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The federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was the most sweeping overhaul of the U.S. welfare program for poor families with children since its inception in the 1935 Social Security Act.To comply with the new federal law, California passed its Temporary Assistance to Needy Families plan in August 1997. Counties began implementing the new program, CalWORKs (California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids), on January 1, 1998.

The federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was the most sweeping overhaul of the U.S. welfare program for poor families with children since its inception in the 1935 Social Security Act.To comply with the new federal law, California passed its Temporary Assistance to Needy Families plan in August 1997. Counties began implementing the new program, CalWORKs (California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids), on January 1, 1998.

"Increases in urban populations, aging infrastructures and global environmental change have begun to highlight the need and urgency to address urban resilience through research and stakeholder-based dialog. The number of case studies for individual locations and on individual challenges - such as meeting water or energy demands - are increasing. Many of those studies reveal the complexity of managing interrelations among population, infrastructure, and institutions, though many ultimately choose a narrow, sector-specific approach to the issue. Few approaches have built on insights from complexity theory and related bodies of knowledge which are more consistent with the perspective that urban infrastructure systems are tightly coupled with one another and must respond to often subtle, long-term changes of technological, social and environmental conditions. Drawing on that knowledge, and building on insights from previous case studies, this paper explores the potential roles of complexity theory in guiding investment and policy decisions in the urban context, focusing on strategies to promote resilience and adaptability in the light of population, infrastructure, and institutional dynamics." (author's abstract)

"The laws of thermodynamics constrain transformation of materials and energy, and thus have implications for material and energy use in the economy, for environmental impact, and for policy. This paper provides an overview over the applications of concepts from thermodynamics in economics at the level of individual processes and explores potential constraints at larger system levels - the economy as a whole and the ecosystems within which economies are embedded. Specific emphasis is placed on the ways in which insights from thermodynamics are used to inform economic and policy decision making." (author's abstract)

"This paper is based on the premise that without integration of knowledge across disciplines, without integration of research with education, and without dialogue between science and stakeholders, opportunities to bound the complexity of environmental processes will be missed. Without adequate integration, solutions to environmental challenges will be partial at best, and new problems and unintended impacts will likely arise that prevent natural resource, economic and social systems from flourishing. On that premise, the paper explores what specifically needs to be integrated, and why, how that integration may occur, and what emotive, social and institutional conditions need to be achieved that may foster integration." (author's abstract)

For almost a century, evolutionary economics has been based to a significant extent on analogies derived from biology. At the same time the discipline suffered from lack of analytical rigor. Recently, advances in thermodynamics and information theory have provided a new foundation for evolutionary studies in biology and economics alike. As a result, the body of studies in evolutionary economics that imports concepts from thermodynamics and information theory to develop new analogies is growing. This paper surveys recent trends in evolutionary economics at the crossroads of biology and physics, and argues to supplant analogies derived from either of the two disciplines. Albeit powerful means to crystallize thought about evolutionary processes in economic systems, analogies from biology have tended to plaster over the many differences between biological and economic processes that are essential to economic systems. Similarly, thermodynamics and information theory cannot provide a non-anthropocentric evaluation of economic processes. Yet, the concepts and measures available from physics can be used to improve our understanding of economic evolution if properly placed into the context of socioeconomic processes. The paper delineates the realm for non-analogy based applications of concepts from physics for the assessment of economic processes in light of discontinuities and emergent complexities.