Young people facing housing deprivation in Palmerston North: a crisis?

If you are a young person tonight, or any other night, living in Palmerston North, you will need to hope that you have somewhere to sleep, as currently the city provides no safe and secure emergency housing for young people. If, for a range of reasons, a young person is not able to, or chooses not to stay with their immediate or extended family, the social services in the city are forced to ask that young person to consider sleeping on friends’ couches or to seek other equally inadequate housing options in the absence of a service that could meet their housing needs.[From Executive Summary

Promoting Healthy Communities and Reducing Childhood Obesity: Legislative Options

Summarizes legislation proposed or enacted in 2007-08 in the areas of healthy eating and physical activity such as nutrition, physical education, and obesity prevention and treatment, as well as healthy community design and access to healthy food

Promoting Healthy Communities and Preventing Childhood Obesity: Trends in Recent Legislation

Summarizes state legislation enacted in 2009 in the areas of healthy eating and physical activity, such as school nutrition and BMI measurements, and healthy community design and access to healthy food, such as safe routes to school and farmers' markets

Infrastructure in a Structural Model of Economic Growth

Researchers, commentators, and politicians have devoted steadily more attention to infrastructure in response to claims that inadequate accumulation of public capital has contributed to substandard U.S. economic growth. Despite this, the link between infrastructure and productivity growth remains controversial. In this regard, it is somewhat surprising that infrastructure research has developed in isolation from the large literature on economic growth. We develop a neoclassical growth model that explicitly incorporates infrastructure and is designed to provide a tractable framework within which to analyze the empirical importance of public capital accumulation to productivity growth. We find little support for claims of a dramatic productivity boost from increased infrastructure outlays. In a specification designed to provide an upper bound for the influence of infrastructure, we estimate that raising the rate of infrastructure investment would have had a negligible impact on annual productivity growth between 1971 and 1986.

Analysis of Error within Forensic Measurements and Photogrammetry Programs

Digital images and photography have been considered commonplace in forensic science since the late 1990’s. Photogrammetry is a tool used in forensic science to measure objects within photographs that contain a scale or programs that are able to measure items in 3D images. Items at crime scenes often need to be measured and forensic scientists may not know what the best option is for their situation. This research will be conducted to show which type of measurement technique is most accurate, calculated against NIST traceable measurements, at various sizes of objects. The measurement techniques that will be tested are standard, commercially available, hand scale measurements, Photoshop, GIMP, IrfanView, and FARO. The hypothesis of the experiment is that FARO will have the lowest percent error for all sizes of objects. It was discovered that Photoshop, GIMP, and IrfanView had the lowest percent errors for small objects (0.43%), while for small objects, FARO had the highest percent error (10.61%). For medium objects, Photoshop again had the lowest percent error (0.44%) but standard measurements had the highest error (1.74%). For large objects, FARO had the lowest percent error (0.28%), and IrfanView had the highest percent error (1.85%). However, most methods had percent errors equal to or less than the acceptable five percent. Some methods were preferred for different sizes of objects, but all programs were useful as long as the limitations were considered

Sexual compatibility and seed germination in Nolana species

Nolana L.f. is a large, diverse genus in the Solanaceae endemic to coastal deserts of Peru and Chile. Large showy flowers and drought tolerance give Nolana great potential for breeding and cultivar development for the ornamental plant industry. As a precursor to breeding efforts, studies of floral development, sexual compatibility, and seed germination were conducted involving eight Nolana species (N. adansonii, K aticoana, N. elegans, N. humijusa, N. ivaniana, N. laxa, N. plicata, N. rupicola) cultivated at UNH. Stigma receptivity and pollen viability were evaluated at a range of stages of flower development. Floral development keys were developed to provide visual reference correlating morphological appearance of buds/flowers at each developmental stage to stage durations and levels of stigma receptivity. Artificial hybridizations (self-, infra-, and interspecific) were performed within and between each species. Species were generally self-incompatible. Intraspecific compatibility was high. Success of interspecific hybridization was analyzed based on fruit set, mericarps per fruit, mericarp size, and seed germination. Reduction in interspecific fertility was generally seen as lower fruiting success and smaller mericarp size as compared to intraspecific hybridization. Estimated seed counts were made by x-ray analysis of mericarps revealing differences in seed set between crosses. Hybrid seed was germinated verifying compatibility of 22 unidirectional species pairs. Causes and remedies for low seed germination rates were investigated with analysis of mericarp, morphology, imbibition, and effect of chemical and environmental germination treatments. Scanning electron microscopy and imbibition studies ruled out presence of physical germination barriers. Gibberellic acid (1000 ppm) effectively increased germination in some species. Older mericarps (stored dry for two years) had higher germination than fresh mericarps. Mericarps of N. aticoana stored for seven weeks at 35°C and 75% RH showed higher germination than mericarps stored dry, or stored moist for 1-6 or 8-12 weeks. Germination of seed cultured when immature did not surpass that of mature seed. X-ray analysis confirmed existence of at least one seed within most mericarps. Germination rates fall far below theoretical potentials based on x-ray seed counts. Findings suggest germination failure is likely due to physiological dormancy rather than low seed set

Influence of lithophysal geometry on the uniaxial compression of tuff-like rock

The purpose of this report is to summarize the work and present conclusions of Project Activity Task ORD-FY04-013 conducted under Cooperative Agreement No. DEFC28- 04RW12232 between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE). This document describes results of laboratory testing on analog lithophysal tuff (Hydro-StoneTB®) conducted in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) from 2004 to 2006