Water Marketing as an Adaptive Response to the Threat of Climate Change

Demographic changes and existing water use patterns have placed tremendous pressures upon water supplies, particularly in the West. Global climate change will exacerbate pressures on water resources. The gradual warming of the atmosphere is certain to change the distribution and availability of water supplies, with potentially severe consequences for freshwater supplies. While climate change will have a significant impact on water resources through changes in the timing and volume of precipitation, altered evaporation rates, and the like, the precise nature, magnitude, timing, and distribution of such climate-induced changes are unknown. This uncertainty complicates the task of water managers who are already faced with escalating demands. This article argues that climate change, and its projected effects on water use and supply, calls for a fundamental reexamination of water institutions. In particular, this article suggests that market-based institutions are well suited to address the additional pressures on water supplies due to climate change. Many aspects of water markets, including their flexibility, decentralized nature, and ability to create and harness economic incentives, make them particularly well suited to address the uncertain water forecast. A gradual shift toward water marketing and market pricing will improve the management of water supplies, ensure more efficient allocation of available water supplies and encourage cost-effective conservation measures

Conservative Principles for Environmental Reform

Major environmental policy reform is long overdue. The current regulatory architecture was erected in the 1970s. Since then meaningful reforms have been few and far between. A few reforms and regulatory expansions were adopted in the 1980s, and Congress enacted significant reforms to the Clean Air Act in 1990. Only the most minor environmental bills have been enacted since then

Legal Obstacles to Private Ordering in Marine Fisheries

Part II of this Article surveys the challenges of marine conservation, the failures of existing regulatory regimes, and the potential for property rights in marine resources. Part III discusses the nature of private ordering, providing examples that arise from the fisheries context. Part IV discusses how legal rules can inhibit private ordering. That section focuses in particular on how antitrust law has impeded cooperative fishery management. Part V then explores possibilities for overcoming antitrust obstacles to private ordering. This Article concludes with some broader thoughts about the implications of this research for resource conservation

New York’s School Teachers Say No to the Status Quo! A Chronicle of New York State’s Teachers Union’s (NYSUT) First Contested Election

Other than a scattered mentioning on educational blogs, and a few uninspired national references, the New York State United Teacher’s (NYSUT) April 2014 first contested election in its four decade history did not seem to matter very much. We saw it differently at Cornell’s ILR School. NYSUT is known as a highly efficient, top down, union powerhouse, yet we learned that this election saw school teachers and their local union leaders utilizing their organization’s design and structure for the members’ advantage in a stunning “bottom up” political victory. This surprising outcome is why we decided to research how this occurred and write this report. Along the way, we met brilliant strategists, courageous political novitiates, remarkable communication specialists, and never-ending tenacity wrapped in purposefulness that ensured school-based leaders their electoral success. In doing so, they joined their insurgent teacher colleagues in Massachusetts, Milwaukee, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Paul and elsewhere, affirming that school teacher trade unionists can and will respond to the attacks upon them and public education. The following pages chart why this contested election occurred and how the insurgents proceeded. The information is based primarily upon extensive interviews with rank and file leaders and discussions with former and newly elected leaders. There are also specific references to observations shared by the defeated President, Richard Iannuzzi, who graciously offered his candor in explaining how he saw what was happening to the union and why he acted as he did in the period leading up to his defeat. This report begins with some brief comments about NYSUT’s history, placement of the election in both a national and New York state context, and an explanation about how NYSUT’s structure had so much to do with the election. The bulk of the writing describes how rank and file forces slowly but molecularly developed into a force able to successfully challenge the president and leadership team of the largest state union in America. Throughout, the detail presented suggests that power wielded by rank and file union members of the teaching profession is the best hope to restore balance to public education in the country. The next few years will tell us whether this “suggestion” is so

Analytical results for the confinement mechanism in QCD_3

We present analytical methods for investigating the interaction of two heavy quarks in QCD_3 using the effective action approach. Our findings result in explicit expressions for the static potentials in QCD_3 for long and short distances. With regard to confinement, our conclusion reflects many features found in the more realistic world of QCD_4.Comment: 24 pages, uses REVTe

EXODUS: Integrating intelligent systems for launch operations support

Kennedy Space Center (KSC) is developing knowledge-based systems to automate critical operations functions for the space shuttle fleet. Intelligent systems will monitor vehicle and ground support subsystems for anomalies, assist in isolating and managing faults, and plan and schedule shuttle operations activities. These applications are being developed independently of one another, using different representation schemes, reasoning and control models, and hardware platforms. KSC has recently initiated the EXODUS project to integrate these stand alone applications into a unified, coordinated intelligent operations support system. EXODUS will be constructed using SOCIAL, a tool for developing distributed intelligent systems. EXODUS, SOCIAL, and initial prototyping efforts using SOCIAL to integrate and coordinate selected EXODUS applications are described

Remote sensing X-ray spectrometer

Spectrometer measures chemical composition of lunar rocks by remote sensing from orbit and senses lunar X-rays produced by interaction of solar X-rays and elements on the lunar surface. Instrument features high sensitivity, data handling system that accumulates and prepares data for telemetry, and automatic calibration

Efficient Monte Carlo for high excursions of Gaussian random fields

Our focus is on the design and analysis of efficient Monte Carlo methods for computing tail probabilities for the suprema of Gaussian random fields, along with conditional expectations of functionals of the fields given the existence of excursions above high levels, b. Na\"{i}ve Monte Carlo takes an exponential, in b, computational cost to estimate these probabilities and conditional expectations for a prescribed relative accuracy. In contrast, our Monte Carlo procedures achieve, at worst, polynomial complexity in b, assuming only that the mean and covariance functions are H\"{o}lder continuous. We also explain how to fine tune the construction of our procedures in the presence of additional regularity, such as homogeneity and smoothness, in order to further improve the efficiency.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AAP792 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org