Amici Curiae Brief of the International Municipal Lawyers Association and Legal Scholars in Support of Defendants-Appellees in Portland Pipe Line Corporation, et al. v. City of South Portland, et al.

This brief to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court was filed in support of the City of South Portland by the Amici Curiae, including the International Municipal Lawyers Association and legal scholars, to provide the Court with a background on the role of local governments in land use planning, and to explain why the City of South Portland’s Clear Skies Ordinance falls easily within the City’s authority and was not preempted by state legislation.After studying the potential for bulk loading of crude oil within its boundaries, the City of South Portland concluded that the infrastructure requirements and environmental impacts of the activity posed a threat to public health and welfare and were incompatible with the community’s vision of itself for the future. The City therefore decided to enact the Clear Skies Ordinance, which prohibits the storing and handling of petroleum or petroleum products for the bulk loading of crude oil onto any marine tank vessel in specified zoning districts. Litigation followed, with plaintiffs arguing that the City lacked authority to enact the Ordinance and that, even if it had such authority in the first instance, that authority had been preempted by other state law. Defendants prevailed on summary judgment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, and during the course of an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, the Circuit certified several questions to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. This brief was filed in support of the City with regard to those certified questions.The brief begins by discussing how central the role of local governments is in making land use decisions, emphasizing the highly localized impacts of land use decisions for public health and welfare. It then describes the zoning mechanisms by which local governments exercise their land use power, and discusses why the zoning power is so important for protecting public health and environmental quality, and responding to the changing needs of communities.Next, the brief explains the legal underpinnings of the City of South Portland’s home rule authority. The Constitution of the State of Maine contains a broad grant of home rule authority that is further strengthened by a statutorily imposed rebuttable presumption of validity for exercises of that authority. Local exercises of zoning authority are consistent within this home rule grant, and the brief discusses why the Clear Skies Ordinance falls squarely within the local zoning power. Finally, the brief explains why the Ordinance has not been expressly or impliedly preempted by state law. For all of those reasons, the brief concludes that the City’s enactment of the Ordinance was valid in the first instance and should not be overturned

Thirty Years After Michael E. Porter: What Do We Know About Business Exit?

Although a business exit is an important corporate change initiative, the buyer’s side seems to be more appealing to management researchers than the seller’s because acquisitions imply growth, i.e., success. Yet from an optimistic viewpoint, business exit can effectively create value for the selling company. In this paper we attempt to bring the relevance of the seller’s side back into our consciousness by asking: What do we know about business exit? We start our exploration with Porter (1976), focusing on literature that investigates the antecedents of, barriers to, and outcomes of business exit. We also include studies from related fields such as finance and economics.1 Through this research we determine three clusters of findings: factors promoting business exit, exit barriers, and exit outcomes. Overall, it is the intention of this paper to highlight the importance of business exit for research and practice. Knowing what we know about business exits and their high financial value we should bear in mind that exit need not mean failure but a new beginning for a corporation

A Response to the IPCC Fifth Assessment

This collection of essays is the initial product of the second meeting of the Environmental Law Collaborative, a group of environmental law scholars that meet to discuss important and timely environmental issues. Here, the group provides an array of perspectives arising from the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Each scholar chose one passage from one of the IPCC’s three Summaries for Policymakers as a jumping-off point for exploring climate change issues and responding directly to the reports. The result is a variety of viewpoints on the future of how law relates to climate change, a result that is the product not only of each scholar’s individual knowledge but also of the group’s robust discussion

A Response to the IPCC Fifth Assessment

This collection of essays is the initial product of the second meeting of the Environmental Law Collaborative, a group of environmental law scholars that meet to discuss important and timely environmental issues. Here, the group provides an array of perspectives arising from the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Each scholar chose one passage from one of the IPCC’s three Summaries for Policymakers as a jumping-off point for exploring climate change issues and responding directly to the reports. The result is a variety of viewpoints on the future of how law relates to climate change, a result that is the product not only of each scholar’s individual knowledge but also of the group’s robust discussion

