EPA's Arsenic Rule: The Benefits of the Standard Do Not Justify the Costs

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently finalized a rule that would reduce the maximum allowable level of arsenic in drinking water by 80 percent. While arsenic is thought to be essential for the human body at low levels, it can cause cancer when consumed at higher concentrations for extended periods of time. This regulatory analysis evaluates the benefits and costs of the EPA's rule. On the basis of currently available information, we find that the EPA's standard cannot be justified on economic grounds. We estimate that the costs of the final rule will exceed the benefits by about $190 million annually. We also find that the rule probably will result in a net loss of life. We find that the rule probably will result in a net loss of life. The direct effect of the rule will be to save about ten lives annually in the future. After taking into account the indirect impacts of the cost of the rule on items like health care expenditures, however, we find that the rule is likely to result in a net loss of about ten lives annually. A question that the rule does not examine carefully is whether other regulatory alternatives could result in positive net benefits. We explore the option of targeting specific water systems and find that this strategy is unlikely to be very helpful. Instead of regulating more stringently now, the agency should wait until more information becomes available over the next few years. Such a strategy would have the advantage of avoiding large capital expenditures until the time that evidence suggests that risks posed by arsenic in drinking water are significant.

Building a Better Briton: Parliament\u27s Push for State-Funded Secondary Schools, 1901-1903

The first three years of the twentieth century were a crucial time in the development of state-funded education in England. The rising tide of Germanophobia in the wake of the South African War impressed Conservative politicians with the need to improve England\u27s educational system in order that she remain competitive in the world. With the aid of a very few Liberal imperialists, the Conservatives were able to shepherd through a series of bills which established state funded secondary schools throughout all of England, an expansion on the system created by the Education Act of 1870 in terms of both curriculum and breadth of jurisdiction. The Liberals opposed much of this legislation based on their allegiance to their nonconformist constituents, who viewed the expanse of state-funded schools as a threat to their voluntary schools and as an attempt to enforce Anglican uniformity. The fact that these MPs opposed these bills, and later modified them greatly when Liberal, and later Labour, governments came to power in the decade immediately preceding the first World War, should in no way diminish the importance of these pieces of Conservative legislation. This essay fits into the historiography of its topic in that it provides a detailed examination of debates which have often been overlooked due to historians\u27 emphasis on the later Liberal legislation

Should You Be Allowed to Use Your Cellular Phone While Driving?

Regulation of the use of cellular phones by individuals while driving is now commonplace outside the United States and has been proposed in a number of jurisdictions in the United States. There is growing concern that using cellular phones while driving leads to increases in accidents and fatalities. This paper provides an economic analysis of regulatory options for addressing cellular phone usage by drivers of vehicles. While large uncertainties surrounding both benefits and costs exist, a key conclusion is that banning drivers from using cellular phones is a bad idea. Our best estimate is that the costs of a ban are likely to exceed benefits by about $20 billion annually. Less intrusive regulation, such as requiring the use of a hands-free device that would allow a driver to use both hands for steering also is not likely to be economically justified.

Assessing Regulatory Impact Analyses: The Failure of Agencies to Comply With Executive Order 12,866

None.Environment, Health and Safety, Regulatory Reform

Assessing the Quality of Regulatory Impact Analyses

This study provides the most comprehensive evaluation of the quality of recent economic analyses that agencies conduct before finalizing major regulations. We construct a new dataset that includes analyses of forty-eight major health, safety, and environmental regulations from mid-1996 to mid-1999. This dataset provides detailed information on a variety of issues, including an agency's treatment of benefits, costs, net benefits, discounting, and uncertainty. We use this dataset to assess the quality of recent economic analyses and to determine the extent to which they are consistent with President Clinton's Executive Order 12866 and the benefit-cost guidelines issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). We find that economic analyses prepared by regulatory agencies typically do not provide enough information to make decisions that will maximize the efficiency or effectiveness of a rule. Agencies quantified net benefits for only 29 percent of the rules. Agencies failed to discuss alternatives in 27 percent of the rules and quantified costs and benefits of alternatives in only 31 percent of the rules. Our findings strongly suggest that agencies generally failed to comply with the executive order and adhere to the OMB guidelines. We offer specific suggestions for improving the quality of analysis and the transparency of the regulatory process, including writing clear executive summaries, making analyses available on the Internet, providing more careful consideration of alternatives to a regulation, and estimating net benefits of a regulation when data on costs and benefits are provided.

