and obscures the secular increase in real expenditure on means-tested transfer programs taken as a whole. Indeed, Figure 1, which shows expenditures since 1968 in the 80 largest programs in the country, indicates that per-capita expenditure on means-tested programs is higher today than ever in its history. The enormous growth in real expenditure that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ...

In 1977, reorganization of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare brought together in the Social Security Administration three major income-maintenance system--old age, survivors, and disability insurance; supplemental security income; and aid to families with dependent children. These are distinct and separate programs differing in purpose and in methods of financing and administrati...

Identification of protein domains is a key step for understanding protein function. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have proved to be a powerful tool for this task. The Pfam database notably provides a large collection of HMMs which are widely used for the annotation of proteins in sequenced organisms. This is done via sequence/HMM comparisons. However, this approach may lack sensitivity when searc...

In the last two years the Pfam database (http://pfam.xfam.org) has undergone a substantial reorganisation to reduce the effort involved in making a release, thereby permitting more frequent releases. Arguably the most significant of these changes is that Pfam is now primarily based on the UniProtKB reference proteomes, with the counts of matched sequences and species reported on the website res...

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 made radical changes to the way the nation provides income support to low-income families. The main program that provided cash assistance to single-parent families for over 60 years, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was replaced with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). TANF allows sta...

We introduce a new approach to learning statistical models from multiple sequence alignments (MSA) of proteins. Our method, called GREMLIN (Generative REgularized ModeLs of proteINs), learns an undirected probabilistic graphical model of the amino acid composition within the MSA. The resulting model encodes both the position-specific conservation statistics and the correlated mutation statistic...

Kunitz type trypsin inhibitor (KTI) family is one of the most versatile families of protease inhibitors. Their exact natural physiological role in plants is still unclear. According to some reports, KTIs are involved in proper growth and development of plants. Some researchers suggested their role in recovery from physical damage, while others have shown their applications in plant’s defence fr...

The welfare system has long been criticized for its incentives against marriage. This paper examines one way in which welfare actually may keep families together: the fact that benefits increase with family size may encourage teenagers to stay in welfare-recipient households. Welfare benefit incentives affecting coresidence are twofold: (i) a parent loses benefits if a child leaves the househol...

The profile hidden Markov model (PHMM) is widely used to assign the protein sequences to their respective families. A major limitation of a PHMM is the assumption that given states the observations (amino acids) are independent. To overcome this limitation, the dependency between amino acids in a multiple sequence alignment (MSA) which is the representative of a PHMM can be appended to the PHMM...

High-resolution structural knowledge is key to understanding how proteins function at the molecular level. The number of entries in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), the repository of all publicly available protein structures, continues to increase, with more than 8000 structures released in 2012 alone. The authors of this article have studied how structural coverage of the protein-sequence space ha...