The UCSC Genome Browser Database: 2008 update

The University of California, Santa Cruz, Genome Browser Database (GBD) provides integrated sequence and annotation data for a large collection of vertebrate and model organism genomes. Seventeen new assemblies have been added to the database in the past year, for a total coverage of 19 vertebrate and 21 invertebrate species as of September 2007. For each assembly, the GBD contains a collection of annotation data aligned to the genomic sequence. Highlights of this year's additions include a 28-species human-based vertebrate conservation annotation, an enhanced UCSC Genes set, and more human variation, MGC, and ENCODE data. The database is optimized for fast interactive performance with a set of web-based tools that may be used to view, manipulate, filter and download the annotation data. New toolset features include the Genome Graphs tool for displaying genome-wide data sets, session saving and sharing, better custom track management, expanded Genome Browser configuration options and a Genome Browser wiki site. The downloadable GBD data, the companion Genome Browser toolset and links to documentation and related information can be found at: http://genome.ucsc.ed

The UCSC Genome Browser Database: update 2006

The University of California Santa Cruz Genome Browser Database (GBD) contains sequence and annotation data for the genomes of about a dozen vertebrate species and several major model organisms. Genome annotations typically include assembly data, sequence composition, genes and gene predictions, mRNA and expressed sequence tag evidence, comparative genomics, regulation, expression and variation data. The database is optimized to support fast interactive performance with web tools that provide powerful visualization and querying capabilities for mining the data. The Genome Browser displays a wide variety of annotations at all scales from single nucleotide level up to a full chromosome. The Table Browser provides direct access to the database tables and sequence data, enabling complex queries on genome-wide datasets. The Proteome Browser graphically displays protein properties. The Gene Sorter allows filtering and comparison of genes by several metrics including expression data and several gene properties. BLAT and In Silico PCR search for sequences in entire genomes in seconds. These tools are highly integrated and provide many hyperlinks to other databases and websites. The GBD, browsing tools, downloadable data files and links to documentation and other information can be found at

VEMAP Phase 2 Bioclimatic Database. I. Gridded Historical (20th century) Climate for Modeling Ecosystem Dynamics Across the Conterminous USA

Analysis and simulation of biospheric responses to historical forcing require surface climate data that capture those aspects of climate that control ecological processes, including key spatial gradients and modes of temporal variability. We developed a multivariate, gridded historical climate dataset for the conterminous USA as a common input database for the Vegetation/Ecosystem Modeling and Analysis Project (VEMAP), a biogeochemical and dynamic vegetation model intercomparison. The dataset covers the period 1895-1993 on a 0.5° latitude/longitude grid. Climate is represented at both monthly and daily timesteps. Variables are: precipitation, mininimum and maximum temperature, total incident solar radiation, daylight-period irradiance, vapor pressure, and daylight-period relative humidity. The dataset was derived from US Historical Climate Network (HCN), cooperative network, and snowpack telemetry (SNOTEL) monthly precipitation and mean minimum and maximum temperature station data. We employed techniques that rely on geostatistical and physical relationships to create the temporally and spatially complete dataset. We developed a local kriging prediction model to infill discontinuous and limited-length station records based on spatial autocorrelation structure of climate anomalies. A spatial interpolation model (PRISM) that accounts for physiographic controls was used to grid the infilled monthly station data. We implemented a stochastic weather generator (modified WGEN) to disaggregate the gridded monthly series to dailies. Radiation and humidity variables were estimated from the dailies using a physically-based empirical surface climate model (MTCLIM3). Derived datasets include a 100 yr model spin-up climate and a historical Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) dataset. The VEMAP dataset exhibits statistically significant trends in temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, vapor pressure, and PDSI for US National Assessment regions. The historical climate and companion datasets are available online at data archive centers

Twelve thousand years of dust: The Holocene global dust cycle constrained by natural archives

