Jumping bristletail (Insecta: Apterygota: Microcoryphia) records in the southeastern United States

Few records of Microcoryphia exist for the southeastern United States, with named species being reported only from Arkansas, Tennessee, and the mid-Atlantic states, and with an unnamed species being reported from Georgia. Records are here provided from 291 specimens housed in the Mississippi Entomological Museum, including ten new species-level state records. This is also the first published report of the order Microcoryphia from Alabama and Mississippi. Species include the machilids Pedetontoides atlanticus Mendes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina; Pedetontus cf. atlanticus in Kentucky; Pedetontus (Verhoeffilis) gershneri Allen in Arkansas; and Pedetontus (Pedetontus) saltator Wygodzinsky and Schmidt in Mississippi and North Carolina; and the meinertellid Machiloides banksi (Silvestri) in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and North Carolina

The unemployment challenge : Labour market policies for the recession

Over the next year another 50,000 people will become unemployed. The number of unemployed will surpass that of the last recession of 1997-98. To address the unemployment challenge New Zealand needs to supplement existing job search assistance with investment in training and business capital to push long term productivity growth. Subsidies to prop up jobs and firms should be avoided. The April 2009 QSBO found that a net 36% of firms intend to cut staff numbers in the next three months. Unemployment will be the worst we have faced since the 1991 global recession. With the peak in unemployment approaching, attention needs to shift now to the challenge of getting the unemployed into work. The temptation will be to artificially protect jobs. But this is short-sighted. The economic imperative should be to ensure New Zealand has the right human capital to prosper when the economy picks up. At first glance, recent initiatives (temporary top-up support for those made redundant and the 9 day fortnight) appear sensible. But they have downsides and should be removed after the crisis has passed. Also, because they are tightly targeted they will have little impact, and do not cater well for many of the 50,000 or so extra unemployed. These will be new entrants to the labour market or those employed by small firms. This policy gap needs to be filled to avoid high and long-term unemployment.Recession, unemployment, New Zealand

Housing: An Analysis of Ownership and Investment Based on the Household Savings Survey

In 2001, Statistics New Zealand conducted a major survey of the assets and liabilities of New Zealanders called the Household Savings Survey (HSS). This paper presents the results of an analysis of ownership and investment in housing based on the results of that survey. International comparisons suggest that the rates of home ownership, investment in property and housing debt levels in New Zealand are broadly comparable with those in Australia and the United States and with a wider set of countries. An exception is that younger age groups in New Zealand hold more investment property than their counterparts in the USA and Australia. In New Zealand almost one in ten couples owned rental property in 2001, while one in five owned some form of investment property. We examine the factors that govern tenure choice and gearing. Of note is the fact that 44% of couples and 56% of individual home owners have debt free residential properties. Households' balance sheets reflect the importance of housing for both assets and liabilities. We complement the analysis of the cross-sectional unit record data from the HSS with an analysis of housing taken from the households' aggregate balance sheets from 1978 to 2004 from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. We use these data to form a measure of household saving based on the stock of net equity. We then adjust this measure of savings for changes in house prices, and find that this adjustment explains almost two thirds of the difference between the stock and flow measure of household savings, the latter taken from the Household Income and Outlay Accounts. Furthermore we find that from 1980 to 2005 the annual average rate of household saving based on these estimates from household balance sheets was 12.4% of personal disposable income, after removing the effect of changes in house price. Arguably this is a preferable measure of household saving to the widely cited negative rates of household saving based on national income accounts. We further use the balance sheet data to estimate the extent to which households have apparently withdrawn equity from their housing assets for investment in other forms or consumption. We find that on average a rise of one dollar in housing net equity is associated with 10 cents of apparent equity withdrawal.Housing; New Zealand; Portfolio; Wealth; Ownership; Equity; Gearing; Equity withdrawal; Measures of saving

The millimeter and submillimeter laboratory spectrum of methyl formate in its ground symmetric torsional state

Over 200 rotational lines of methyl formate in its ground (v-t = 0), symmetric (A) torsional state have been measured in the frequency range 140-550 GHz. Analysis of these and lower frequency transitions permits accurate prediction (≤0.1 MHz) of over 10,000 transitions at frequencies below 600 GHz with angular momentum J ≤ 50. The measured spectral lines have permitted identification of over 100 new methyl formate lines in Orion

The laboratory millimeter-wave spectrum of methyl formate in its ground torsional E state