Changing the Principal Supervisor Role to Better Support Principals: Evidence from the Principal Supervisor Initiative

The principal supervisor job has traditionally revolved around administration, operations and compliance, but as principals have increasingly been called on in recent years to concentrate on supporting high-quality teaching, the idea of a complementary makeover of the supervisor job has gained attention. In 2014, with funding from The Wallace Foundation, six large school districts around the country embarked on a four-year, $24-million initiative to redesign the supervisor position so it focused primarily on supporting principals in their role as instructional leaders.This report, which looks at the final year and the effects of the Principal Supervisor Initiative, concludes that the effort succeeded in changing the job so that it centered on developing and evaluating principals to help them promote effective teaching and learning in their schools. Over the course of the initiative, principals' ratings of their supervisors' effectiveness rose from 3.88 to 4.10 on a scale of 1-to-5, a statistically significant increase. Principals reported greater frequency of supervisor practices to develop school leadership—such as helping principals with data analysis, providing them with useful feedback and working with them to assess teacher effectiveness

Effect of diet type and added copper on growth performance, carcass characteristics, total tract digestibility, gut morphology, and mucosal mRNA expression of finishing pigs

Citation: Coble, K., Burnett, D., Goodband, R. D., Gonzalez, J. M., Usry, J. L., Tokach, M. D., . . . Vaughn, M. A. (2016). Effect of diet type and added copper on growth performance, carcass characteristics, total tract digestibility, gut morphology, and mucosal mRNA expression of finishing pigs. Journal of Animal Science, 94, 140-141. doi:10.2527/msasas2016-299A total of 757 pigs (PIC 337 × 1050; initially 27.6 kg BW) were used in a 117-d experiment to determine the effects of added Cu (TBCC; tribasic copper chloride, IntelliBond C; Micronutrients, Inc., Indianapolis, IN) and diet type on growth performance, carcass characteristics, energy digestibility, gut morphology, and mucosal mRNA expression of finishing pigs. Pens of pigs were allotted to 1 of 4 dietary treatments, balanced on average pen weight in a randomized complete-block design with 26 to 28 pigs/pen and 7 replications/treatment. Treatments were arranged in a 2 × 2 factorial arrangement with main effects of diet type, a corn-soybean meal-based diet (corn-soy) or a high byproduct diet (byproduct) with 30% distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) and 15% bakery meal, and added Cu (0 (10 mg/kg basal) or 150 mg/kg added Cu). There were no Cu×diet type interactions for growth performance. Neither added Cu nor diet type significantly influenced overall growth performance, although adding Cu during the early finishing period tended to increase (P = 0.076) ADG compared to pigs fed none (0.85 vs. 0.83). However, NE caloric efficiency was improved (P = 0.001) for pigs fed the corn-soy diet compared to the byproduct diet (6.76 vs. 7.15 Mcal intake/kg BW gain). Pigs fed the corn-soy diet had improved carcass yield (P = 0.007; 74.33 vs. 73.19%) and HCW G:F (P = 0.011; 0.274 vs. 0.266), and tended to have increased HCW (P = 0.067; 94.60 vs. 92.65 kg) and HCW ADG (P = 0.056; 0.635 vs. 0.615 kg/d) compared to pigs fed the byproduct diet. A Cu×diet type interaction (P < 0.05) existed for DM and GE digestibility in phase 2 as added Cu improved digestibility of DM and GE in the corn-soy diet, but not in the byproduct diet. In phase 4, added Cu tended to increase DM and GE digestibility (P = 0.060) while pigs fed the byproduct diet had decreased DM and GE digestibility (P = 0.001) compared to the corn-soy diet. For gut morphology, pigs fed added Cu had decreased distal small intestine crypt depth (P = 0.017; 207 vs. 225 um) compared to those fed no added Cu. Furthermore, pigs fed added Cu had decreased (P = 0.032; 0.618 vs. 0.935) relative mRNA expression of intestinal fatty acid binding protein (iFABP) compared to those fed no added Cu. In summary, 150 mg/kg added TBCC did not significantly affect overall growth but did influence diet digestibility and some gut morphology or mRNA expression measurements. Feeding a high byproduct diet decreased yield, caloric efficiency, and diet digestibility