Mineral dust plays an important role in the climate system by interacting with radiation, clouds, and biogeochemical cycles. In addition, natural archives show that the dust cycle experienced variability in the past in response to global and local climate change. The compilation of the DIRTMAP paleodust datasets in the last two decades provided a target for paleoclimate models that include the dust cycle, following a time slice approach. We propose an innovative framework to organize a paleodust dataset that moves on from the positive experience of DIRTMAP and takes into account new scientific challenges, by providing a concise and accessible dataset of temporally resolved records of dust mass accumulation rates and particle grain-size distributions. We consider data from ice cores, marine sediments, loess/paleosol sequences, lake sediments, and peat bogs for this compilation, with a temporal focus on the Holocene period. This global compilation allows investigation of the potential, uncertainties and confidence level of dust mass accumulation rates reconstructions, and highlights the importance of dust particle size information for accurate and quantitative reconstructions of the dust cycle. After applying criteria that help to establish that the data considered represent changes in dust deposition, 43 paleodust records have been identified, with the highest density of dust deposition data occurring in the North Atlantic region. Although the temporal evolution of dust in the North Atlantic appears consistent across several cores and suggest that minimum dust fluxes are likely observed during the Early to mid-Holocene period (6000–8000 years ago), the magnitude of dust fluxes in these observations is not fully consistent, suggesting that more work needs to be done to synthesize datasets for the Holocene. Based on the data compilation, we used the Community Earth System Model to estimate the mass balance and variability of the global dust cycle during the Holocene, with dust load ranging from 17.1 to 20.5 Tg between 2000 and 10 000 years ago, and a minimum in the Early to Mid-Holocene (6000–8000 years ago)

Organization Culture as an Explanation for Employee Discipline Practices

Most supervisors dread employee discipline and often employ strategies not officially sanctioned by the organization. Poorly designed discipline systems cause this variation in discipline practices. Inconsistent discipline can cause losses in productivity and reduce employee morale. Extant literature offers little in the form of guidance for improving this important human resource activity. This article explore where normative literature on organizational culture may have explanatory value for understanding variation in discipline practices. The article suggests two groups of factors that have causal effects on discipline practices. The tangible factors are those describing the formal practices the organization wishes its employees to follow. The intangible factors provide cues for explaining why informal strategies emerge as successful practices for getting things done. Using this conception of organization culture, the article proposes hypotheses for future testing to validate the suspected influence of culture on decisions regarding employee discipline.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Elevated Fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21) in obese, insulin resistant states is normalised by the synthetic retinoid Fenretinide in mice

The authors would like to thank undergraduate student Aleksandra Kowalczuk (University of Aberdeen) for assisting in experiments and Dr. Emma K. Lees (School of Health Sciences, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK) for invaluable discussions concerning the regulation of FGF21. We thank Dr. Calum Sutherland and Dr. Amy Cameron (both Division of Molecular and Clinical Medicine, Ninewells Hospital and Medical School, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK) for technical support and expertise in performing hepatocyte studies. Fenretinide was a generous gift of T. Martin (Johnson & Johnson, New Brunswick, NJ) and U. Thumeer (Cilag AG, Schaffhausen, Switzerland), for use completely without restriction or obligation. Quantitative-PCR was carried out using the qPCR Core Facility (Institute of Medical Sciences, University of Aberdeen). RNA-sequencing was carried out at the University of Aberdeen Centre for Genome Enabled Biology and Medicine. Pancreas histology was performed by Dr Linda Davidson (Department of Histology, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, NHS Grampian, Foresterhill Health Campus, Aberdeen, UK). This study was supported by the British Heart Foundation Intermediate Basic Research Fellowship FS/09/026 to N. Mody, RCUK fellowship to MD, EFSD/Lilly Programme Grant to MD and N. Mody, Tenovus Scotland grants G10/04 and G14/14 to N. Mody, University of Aberdeen Centre for Genome Enabled Biology and Medicine (CGEBM) PhD studentship to N. Morrice and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council studentship to GDM.Peer reviewedPublisher PD