Determinants of Industrial Property Rents in the Chicago Metropolitan Area

Urban economists have long understood the theoretical importance of transportation infrastructure and accessibility on the location choice of households and firms. We utilize a readily available data set of transaction rents in the Chicago metropolitan area to investigate the determinants of industrial property rents. Among the factors considered are proximity to transportation infrastructure, characteristics of the property, the term structure of lease agreements, and local attributes of the neighborhood. Empirical results suggest property, lease, and local demographics play important roles in determining rents. Despite the fact that industrial property tends to locate very close to rail lines and interstate highways, transportation infrastructure has much less influence. There is evidence that there is an upward sloping lease term structure premium and that the premium varies over time. The model is also used to develop a constant quality rent index for the Chicago commercial property market. Compared to average rents and asking rents, the estimated constant quality index shows a smaller run up in rents from 2003 through 2008 and a larger drop off in rents through the end of 2011

Agent-based Traffic Operator Training Environments for Evacuation Scenarios

Realistic simulation environments play a vital role in the effective training of traffic controllers to respond to large-scale events such as natural disasters or terrorist threats. BAE SYSTEMS is developing a training environment that comprises of: a physical traffic control centre environment, a 3D visualisation and a traffic behaviour model. In this paper, we describe how an agent-based approach has been essential in the development of the traffic operator training environment, especially for constructing the required behavioural models. The simulator has been applied to an evacuation scenario, for which an agent-based model has been developed which models a variety of relevant driver evacuation behaviours. These unusual behaviours have been observed occurring in real-life evacuations but to date have not been incorporated in traffic simulators. In addition, our agent-based approach includes flexibility within the simulator to respond to the variety of decisions traffic controllers can make, as well as achieving a strong degree of control for the scenario manager

How the Justice System Responds to Juvenile Victims: A Comprehensive Model.

The justice system handles thousands of cases involving juvenile victims each year. These victims are served by a complex set of agencies and institutions, including police, prosecutors, courts, and child protection agencies. Despite the many cases involving juvenile victims and the structure in place for responding to them, the juvenile victim justice system model presented in this Bulletin is a new concept. Although the juvenile victim justice system has a distinct structure and sequence, its operation is not very well understood. Unlike the more familiar juvenile offender justice system, the juvenile victim justice system has not been conceptualized as a whole or implemented by a common set of statutes. This Bulletin identifies the major elements of the juvenile victim justice system by delineating how cases move through the system. It reviews each step in the case flow process for the child protection and criminal justice systems and describes the interaction of the agencies an individuals involved. Recognizing how the juvenile victim justice system works can inform policy decisions and improve outcomes for juvenile victims. Acknowledging the existence of the system has important implications for system integration, information sharing, and data collection—all of which play a key role in ensuring the safety and well-being of juvenile victims

Action conjointe et connaissances professionnelles de l'enseignant

http://educationdidactique.revues.org/850International audienceTeachers'knowledge has been the focus of many studies in science education (Abell, 2007), often based on implicit assumptions about the link between what teachers say about their practice and their actual practice. This link is somehow problematic and therefore the teachers'knowledge at stake in these studies in mainly knowledge on action. To bypass this limitation, and in order to study also knowledge in action we put forward a connection between two approaches - the categories of professional knowledge highlighted by previous studies Pedagogical Content Knowledge) and Joint Action Theory - as well as a method of analysis related to Joint Action Theory.Lorsque l'on s'intéresse à la formation des enseignants ou à l'étude des pratiques de classe, les connaissances professionnelles des enseignants occupent une place privilégiée. Ces connaissances de l'enseignant sont donc au cœur d'un certain nombre d'études en didactique (Abell, 2007). Ces études reposent sur un certains nombres d'hypothèses, souvent implicites, sur le lien entre ce que les enseignants disent de leurs pratiques et ce qu'ils font effectivement dans leur classe. Or ce lien est loin d'être clair, et ce sont principalement les connaissances sur l'action qui sont étudiées par cette approche. Afin de dépasser cette limitation et d'étudier également les connaissances dans l'action nous proposons une articulation théorique entre la TACD et des catégories de connaissances professionnelles mises au jour par des travaux d'un autre courant scientifique (Pedagogical Content Knowledge) ainsi qu'une méthode d'analyse de ces connaissances en lien avec la théorie de l'action conjointe

Evaluating Nurses perceptions of family presence during resuscitation efforts and invasive procedures before and after an educational intervention.