Over 250 rotational transitions of the internal rotor methyl formate (HCOOCH_3) in its ground v_t = 0 degenerate (E) torsional substate have been measured in the millimeter-wave spectral region. These data and a number of E-state lines identified by several other workers have been analyzed using an extension of the classical principal-axis method in the high barrier limit. The resulting rotational constants allow accurate prediction of the v_t = 0 E substate methyl formate spectrum below 300 GHz between states with angular momentum J ≤ 30 and rotational energy E_(rot)≤ 350cm^(-1). The calculated transition frequencies for the E state, when combined with the results of the previous analysis of the ground-symmetric, nondegenerate state, account for over 200 of the emission lines observed toward Orion in a recent survey of the 215-265 GHz band

HvZ Website: The Re-Engineering

As part of our Software Design and Development class, we were given a customer and tasked with providing them a product that they specifically request. Our customer was the Humans vs Zombies (HvZ) student group here on campus. They are a group that periodically plays a campus-wide game of tag using their own online resources, and they requested that we provide them a new, updated website. Their problem was that they needed to both update their site and acquire a more maintable version. The current site that they own now is three years old with code that is difficult to decipher

Toward a Smart EU Energy Policy: Rationale and 22 Recommendations

We are in desperate need of an EU Energy Policy. The facts are that, yes, there is indeed an EU Energy Policy. It is a policy based on a vision, a vision with three components. The policy is aiming for “markets, competition and efficiency”, it is equally focussing on “a sustainable energy economy”, and thirdly, it wants to “secure the EU’s energy supply”. Three objectives, three separate action lines. Balancing the three objectives in an integrated approach is challenging and difficult. To what extent is the market approach consistent with the other two policy packages? What impact does a climate package with tradable emission rights and non-tradable targets for green energy have on the market designs for gas and electricity? Are the necessary investments in new pipes and wires for securing our energy supplies sufficiently coming under the prevailing regulatory framework? Or, to put it differently; are we smart enough in the way in which we are making implementing steps in order to meet our stated objectives? Our paper ends with a proposed new vision and a set of 22 recommendations to the new European Commission.energy policy; climate change; security of energy supply; EU internal marke

Roles and interaction of blow flies (Diptera: Calliphoridae) and introduced fire ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Solenopsis invicta and S. invicta x richteri) in carrion decomposition in the southeastern United States

Invasive fire ants (Solenopsis invicta and its hybrid with S. richteri) have been reported from carrion in the southeastern United States and are considered a part of the succession community. Alteration of ecological processes by fire ants could affect forensic interpretation of entomological data; therefore, I conducted studies to investigate the relative roles and interactions of fire ants and blow flies in carrion decomposition. The blow fly species composition in Mississippi has not been studied since 16 species were reported in 1983. Specimens from the Mississippi Entomological Museum were used to update the checklist of the blow flies of Mississippi and produce a photographic key to adults and third instar larvae. A total of 23 species of blow flies are now known or expected to occur in the state. I conducted an experiment whereby portions of the succession fauna were excluded from access to carrion to study the relative effects of fire ants and blow flies on carrion decomposition and their interactions with each other. Fire ants made lesions in and partially buried carcasses, but their exclusion did not affect carrion decomposition rates; slightly affected the succession community; and strongly affected succession of blow flies, specifically. Lastly, I collected fire ants from mounds at set distances from carrion and analyzed their guts for pig and blow fly DNA. The probability of detecting pig or blow fly DNA in ants collected directly from carrion increased with each succeeding day, and the probability of detecting either pig or blow fly DNA in ant guts decreased with increasing distance between carrion and the mound. Probability of detecting pig or blow fly DNA in ant guts from ants collected directly from the carcasses was 42% and 33%, respectively. This study documented that fire ants scavenge on carrion, prey on other members of the succession fauna, and transfer acquired nutrients at least 3 m into the landscape. Thus, fire ants represent a barrier to normal faunal succession patterns on carrion and these delays should be considered by forensic entomologists for postmortem interval estimation

Time dependent diffusion in a disordered medium with partially absorbing walls: A perturbative approach

We present an analytical study of the time dependent diffusion coefficient in a dilute suspension of spheres with partially absorbing boundary condition. Following Kirkpatrick (J. Chem. Phys. 76, 4255) we obtain a perturbative expansion for the time dependent particle density using volume fraction $f$ of spheres as an expansion parameter. The exact single particle $t$-operator for partially absorbing boundary condition is used to obtain a closed form time-dependent diffusion coefficient $D(t)$ accurate to first order in the volume fraction $f$. Short and long time limits of $D(t)$ are checked against the known short-time results for partially or fully absorbing boundary conditions and long-time results for reflecting boundary conditions. For fully absorbing boundary condition the long time diffusion coefficient is found to be $D(t)=5 a^2/(12 f D_{0} t) +O((D_0t/a^2)^{-2})$, to the first order of perturbation theory. Here $f$ is small but non-zero, $D_0$ the diffusion coefficient in the absence of spheres, and $a$ the radius of the spheres. The validity of this perturbative result is discussed