Who Should Bear the Administrative Costs of an Emissions Tax?

All environmental policies involve administrative costs, the costs of implementing and managing policies that extend beyond abatement costs. We examine theoretically the optimal distribution of these costs between the public and regulated sources of pollution. The distribution of administrative costs affects social welfare only if public funds are more expensive than private funds, or if the distribution of administrative costs affects the size of a regulated industry. If having the public take on a larger part of administrative costs increases the size of the industry and this does not lead to lower emissions for a given emissions tax, then it is optimal to make the pollution sources bear all of the administrative costs. A necessary, but not sufficient, reason for having the public bear part of the cost burden is if aggregate emissions decrease as a result.Emissions Taxes, Pigouvian Taxes, Administrative Costs, Pollution Control

A Note on Emissions Taxes and Incomplete Information

In contrast with what we perceive is the conventional wisdom about setting emissions taxes under uncertainty, we demonstrate that setting a uniform tax equal to expected marginal damage is not generally efficient under incomplete information about firms’ abatement costs and damages from pollution. We show that efficient taxes will deviate from expected marginal damage if there is uncertainty about the slopes of the marginal abatement costs of regulated firms. Moreover, efficient emissions tax rates will vary across firms if a regulator can use observable firm-level characteristics to gain some information about how the firms’ marginal abatement costs vary.Emissions Taxes, Incomplete Information, Uncertainty

Controlling Urban Air Pollution Caused by Households: Uncertainty, Prices, and Income

We examine the control of air pollution caused by households burning wood for heating and cooking in the developing world. Since the problem is one of controlling emissions from nonpoint sources, regulations are likely to be directed at household choices of wood consumption and combustion technologies. Moreover, these choices are subtractions from, or contributions to, the pure public good of air quality. Consequently, the efficient policy design is not independent of the distribution of household income. Since it is unrealistic to assume that environmental authorities can make lump sum income transfers part of control policies, efficient control of air pollution caused by wood consumption entails a higher tax on wood consumption and a higher subsidy for more efficient combustion technologies for higher income households. Among other difficulties, implementing a policy to promote the adoption of cleaner combustion technologies must overcome the seemingly paradoxical result that efficient control calls for higher technology subsidies for higher income households.efficiency, urban air pollution, nonpoint pollution, environmental policy, uncertainty

A Study Of Reading Achievement Of Bilingual (Spanish/English) Pupils In Grades Three And Five Taught Under Three Different Models Of Instruction

PROBLEM: Teaching limited English proficient pupils to read English is a primary concern of teachers in the United States. The problem educators face is how to accomplish the goal effectively. The emphasis on acquisition of oral fluency of English and quick introduction to reading has had mixed results. The controlled studies testing the hypotheses of primary language approaches are scarce. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine achievement test results of bilingual Spanish/English third and fifth grade students who were taught to read: 1) initially in the primary language and then English, 2) were taught to read English with enroute assistance in the primary language, and 3) were taught to read English without recourse to the pupils\u27 primary language. The achievement test scores of the pupils were subjected to statistical treatment to assess the effectiveness of the three approaches to instruction. PROCEDURES: The achievement test scores of fifty-one third grade and thirty-five fifth grade pupils taught under three different models of instruction, i.e., the Primary Language Approach, the Concurrent Language Approach, and the Direct Language Approach, were analyzed. The analytic procedure adopted was to compare pre and post test scores by both parametric (t-test) and non-parametric (Wilcoxin) tests. A .05 level of confidence was adopted for all analysis. The results of the Bilingual Syntax Measure administered individually in Spanish and English were used as a measure of bilingualism. As a preliminary measure to the ANCOVA, a test was conducted to determine if the groups differed on the pretest. FINDINGS: By the time of the post test by both the parametric and nonparametric tests for the third grade, there was no statistically significant difference between pre and post test results. The results of the regression analysis did find a significant decrease between pre and post tests for the Concurrent approach group. For the fifth grade, by both the parametric and non-parametric tests, the Primary Language approach group scored higher on both pre and post tests. For the Concurrent Approach group, there was a statistically significant decrease between pre and post tests at the .05 level by both parametric and non-parametric tests. RECOMMENDATIONS: A long range study that provides for control of variables, such as teacher selection, delivery of instruction, and language proficiency of teachers and students should be conducted in an urban center. A study that controls for these variables before the fact will provide more conclusive evidence regarding the more effective instructional approaches for Spanish/English bilingual pupils in the United States

