Place matters: challenges and opportunities in four rural Americas

A survey of 7,800 rural Americans in 19 counties across the country has led to the Carsey Institute\u27s first major publication that outlines four distinctly different rural Americas—amenity, decline, chronic poverty, and those communities in decline that are also amenity-rich—each has unique challenges in this modern era that will require different policies than their rural neighbors

Creative spaces: the role of the underground and the prospect of lock-in in the creative industries

Motivated by thinking that culture can be promoted as a driver of economic development, there has been widespread policy consensus about the importance of developing culture and the creative economy as wider attempts to promote growth in cities and regions. While the impact of creative industries differs from area to area as do the conditions and resources for this, several towns and cities have been quick to recognise and exhort the benefits of creative sectors and creative workers and to invest heavily in their creative offer: investing in creative industries as a subset of the cultural economy; showcasing their cultural assets, and implementing strategies to attract creative professionals and retain graduates

Place effects on environmental views

How people respond to questions involving the environment depends partly on individual characteristics. Characteristics such as age, gender, education, and ideology constitute the well-studied social bases of environmental concern, which have been explained in terms of cohort effects or of cognitive and cultural factors related to social position. It seems likely that people\u27s environmental views depend not only on personal characteristics but also on their social and physical environments. This hypothesis has been more difficult to test, however. Using data from surveys in 19 rural U.S. counties, we apply mixed-effects modeling to investigate simple place effects with respect to locally focused environmental views. We find evidence for two kinds of place effects. Net of individual characteristics, specific place characteristics have the expected effect on related environmental views. Local changes are related to attitudes about regulation and growth. For example, respondents more often perceive rapid development as a problem, and favor environmental rules that restrict development, in rural counties with growing populations. Moreover, they favor conserving resources for the future rather than using them now to create jobs in counties that have low unemployment. After we controlled for county growth, unemployment and jobs in resource based industries, and individual social-position and ideological factors, there remains significant place-to-place variation in mean levels of environmental concern. Even with both kinds of place effects in the models, the individual level predictors of environmental concern follow patterns expected from previous research. Concern increases with education among Democrats, whereas among Republicans, the relationship is attenuated or reversed. The interaction marks reframing of environmental questions as political wedge issues, through nominally scientific counterarguments aimed at educated, ideologically receptive audiences. © 2010, by the Rural Sociological Society

Metamaterials for light rays: ray optics without wave-optical analog in the ray-optics limit

Volumes of sub-wavelength electromagnetic elements can act like homogeneous materials: metamaterials. In analogy, sheets of optical elements such as prisms can act ray-optically like homogeneous sheet materials. In this sense, such sheets can be considered to be metamaterials for light rays (METATOYs). METATOYs realize new and unusual transformations of the directions of transmitted light rays. We study here, in the ray-optics and scalar-wave limits, the wave-optical analog of such transformations, and we show that such an analog does not always exist. Perhaps, this is the reason why many of the ray-optical possibilities offered by METATOYs have never before been considered.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, references update

Electric field induced charge noise in doped silicon: ionization of phosphorus donors

We report low frequency charge noise measurement on silicon substrates with different phosphorus doping densities. The measurements are performed with aluminum single electron transistors (SETs) at millikelvin temperatures where the substrates are in the insulating regime. By measuring the SET Coulomb oscillations, we find a gate voltage dependent charge noise on the more heavily doped substrate. This charge noise, which is seen to have a 1/f spectrum, is attributed to the electric field induced tunneling of electrons from their phosphorus donor potentials.Comment: 4 page, 3 figure

Global electric field determination in the Earth's outer magnetosphere using charged particles