Background: Since the 1980’s , family presence during resuscitation and invasive procedures has been supported in the literature as being beneficial to health care workers, family and patients. Ongoing controversy related to misconceptions regarding family practice hinder its acceptance and practice in the hospital setting. determine the effects of an educational Purpose : The purpose of this project was to intervention on nurses’ attitudes, beliefs, and intent to practice family presence using the adult learning theory and theory of reasoned action. Methods: Pre and post surveys were used in this study. Nurses in a local emergency department, who volunteered for the project, completed the pre-test prior to the completion an educational podcast. After listening to the 20 minute podcast, nurses were asked to complete the same survey again to evaluate changes in attitudes, beliefs and intent to practice family presence. Results: There was a statistically significant change between the pre and post surveys in four of six questions chosen to evaluate the effectiveness of the podcast. The two questions which did not have statistically significant changes had favorable responses in both pre and post surveys supporting family presence. Two short answer questions all indicated a change in attitudes and beliefs. Conclusion: The change in pre and post education survey scores supports that the educational podcast was effective in changing attitudes, beliefs and intent to practice family presence during resuscitation and invasive procedures

The Effects of a Bullying Prevention Program and a Positive Behavior Program on the Self-Perceptions of Building Positive Relationships Among Middle School Students

The harmful effects of bullying are a rising concern in schools, and officials are implementing bullying prevention programs to strengthen peer relationships and build social equity within school communities. The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to examine the effectiveness of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program and Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports to see which program had a more significant impact on self-perception of building positive relationships among middle school students. With each program offering different bullying prevention strategies, it is important that educational leaders fully analyze the effectiveness of each program so the needs of the school can be met. Through examining the ideals of Adams’s equity theory and how people view social relationships, the following research question was developed: Is there a difference in the perceptions of building positive relationships between students who participated in Olweus and students who participated in PBIS training, as measured by the Peer Relations Questionnaire (PRQ)? Two hundred forty seventh-grade students from two rural middle schools in the central part of North Carolina participated in this study. One hundred twenty students from each school were selected to complete the PRQ for children based on the expectation that they had been exposed to their programs for one full year. Due to the lack of normality in student reporting, student responses were compared by the Mann-Whitney U test. Based on the results of this nonparametric test, there is no evidence that the distribution of scores was different between schools, neither for the whole population nor for females or males considered separately. The lack of normality discovered in the findings shows this study cannot be generalized across all middle school settings, which suggests more research in rural middle schools across various districts and states needs to be conducted

Modelling intense rainfall in a changing climate

Anthropogenic climate change is unequivocal, with serious implications for society. Decades of atmospheric pollution have precipitated rapid non-stationarity in the hydrosphere, changing the frequency and intensity of storms in space and time. Utilities and civil infrastructure span generations, requiring practitioners to assess the local impacts of hydro-meteorological change. Rainfall simulation and extreme value theory are necessary for water resources planning and hazard mitigation. However, purely statistical techniques lack physical realism and the estimation of larger extremes can be highly uncertain. This thesis presents a new approach for estimating short duration rainfall extremes in a changing climate with mechanistic stochastic rainfall models. Mechanistic stochastic models simulate rainfall with rectangular pulses which conceptualise the phenomenology of rainfall generation in storms. But, since their inception over 30 years ago, they have tended to under estimate rainfall extremes at fine temporal scales. Motivated by industry to improve the physical realism of extreme rainfall estimation at sub-hourly scales, a censored modelling approach is presented with Bartlett-Lewis rectangular pulse models to simulate the intense rainfall profile. With censored rainfall simulation, intense storm profiles are constructed from the superposition of cells, from which extremes are sampled. The approach is applied to two test sites in the UK and Germany and used to estimate rainfall extremes in the present and hypothesised future climates at the end of this century. A new downscaling methodology is developed in which the rainfall models are conditioned on an ensemble of CMIP5 climate model outputs for moderate and severe climate forcing. Using K-nearest neighbour sampling to identify the training data for calibration, model parameter estimators are approximated using multivariate linear regression to enable estimation outside the covariate range. The approach is introduced with conditioning on mean monthly near surface air temperature and verified with further conditioning on relative humidity.Open Acces

