Maquiladoras, Air Pollution, and Human Health in Ciudad Juarez and El Paso

Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, is home to the U.S.–Mexico border’s largest maquiladora labor force, and also its worst air pollution. We marshal two types of evidence to examine the link between maquiladoras and air pollution in Ciudad Juárez, and in its sister city, El Paso, Texas. First, we use a publicly available sector-level emissions inventory for Ciudad Juárez to determine the importance of all industrial facilities (including maquiladoras) as a source of air pollution. Second, we use original plantlevel data from two sample maquiladoras to better understand the impacts of maquiladora air pollution on human health. We use a series of computational models to estimate health damages attributable to air pollution from these plants, we compare these damages to estimates of damages from non-maquiladora industrial polluters, and we use regression analysis to determine whether the poor suffer disproportionately from maquiladora air pollution. We find that air pollution from maquiladoras has serious consequences for human health, including respiratory disease and premature mortality. However, maquiladoras are clearly not the leading cause of air pollution in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. Moreover, most maquiladoras are probably less important sources of dangerous air pollution than at least one notoriously polluting Mexican-owned industry. Finally, we find no evidence to suggest that maquiladora air pollution affects the poor disproportionately.maquiladora, air pollution, human health, environmental justice, U.S.-Mexico border, Ciudad Juárez, El Paso

A Multiprocessor Distributed Debugger

This thesis presents the design and implementation of a distributed debugger. The debugger was designed to support the debugging of a system containing multiple processors from a single debug console. The debugger implementation consists of host software which runs on a VAX minicomputer and target software which runs on Intel SDK-86 single board computers. The host and targets communicate using an RS-232 channel. The debugger supports breakpoints, disassembly of target code, symbolic reference of program procedures and variables, and download of Intel Object Module Format binary files

Interview with Mr. Ernie Brown

Transcript of an interview with Mr. Ernie Brown. For ACES 803 Educational Research, Dr. Allan Millerhttps://scholars.fhsu.edu/ors/1234/thumbnail.jp

Can Soldiers Be Peace Officers? The Waco Disaster and the Militarization of American Law Enforcement

One of the most significant trends of federal law enforcement in the last fifteen years has been its militarization. The logical, perhaps inevitable, consequence of that militarization was seen in the disaster at Waco, Texas, resulting in the deaths of four federal agents, and seventy-six other men, women, and children. In this article, we use the Waco tragedy as a starting point to examine the militarization of federal law enforcement, and similar trends at the state and local level. Part Two of this article sets forth the details and rationale of the Posse Comitatus Act--the 1878 law forbidding use of the military in law enforcement. Part Three explicates how that Act was eroded by the drug war in the 1980s. The article then discusses how the drug exception to the Posse Comitatus Act was used to procure major military support for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) raid against the Branch Davidians-even though there was no real drug evidence against them-and how the drug exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act have made such abuses endemic. Part Four examines the fifty-one day FBI siege of the Branch Davidian residence, with a focus on the destructive role played by the FBI\u27s Hostage Rescue Team, an essentially military force which has proved counterproductive in a civilian law enforcement context. In Part Five we look at the problem of groupthink, its role in the Waco tragedy, and the importance of keeping groupthink-prone institutions-like the military-out of law enforcement. Finally, Part Six offers a broader view of the problem of the militarization of federal law enforcement. We examine the proliferation of federal paramilitary units and federal efforts to promote the militarization of state and local law enforcement. After explaining the direct connection between the drug war and law enforcement militarization, we propose numerous statutory remedies to demilitarize law enforcement

Thermodynamic Entropy And The Accessible States of Some Simple Systems

Comparison of the thermodynamic entropy with Boltzmann's principle shows that under conditions of constant volume the total number of arrangements in simple thermodynamic systems with temperature-independent heat capacities is TC/k. A physical interpretation of this function is given for three such systems; an ideal monatomic gas, an ideal gas of diatomic molecules with rotational motion, and a solid in the Dulong-Petit limit of high temperature. T1/2 emerges as a natural measure of the number of accessible states for a single particle in one dimension. Extension to N particles in three dimensions leads to TC/k as the total number of possible arrangements or microstates. The different microstates of the system are thus shown a posteriori to be equally probable, with probability T-C/k, which implies that for the purposes of counting states the particles of the gas are distinguishable. The most probable energy state of the system is determined by the degeneracy of the microstates.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur

Challenges for the theory and practice of business coaching: A systemic review of empirical evidence

Until recently, there has been little published systematic empirical research into business coaching. This article reports on a systematic, critical review of 111 published empirical papers investigating business coaching theory, processes, and outcomes. The present article identifies a significantly larger body of empirical research than covered in previous reviews and uses a Systematic Review methodology (SRm) to conduct a comprehensive review of the available empirical evidence into business coaching effectiveness focusing on implications for theoretical development, practice (within human resource development) and further research in this area. This review identifies convergence around factors that contribute to perceived effective coaching practice but nevertheless highlights a number of issues to be resolved in further research. These include determining the primary beneficiaries of coaching, the factors that contribute to coach credibility, and how the organizational and social context impacts on coaching. Weaknesses in coaching research methodology and research gaps are also noted

Divergence or convergence? Health inequalities and policy in a devolved Britain

Since the advent of political devolution in the UK, it has been widely reported that markedly different health policies have emerged. However, most of these analyses are based on a comparison of health care policies and, as such, only tell part of a complex and evolving story. This paper considers official responses to a shared public health policy aim, the reduction of health inequalities, through an examination of national policy statements produced in England, Scotland and Wales respectively since 1997. The analysis suggests that the relatively consistent manner in which the ‘policy problem’ of health inequalities has been framed combined with the dominance of a medical model of health have constrained policy responses. Our findings differ from existing analyses, raising some important questions about the actuality of, and scope for, policy divergence since devolution