2004 Annual Update to "...and Justice for All": DVRPC's Strategy for Fair Treatment and Meaningful Involvement of All People

In 2001, DVRPC published the . . and Justice for All report to identify impacts of disparate funding and services on defined low-income and minority groups. A methodology was created, refined in subsequent years, to identify populations that may be adversely affected by transportation planning decisions. This report is an annual update of that initial report and catalogues DVRPC's fiscal year 2008 programs and plans that contain Environmental Justice (EJ) elements. Descriptions for each project or program that utilize DVRPC's EJ methodology are discussed, including a TIP analysis and corridor studies. Additional Title VI and Public Outreach efforts are incorporated into this report, as are forthcoming procedures for EJ and Title VI

2002 Annual Update of "and Justice for All": DVRPC's Strategy for Fair Treatment and Meaningful Involvement of All People

This report is an annual update of DVRPC's September 2001 report on Environmental Justice entitled "and Justice for All": DVRPC's Strategy for Fair Treatment and Meaningful Involvement of All People. It is part of DVRPC's ongoing and continuing work program and also fulfills a federal certification requirement for Metropolitan Planning Organizations that use federal funds to undertake a planning process to develop regional plans and programs. The supplement updates and refines the quantitative methodology developed in the first report. New demographic and quality of life factors are added, including limited English proficiency populations, female head of household with child populations, and the locations of day care centers. A new eight-factor degrees of disadvantage analysis and a poverty as a constant analysis are compared with the newly adopted FY 2003 Transportation Improvement Program. A sample neighborhood analysis of TIP funding focuses on Southwest Philadelphia

The mean lives of some excited levels in nitrogen 1

Beam foil measurements of multiplet mean lives in nitrogen deca

Beam-foil spectrum of nitrogen at ultraviolet wavelengths

Spectrum analysis on foil excited nitrogen beam during acceleration at ultraviolet wavelength

Plausibility functions and exact frequentist inference

In the frequentist program, inferential methods with exact control on error rates are a primary focus. The standard approach, however, is to rely on asymptotic approximations, which may not be suitable. This paper presents a general framework for the construction of exact frequentist procedures based on plausibility functions. It is shown that the plausibility function-based tests and confidence regions have the desired frequentist properties in finite samples---no large-sample justification needed. An extension of the proposed method is also given for problems involving nuisance parameters. Examples demonstrate that the plausibility function-based method is both exact and efficient in a wide variety of problems.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

Ablation debris control by means of closed thick film filtered water immersion

The performance of laser ablation generated debris control by means of open immersion techniques have been shown to be limited by flow surface ripple effects on the beam and the action of ablation plume pressure loss by splashing of the immersion fluid. To eradicate these issues a closed technique has been developed which ensured a controlled geometry for both the optical interfaces of the flowing liquid film. This had the action of preventing splashing, ensuring repeatable machining conditions and allowed for control of liquid flow velocity. To investigate the performance benefits of this closed immersion technique bisphenol A polycarbonate samples have been machined using filtered water at a number of flow velocities. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the closed immersion technique: a 93% decrease in debris is produced when machining under closed filtered water immersion; the average debris particle size becomes larger, with an equal proportion of small and medium sized debris being produced when laser machining under closed flowing filtered water immersion; large debris is shown to be displaced further by a given flow velocity than smaller debris, showing that the action of flow turbulence in the duct has more impact on smaller debris. Low flow velocities were found to be less effective at controlling the positional trend of deposition of laser ablation generated debris than high flow velocities; but, use of excessive flow velocities resulted in turbulence motivated deposition. This work is of interest to the laser micromachining community and may aide in the manufacture of 2.5D laser etched patterns covering large area wafers and could be applied to a range of wavelengths and laser types

Azimuthal instability of the radial thermocapillary flow around a hot bead trapped at the water-air interface

We investigate the radial thermocapillary flow driven by a laser-heated microbead in partial wetting at the water-air interface. Particular attention is paid to the evolution of the convective flow patterns surrounding the hot sphere as the latter is increasingly heated. The flow morphology is nearly axisymmetric at low laser power P. Increasing P leads to symmetry breaking with the onset of counter-rotating vortex pairs. The boundary condition at the interface, close to no-slip in the low-P regime, turns about stress-free between the vortex pairs in the high-P regime. These observations strongly support the view that surface-active impurities are inevitably adsorbed on the water surface where they form an elastic layer. The onset of vortex pairs is the signature of a hydrodynamic instability in the layer response to the centrifugal forced flow. Interestingly, our study paves the way for the design of active colloids able to achieve high-speed self-propulsion via vortex pair generation at a liquid interface

The undertranslated transcriptome reveals widespread translational silencing by alternative 5' transcript leaders

BACKGROUND: Translational efficiencies in Saccharomyces cerevisiae vary from transcript to transcript by approximately two orders of magnitude. Many of the poorly translated transcripts were found to respond to the appropriate external stimulus by recruiting ribosomes. Unexpectedly, a high frequency of these transcripts showed the appearance of altered 5' leaders that coincide with increased ribosome loading. RESULTS: Of the detectable transcripts in S. cerevisiae, 8% were found to be underloaded with ribosomes. Gene ontology categories of responses to stress or external stimuli were overrepresented in this population of transcripts. Seventeen poorly loaded transcripts involved in responses to pheromone, nitrogen starvation, and osmotic stress were selected for detailed study and were found to respond to the appropriate environmental signal with increased ribosome loading. Twelve of these regulated transcripts exhibited structural changes in their 5' transcript leaders in response to the environmental signal. In many of these the coding region remained intact, whereas regulated shortening of the 5' end truncated the open reading frame in others. Colinearity between the gene and transcript sequences eliminated regulated splicing as a mechanism for these alterations in structure. CONCLUSION: Frequent occurrence of coordinated changes in transcript structure and translation efficiency, in at least three different gene regulatory networks, suggests a widespread phenomenon. It is likely that many of these altered 5' leaders arose from changes in promoter usage. We speculate that production of translationally silenced transcripts may be one mechanism for allowing low-level transcription activity necessary for maintaining an open chromatin structure while not allowing inappropriate protein production

Coherent frequentism

By representing the range of fair betting odds according to a pair of confidence set estimators, dual probability measures on parameter space called frequentist posteriors secure the coherence of subjective inference without any prior distribution. The closure of the set of expected losses corresponding to the dual frequentist posteriors constrains decisions without arbitrarily forcing optimization under all circumstances. This decision theory reduces to those that maximize expected utility when the pair of frequentist posteriors is induced by an exact or approximate confidence set estimator or when an automatic reduction rule is applied to the pair. In such cases, the resulting frequentist posterior is coherent in the sense that, as a probability distribution of the parameter of interest, it satisfies the axioms of the decision-theoretic and logic-theoretic systems typically cited in support of the Bayesian posterior. Unlike the p-value, the confidence level of an interval hypothesis derived from such a measure is suitable as an estimator of the indicator of hypothesis truth since it converges in sample-space probability to 1 if the hypothesis is true or to 0 otherwise under general conditions.Comment: The confidence-measure theory of inference and decision is explicitly extended to vector parameters of interest. The derivation of upper and lower confidence levels from valid and nonconservative set estimators is formalize