High-frequency tectonic sequences in the Campanian Castlegate Formation during a transition from the Sevier to Laramide orogeny, Utah, U.S.A.

Though stratigraphic correlations are abundant in the Cordilleran basin-fill, they rarely include along-strike transects providing a spatio-temporal sense of deformation, sediment-supply and subsidence. A new, high-resolution, regional strike-correlation of the Castlegate Formation reveals progressive northward-growth of the San Rafael Swell during two embryonic episodes of Laramide-style deformation in central Utah. The intrabasinal deformation-events produced gentle lithospheric-folding punctuated by erosional-truncation of upwarped regions. The earliest episode occurred at 78 Ma in the southern San Rafael Swell likely causing soft-sediment deformation and stratal-tilting. Following this the alluvial-plain was leveled and rapid, extensive-progradation took place. A second episode, at 75 Ma, where deformation was focused in the northern San Rafael Swell, also caused sediment-liquefaction and erosional beveling. The stratal-tilting and sediment-liquefaction is attributed to seismicity induced by basal-traction between a subducting flat-slab and continental-lithosphere. The south-to north time-transgression of uplift is spatio-temporally consistent with NE-propagation of an oceanic-plateau subducted shallowly beneath the region

Transverse dimensional changes following rapid maxillary expansion

RAPID MAXILLARY EXPANSION has been advocated for the treatment of a narrow maxillary dental arch for over a hundred years. Early investigators found that the effects of maxillary expansion were not confined to the dental complex but also affected craniofacial morphology including the nasal cavity. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of RME on skeletal, dental and nasal structures in a transverse plane and to relate these changes to nasal cavity function as determined by nasal airway resistance measurements. Twenty-five subjects exhibiting transverse maxillary dental deficiency were compared with 25 age and sex match controls. A number of skeletal, dental and nasal transverse widths and area measurements were selected and subjected to method error analysis. A nasal template was developed that allowed measurement of linear transverse widths and areas within the nasal cavity at different levels. As a result, six skeletal, five dental and seven nasal transverse widths and two nasal cavity area variables were measured and compared between the control group and the anomaly group before and after expansion with RME. Results indicate that there was little difference between the anomaly and control groups before treatment with the exception of maxillary skeletal and dental narrowness. Expansion using RME resulted in increased upper molar width, maxillary width, nasal cavity width and separation of the anterior nasal spine; however all patients did not respond uniformly. Whereas some patients demonstrated large increases in maxillary width, others experienced only moderate or little change. These differences may be related to the degree of ossification of the median palatine suture and to other aspects of maxillofacial maturity. Intranasal changes as a result of RME were restricted generally to the lower half of the nasal cavity and were highly variable, as were changes in nasal airway resistance. Ten patients experienced improvements in either anterior NAR, posterior NAR or both. Six patients had little or no change in either resistance and only three patients experienced increases in both anterior and posterior NAR. Maxillary dental transverse deficiency was successfully treated in all cases at the end of the retention period. Rapid maxillary expansion resulted in separation of the anterior nasal spine in all cases although the extent of separation ofthe median palatine suture was highly individual.As a result of this study it would appear that rapid maxillary expansion is ideally suited to young patients with maxillary skeletal or dental narrowness who have increased anterior nasal airway resistance. Clinically it may be possible to identify those patients most likely to benefit from rapid maxillary expansion by utilising a simple clinical or cephalometric measurement