Azar, David Larochelle, Phil Hill & Andrew Lo, Law is Code: A Software Engineering Approach to Analyzing the United States Code, October 31, 2014. “The agglomeration of rules and regulations over time has produced a body of legal code that no single individual can fully comprehend. This complexity produces inefficiencies, makes the… Continue Reading

How Secure is TextSecure? – Paper

How Secure is TextSecure? Tilman Frosch and Christian Mainka and Christoph Bader and Florian Bergsma and Joerg Schwenk and Thorsten Holz, October 31, 2014. “Instant Messaging has attracted a lot of attention by users for both private and business communication and has especially gained popularity as low-cost short message replacement on mobile devices. However, most popular… Continue Reading

The Importance of Young Firms for Economic Growth

The Importance of Young Firms for Economic Growth by Jason Wiens and Chris Jackson, September 25, 2014 “More than six years after the Great Recession, the American economy finally gained back all of the jobs lost during the economic downturn. While this is positive news, underlying structural concerns remain, resulting in historically low labor force participation, high… Continue Reading

Corporate Investment and Stock Market Listing: A Puzzle?

Asker, John and Farre-Mensa, Joan and Ljungqvist, Alexander, Corporate Investment and Stock Market Listing: A Puzzle? (October 4, 2014). Forthcoming, Review of Financial Studies. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1603484 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1603484 “We investigate whether short-termism distorts the investment decisions of stock market listed firms. To do so, we compare the investment behavior of observably similar… Continue Reading

Improving Digital Publishing of Legal Scholarship, Version 1.0

Keele, Benjamin J., Improving Digital Publishing of Legal Scholarship, Version 1.0 (October 2, 2014). Journal of Things We Like (Lots), Conference — Legal Scholarship We Like, and Why It Matters, 2014; Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law Research Paper No. 2014-33. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2507933 “Legal scholarship’s main mode of formal communication,… Continue Reading

Social Security: Cost-of-Living Adjustments

CRS – Social Security: Cost-of-Living Adjustments. Gary Sidor, Information Research Specialist, October 29, 2014. To compensate for the effects of inflation, Social Security recipients usually receive an annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). Benefits will be increased by 1.7% in 2015, following an increase of 1.5% in 2014. Social Security COLAs are based on changes in the Consumer Price Index for Urban… Continue Reading

Steganography in Modern Smartphones and Mitigation Techniques

“By offering sophisticated services and centralizing a huge volume of personal data, modern smartphones changed the way we socialize, entertain and work. To this aim, they rely upon complex hardware/software frameworks leading to a number of vulnerabilities, attacks and hazards to profile individuals or gather sensitive information. However, the majority of works evaluating the security… Continue Reading

International Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Synthesis Report

“The Synthesis Report distils and integrates the findings of the three working group contributions to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report — the most comprehensive assessment of climate change yet undertaken, produced by hundreds of scientists — as well as the two Special Reports produced during this cycle.” Summary for Policymakers Synthesis Report – Longer Report… Continue Reading