Voters hold the key: lock-in, mobility, and the portability of property tax exemptions

Since California voters approved Proposition 13 in 1978, fifteen states have enacted caps on the annual growth in assessed property values. These laws often impose a great burden on municipal finances and create horizontal inequity among homeowners. Why do voters choose to limit local government in this way? Reasons may include controlling the power of special interests, addressing agency failures of government officials (the "Leviathan" hypothesis), or preserving the impact of a current but fleeting antitax political alignment. Yet research has found that voters' perception of a limitation's fiscal consequences do not match reality, questioning the rationality of voter behavior. To counter this position, another strand of literature argues that support for tax limitations is driven not by perceptions of government inefficiency but by reasonable expectations of who will ultimately bear the tax limitation's burden. We explore this view by exploiting the differential tax treatment generated by assessment caps in the context of a recent, novel referendum in Florida. We examine voter support for a 2008 constitutional amendment that included a unique provision making the existing assessment cap portable within the state. We test the hypothesis that voters understood the mobility consequences of tax limitations and the net burden of the cap. We find that high potential tax savings and high expected mobility rates result in higher support for portability. We also find that the degree of racial segregation, the presence of nonresidential tax bases, and the share of migrants from out of state all contribute to support for the amendment. Results suggest that voters were as concerned with reducing their own tax share at the expense of other property owners as they were with curtailing local expenditures.

Predictable gene expression related to behavioral variation in parenting

Differential gene expression has been associated with transitions between behavioral states for a wide variety of organisms and behaviors. Heterochrony, genetic toolkits, and predictable pathways underlying behavioral transitions have been hypothesized to explain the relationship between transcription and behavioral changes. Less studied is how variation in transcription is related to variation within a behavior, and if the genes that are associated with this variation are predictable. Here, we adopt an evolutionary systems biology perspective to address 2 hypotheses relating differential expression to changes within and between behavior. We predicted fewer genes will be associated with variation within a behavior than with transitions between states, and the genes underlying variation within a behavior will represent a narrower set of biological functions. We tested for associations with parenting variation within a state with a set of genes known a priori to be differentially expressed (DE) between parenting states in the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides. As predicted, we found that far fewer genes are DE related to variation within parenting. Moreover, these were not randomly distributed among categories or pathways in the gene set we tested and primarily involved genes associated with neurotransmission. We suggest that this means candidate genes will be easier to identify for associations within a behavior, as descriptions of behavioral state may include more than a single phenotype

Purity through factorisation

We give a construction that identifies the collection of pure processes (i.e. those which are deterministic, or without randomness) within a theory containing both pure and mixed processes. Working in the framework of symmetric monoidal categories, we define a pure subcategory. This definition arises elegantly from the categorical notion of a weak factorisation system. Our construction gives the expected result in several examples, both quantum and classical.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2017, arXiv:1802.0973

House 1

Chris Hunt and Mavernie Cunningham’s film and sound-based installation 'House 1' was selected for inclusion in the Art and Sound Symposium, Leicester de Montfort University, June 23-24th 2017. The selection process was conducted by peer review including Sam Topley, Louise Rossiter, Sam Warren, and Jack Richardson. House 1 is a collaborative artwork with Mavernie Cunningham that employs relationships between sound, moving image and sculptural object. The piece consists of sound and moving image pieces that were initially inspired by the durational and aural patterns of Jonathan Harvey’s Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980). The first of these pieces is screened within a sculptural house-object made of ceramic, plywood and thread. The house-object is covered in digital transfer prints that reference urban landscapes and reflective windows; red string seeps from the roof and walls. Using notions of dwelling, departure, migration and nostalgia, and the beckoning of each of these states to one another, the sculptural form of the house-object is covered with abstracted images, suggesting aspects of dwelling and its disruption. The film and sound piece contained within plays further on these themes. The work is concerned with questions of the ‘way home’, the formation of homestead and its dispersion or disappearance; to dwell and dwelling’s disruption. This was the second Art and Sound symposium held by Leicester de Montfort University, and was organised by Jack Richardson and Louise Rossiter. The symposium included a presentation of a series of papers, workshops and installations presented by national and international researchers, established artists and prominent academics. The symposium explored a very diverse range of visual and aural practices, theoretical discussion and reflections on the interaction between visual and aural creative processes amongst individual workers and collaborators

Application of the Mathematical Model of Tumor-Immune Interactions for IL-2 Adoptive Immunotherapy to Studies on Patients with Metastatic Melanoma or Renal Cell Cancer

Recent developments in Adoptive Immunotherapy for cancer management have lead clinicians to employ these techniques in hospital settings. Much data has been produced that indicates the effectiveness of introducing enhanced and expanded immune systems into cancer hosts. In this retrospective study we take another look at the Kirschner mathematical model for immune-tumor interactions in light of data presented by Rosenburg on patients with Metastatic Melanoma or Renal Cell Cancer

Prospectus, May 27, 2004

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2004/1014/thumbnail.jp

A State Space Approach to Extracting the Signal from Uncertain Data

Most macroeconomic data are uncertain - they are estimates rather than perfect measures of underlying economic variables. One symptom of that uncertainty is the propensity of statistical agencies to revise their estimates in the light of new information or methodological advances. This paper sets out an approach for extracting the signal from uncertain data. It describes a two-step estimation procedure in which the history of past revisions are first used to estimate the parameters of a measurement equation describing the official published estimates. These parameters are then imposed in a maximum likelihood estimation of a state space model for the macroeconomic variable.Real-time data analysis, State space models, Data uncertainty, Data revisions

Prospectus, April 1, 2004

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2004/1008/thumbnail.jp