Although many properties of the Earth's magnetosphere have been measured and quantified in the past 30 years since it was discovered, one fundamental (for a zeroeth order magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibrium) measurement was made infrequently and with poor spatial coverage: the global electric field. This oversight is in part due to the difficulty of measuring a plasma electric field, and in part due to the difficulty of measuring a plasma electric field, and in part due to the neglect of theorists. However, there is renewed interest in the convection electric field, since it has been realized that it is vital for understanding many aspects of the magnetosphere: the global MHD equilibrium, reconnection rates, Region 2 Birkeland currents, magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling, ring current and radiation belt transport, substorm injections, acceleration mechanisms, etc. Unfortunately the standard experimental methods have not been able to synthesize a global field (excepting the pioneering work of McIlwain's geostationary models), and we are left with an overly simplistic theoretical field, the Volland-Stern electric field mode. Again, single point measurements of the plasma pause were used to infer the appropriate amplitudes of the model, parameterized by Kp (Maynard & Chen, JGR 1975). Although this result was never intended to be the definitive electric field model, it has gone nearly unchanged for 15 years. However, the data sets being taken today require a great deal more accuracy than can be provided by the Volland-Stern model. Nor has the variability of the electric field shielding been properly addressed, although effects of penetrating magnetospheric electric fields has been seen in mid- and low-latitude ionospheric data sets. The growing interests in substorm dynamics also requires a much better assessment of the electric fields responsible for particle injections. Thus, we proposed and developed algorithms for extracting electric fields from particle data taken in the earth's magnetosphere. As a test of the effectiveness of these techniques, we analyzed data taken by the AMPTE/CCE spacecraft in equatorial orbit between 1984-1988. Some analytic tools had to be developed before construction of computer algorithms, and they are discussed

Local light-ray rotation

We present a sheet structure that rotates the local ray direction through an arbitrary angle around the sheet normal. The sheet structure consists of two parallel Dove-prism sheets, each of which flips one component of the local direction of transmitted light rays. Together, the two sheets rotate transmitted light rays around the sheet normal. We show that the direction under which a point light source is seen is given by a Mobius transform. We illustrate some of the properties with movies calculated by ray-tracing software.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Serving children: the impact of poverty on children's experiences of services

This study arose from the identification of a gap in knowledge and corresponding need for the development of a better contemporary understanding of children's experiences of poverty. Focusing on children aged 10 - 14 years, the study aimed to provide a perspective on the lives of children and young people affected by poverty in Scotland through comparing the experiences of children living in poverty with those more economically advantaged

The risk of cancer in primary care patients with hypercalcaemia: a cohort study using electronic records.

PublishedJournal ArticleBACKGROUND: The risk of cancer with hypercalcaemia in primary care is unknown. METHODS: This was a cohort study using calcium results in patients aged ⩾40 years in a primary care electronic data set. Diagnoses of cancer in the following year were identified. RESULTS: Participants (54 267) had calcium results: 1674 (3%) were ⩾2.6 mmol l(-1). Hypercalcaemia was strongly associated with cancer, especially in males: OR 2.92, 95% CI 2.17-3.93, P=<0.001; positive predictive value (PPV) 11.5%; females: OR 1.86, 95% CI 1.39-2.50, P<0.001: PPV 4.1%. CONCLUSIONS: Hypercalcaemia is strongly associated with cancer in primary care, with men at most risk, despite hypercalcaemia being more common in women

Rural environmental concern: Effects of position, partisanship and place

The social bases of environmental concern in rural America resemble those for the nation as a whole, but also reflect the influence of place. Some general place characteristics, such as rates of population growth or resource-industry employment, predict responses across a number of environmental issues. Other unique or distinctive aspects of local society and environment matter as well. We extend earlier work on both kinds of place effects, first by analyzing survey data from northeast Oregon. Results emphasize that “environmental concern” has several dimensions. Second, we contextualize the Oregon results using surveys from other regions. Analysis of an integrated dataset (up to 12,000 interviews in 38 U.S. counties) shows effects from respondent characteristics and political views, and from county rates of population growth and resource-based employment. There also are significant place-to-place variations that are not explained by variables in the models. To understand some of these we return to the local scale. In northeast Oregon, residents describe how perceptions of fire danger from unmanaged forest lands shape their response to the word conservation. Their local interpretation contrasts with more general and urban connotations of this term, underlining the importance of place for understanding rural environmental concern