Understanding the Use of Crisis Informatics Technology among Older Adults

Mass emergencies increasingly pose significant threats to human life, with a disproportionate burden being incurred by older adults. Research has explored how mobile technology can mitigate the effects of mass emergencies. However, less work has examined how mobile technologies support older adults during emergencies, considering their unique needs. To address this research gap, we interviewed 16 older adults who had recent experience with an emergency evacuation to understand the perceived value of using mobile technology during emergencies. We found that there was a lack of awareness and engagement with existing crisis apps. Our findings characterize the ways in which our participants did and did not feel crisis informatics tools address human values, including basic needs and esteem needs. We contribute an understanding of how older adults used mobile technology during emergencies and their perspectives on how well such tools address human values.Comment: 10 page

Genome modeling system: A knowledge management platform for genomics

In this work, we present the Genome Modeling System (GMS), an analysis information management system capable of executing automated genome analysis pipelines at a massive scale. The GMS framework provides detailed tracking of samples and data coupled with reliable and repeatable analysis pipelines. The GMS also serves as a platform for bioinformatics development, allowing a large team to collaborate on data analysis, or an individual researcher to leverage the work of others effectively within its data management system. Rather than separating ad-hoc analysis from rigorous, reproducible pipelines, the GMS promotes systematic integration between the two. As a demonstration of the GMS, we performed an integrated analysis of whole genome, exome and transcriptome sequencing data from a breast cancer cell line (HCC1395) and matched lymphoblastoid line (HCC1395BL). These data are available for users to test the software, complete tutorials and develop novel GMS pipeline configurations. The GMS is available at https://github.com/genome/gms

A Modified Experimental Hut Design for Studying Responses of Disease-Transmitting Mosquitoes to Indoor Interventions: The Ifakara Experimental Huts

Differences between individual human houses can confound results of studies aimed at evaluating indoor vector control interventions such as insecticide treated nets (ITNs) and indoor residual insecticide spraying (IRS). Specially designed and standardised experimental huts have historically provided a solution to this challenge, with an added advantage that they can be fitted with special interception traps to sample entering or exiting mosquitoes. However, many of these experimental hut designs have a number of limitations, for example: 1) inability to sample mosquitoes on all sides of huts, 2) increased likelihood of live mosquitoes flying out of the huts, leaving mainly dead ones, 3) difficulties of cleaning the huts when a new insecticide is to be tested, and 4) the generally small size of the experimental huts, which can misrepresent actual local house sizes or airflow dynamics in the local houses. Here, we describe a modified experimental hut design - The Ifakara Experimental Huts- and explain how these huts can be used to more realistically monitor behavioural and physiological responses of wild, free-flying disease-transmitting mosquitoes, including the African malaria vectors of the species complexes Anopheles gambiae and Anopheles funestus, to indoor vector control-technologies including ITNs and IRS. Important characteristics of the Ifakara experimental huts include: 1) interception traps fitted onto eave spaces and windows, 2) use of eave baffles (panels that direct mosquito movement) to control exit of live mosquitoes through the eave spaces, 3) use of replaceable wall panels and ceilings, which allow safe insecticide disposal and reuse of the huts to test different insecticides in successive periods, 4) the kit format of the huts allowing portability and 5) an improved suite of entomological procedures to maximise data quality