Feeding behaviors and performance measurements in bucks, rams, and bulls

The objective of the study was to determine if relationships exist with feeding behaviors of bucks, rams, and bulls and efficiency or residual feed intake (RFI). Animals utilized in this investigation were either producer consigned by species or West Virginia University animals. All animals were group-housed in pens (14.6 m x 51.2 m) with 156.2 m2 under roof at the Reymann Memorial Farm in Wardensville, WV over two years. Animals were fed complete nutritionally adequate rations ad libitum to meet daily growth requirements for each species. GrowSafe radio frequency technology (GrowSafe Systems Ltd.) was used to monitor animal identification, visit time and location, duration, and feed displacement. AllflexRTM transponders were placed in each animal\u27s left ear. Eight pens had three feed nodes, while two pens had four. Rams and bucks were housed in the pens with four feed nodes. Modifications were made to the feed nodes for the ram and buck research to prevent more than one animal from feeding at one time. Statistical analyses were completed using Proc FREQ, TTEST, and GLM of SAS. More efficient animals consumed less feed (P \u3c 0.01) and visited the feed nodes less frequently (P \u3c 0.01). Negative RFI goats and the rams in the first year had fewer feeding and nonfeeding bouts (P \u3c 0.05). Most visits occurred during the day (P \u3c 0.01) for all species. Daily feed intake varied in all species (P \u3c 0.01). Individual differences were seen in each species with other behaviors and performance measurements. Although behavioral differences were seen with RFI in all species, a more complete behavioral analysis is required to understand how dominance behavior and behavior allocation affect energy expenditure and intake

The Optimal Pricing of Pollution When Enforcement is Costly

We consider the pricing of a uniformly mixed pollutant when enforcement is costly with a model of optimal, possibly firm-specific, emissions taxes and their enforcement. We argue that optimality requires an enforcement strategy that induces full compliance by every firm. This holds whether or not regulators have complete information about firms’ abatement costs, the costs of monitoring them for compliance, or the costs of collecting penalties from noncompliant firms. Moreover, ignoring several unrealistic special cases, optimality requires discriminatory emissions taxes except when regulators are unable to observe firms’ abatement costs, the costs of monitoring individual firms, or any firm-specific characteristic that is known to be jointly distributed with either the firms’ abatement costs or their monitoring costs. In many pollution control settings, especially those that have been subject to various forms of environmental regulation in the past, regulators are not likely to be so ill-informed about individual firms. In these settings, policies that set or generate a uniform pollution price like conventional designs involving uniform taxes and competitive emission trading with freely-allocated or auctioned permits will not be efficient.Compliance, Enforcement, Emissions Taxes, Monitoring, Asymmetric Information, Uncertainty

Evaluación de habilidades prácticas Diplomado de profundización CISCO

El diplomado CISCO en redes LANWAN se abordan temas de alta calidad que realmente son muy importantes y necesarios para nuestra carrera como ingenieros como la construcción de redes LANWAN, se estudia, se hace, se plasma y realizan diseños en dos escenarios con parámetros para una red que tiene una empresa con tres sedes en el país, una segunda empresa tiene conexión a internet y se adapta con la red LAN, gracias a lo aprendido este conocimiento nos permite desarrollar cualquier situación y obtener la solución.The CISCO diploma in LANWAN networks addresses high quality topics that are really very important and necessary for our career as engineers such as the construcction of LANWAN networks, it is studied, made, reflected and designs are made in two scenarios with parameters for a network that has a company with three offices in the country, a second company has an internet connection and adapts to the LAN network, thanks to what we have learned, this knowledge allows us to develop and situation and obtain the solution

Diseño de un sistema de coordinación para enjambres de robots móviles heterogéneos

Este trabajo muestra el diseño automático de comportamientos para un enjambre heterogéneo de robots utilizando programación genética. Para ello, se propone el desarrollo de una plataforma computacional que incluye un formato de descripción para la especificación de robots y sus características, comportamientos primitivos que poseen los robots, y tareas que realiza el enjambre de robots. Los comportamientos son construidos con programación genética componiendo y ajustando árboles de expresión que son validados en un simulador basado en física. Como parte de la validación de la plataforma computacional se diseñan e implementan comportamientos de agregación para un grupo de tres robots móviles simulados y su despliegue en tres robots del Laboratorio Fábrica experimental de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia sede Bogotá .Abstract: This research work studies the automatic design of behaviors for an heterogeneous swarm of robots using genetic programming. In order to build behaviors for robots automatically a computational platform is proposed. The proposed platform is composed by three major components. The first component is a description format which allows to specify robot properties, basic behaviors and tasks. The second component is a genetic programming implementation along with a physics-based simulator, this component builds in an automatic way expression trees which represent robot behaviors. The final component is a behaviors assignment module to deploy expression trees on real robots. In order to validate the proposed platform robot behaviors are built for three simulated mobile robots and their deployment in three real robots in a manufacturing environment at Universidad Nacional de Colombia.Maestrí