Cluster Formation Induced by Local Dielectric Saturation in Restricted Primitive Model Electrolytes.

Experiments using the Surface Force Apparatus (SFA) have found anomalously long-ranged charge-charge underscreening in concentrated salt solutions. Meanwhile, theory and simulations have suggested ion clustering to be a possible origin of this behavior. The popular Restricted Primitive Model of electrolyte solutions, in which the solvent is represented by a uniform relative dielectric constant, ε, is unable to resolve the anomalous underscreening seen in experiments.

An efficient method to establish electrostatic screening lengths of restricted primitive model electrolytes.

We present a novel, and computationally cheap, way to estimate electrostatic screening lengths from simulations of restricted primitive model (RPM) electrolytes. We demonstrate that the method is accurate by comparisons with simulated long-ranged parts of the charge density, at various Bjerrum lengths, salt concentrations and ion diameters. We find substantial underscreening in low dielectric solvent, but with an "aqueous" solvent, there is instead overscreening, the degree of which increases with ion size.

Developing New Scales of Personal Food Security.

Background: Food insecurity is standardly measured at the household level or for groups of household members. However, food hardships may differ for individuals within households. Summary measures of people's individual experiences of food insecurity are needed.

Towards an accurate method for column void volume determination using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.

Prediction of analyte retention times requires prior knowledge of the column void volume, the measurement of which is still highly contested within the literature and therefore experimental based prediction is often used. In this study, we investigated deuterated acetonitrile as an isotopically labelled mobile phase component to observe its elution behaviour in a binary mixture with water at 25 different mobile phase compositions (from 5 to 95 vol.% of acetonitrile), on two stationary phases (C8 and C18), and at two temperatures (30 and 40 °C) using LC-MS.

Machine learning-assisted non-destructive plasticizer identification and quantification in historical PVC objects based on IR spectroscopy.

Non-destructive spectroscopic analysis combined with machine learning rapidly provides information on the identity and content of plasticizers in PVC objects of heritage value. For the first time, a large and diverse collection of more than 100 PVC objects in different degradation stages and of diverse chemical compositions was analysed by chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques to create a dataset used to construct classification and regression models. Accounting for this variety makes the model more robust and reliable for the analysis of objects in museum collections.

Implications of COVID-19 labour market shocks for inequality in financial wellbeing.

Australia's economy abruptly entered into a recession due to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Related labour market shocks on Australian residents have been substantial due to business closures and social distancing restrictions. Government measures are in place to reduce flow-on effects to people's financial situations, but the extent to which Australian residents suffering these shocks experience lower levels of financial wellbeing, including associated implications for inequality, is unknown.

The reciprocal relationship between depressive symptoms and employment status.

This paper analyzes the reciprocal lagged relationship between depressive symptoms and employment status. We find that severe depressive symptoms contribute to a 25.6% increase in subsequent non-employment rates, a 20.

Nonmarital First Births, Marriage, and Income Inequality.

Many aggregate-level studies suggest a relationship between economic inequality and socio-demographic outcomes such as family formation, health, and mortality; but individual-level evidence is lacking. Nor is there satisfactory evidence on the mechanisms by which inequality may have an effect. We study the determinants of transitions to a nonmarital first birth as a single parent or as a cohabiting parent compared to transitions to marriage prior to a first birth among unmarried, childless young adults in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, from 1997 to 2011.

Rasch Analyses of Very Low Food Security among Households and Children in the Three City Study.

The longitudinal Three City Study of low-income families with children measures food hardships using fewer questions and some different questions from the standard U.S. instrument for measuring food security, the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM) in the Current Population Survey (CPS).

Long-Term Implications of Welfare Reform for the Development of Adolescents and Young Adults.

We draw upon the 3-wave longitudinal dataset called Welfare Children and Families: A Three-City Study to examine the long-term implications for adolescents and young adults (N=783) of mothers' welfare receipt and labor force participation from 1999 to 2005. In general, changes in mothers' work and welfare patterns were not associated with deterioration or improvement in youth development (ages 16 to 20 years at wave 3). The few significant associations suggested that youth whose mothers increased employment (net of welfare participation) were more likely to show declines in serious behavior problems and delinquency compared to youth whose mothers were unemployed or employed part-time during the study period.

Welfare Reform in the mid-2000s: How African-American and Hispanic Families in Three Cities are Faring.

This article reports on a sample of 538 African American and Hispanic women who were receiving TANF in 1999, 416 of whom left the program by 2005. The Hispanic women consisted of a Mexican-origin group and a second group that was primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican. Combining the experiences of the employed and the non-employed welfare leavers, we find at best a modest decline in the average poverty rate among African American welfare leavers between 1999 and 2005.

Welfare reform and female headship.

While much of the focus of recent welfare reforms has been on moving recipients from welfare to work, many reforms were also directed at decisions regarding living arrangements, pregnancy, marriage, and cohabitation. This article assesses the impact of welfare reform waivers and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs on women's decisions to become unmarried heads of families, controlling for confounding influences from local economic and social conditions. We pooled data from the 1990, 1992, 1993, and 1996 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which span the period when many states began to adopt welfare waivers and to implement TANF, and estimated logit models of the incidence of female headship and state-stratified, Cox proportional hazard models of the rates of entry into and exit from headship.