Land Value Taxation: Impact Analysis on Omaha/Douglas County, Nebraska

The present property tax has been under attack by home owners, business and industry. Many studies have shown the present property tax to be the most unpopular tax levied by government. This tax once levied by all governments including the federal government is now almost exclusively used by local governments with other levels of government adopting sales and income taxes as replacements for the property tax. While other levels of governments have abandoned the property tax it currently seems that the local property tax will be used by local governments as their main revenue source for quite some time in the future because of the large revenues it currently provides

Wildfire and MAMS data from STORMFEST

Early in 1992, NASA participated in an inter-agency field program called STORMFEST. The STORM-Fronts Experiment Systems Test (STORMFEST) was designed to test various systems critical to the success of STORM 1 in a very focused experiment. The field effort focused on winter storms in order to investigate the structure and evolution of fronts and associated mesoscale phenomena in the central United States. This document describes the data collected from two instruments onboard a NASA ER2 aircraft which was deployed out of Ellington Field in Houston, Texas from February 13 through March 15, 1992, in support of this experiment. The two instruments were the Wildfire (a.k.a. the moderate resolution imaging spectrometer-nadir (MODIS-N) Airborne Simulation (MAS)) and the Multispectral Atmospheric Mapping Sensor (MAMS)

Methanol: Heat Capacity, Enthalpies of Transition and Melting, and Thermodynamic Properties from 5–300°K

Thermal properties of methanol were studied by adiabatic calorimetry. The first‐order nature of the phase transition at 157.4°K with an entropy increment of 0.97 cal mole−1⋅°K−1 was confirmed. The heat capacity of the crystalline phase stable just below the triple point was defined and shown to be extremely sensitive to impurity. No evidence for a second previously‐reported phase transition could be detected. The standard entropy (S°)(S°) and Gibbs energy function (− [G° − H°0] / T)(−[G°−H°0]∕T) for the liquid at 298.15°K are 30.40 and 15.18 cal mole−1⋅°K−1, respectively. The proposed classification of methanol as a plastic crystal on the basis of its small entropy of melting (4.38 cal mole−1⋅°K−1) is considered with respect to hydrogen bonding in the liquid phase.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/70007/2/JCPSA6-54-4-1464-1.pd

Physis

Physis presents eight digitally constructed photographic images and one video installation that were created through mixing and sampling a variety of representations of built environments, visual languages and processes. What results from this image compositing are ambiguous, dreamlike, in-between spaces that mine the relationship between nature and contemporary culture. Through the creation of poetic, ambiguous images viewers are able to form their own response to the individual images and the exhibition as whole. My approach of creating an experience that is more poetic than didactic was born out of a response to contemporary and historical photographs and writings, and to the directness found in images belonging to contemporary media culture. While Physis does allow for multiple interpretations, for me, this body of work references ideas of interconnectedness, transmission and the redefinition of space through connections between studio processes, the body, the digital and the visual

A clinical comparison of residual astigmatism produced by back surface aspheric hard lenses versus back surface spherical hard lenses

A clinical comparison of residual astigmatism produced by back surface aspheric hard lenses versus back surface spherical hard lense

MAMS: High resolution atmospheric moisture/surface properties

Multispectral Atmospheric Mapping Sensor (MAMS) data collected from a number of U2/ER2 aircraft flights were used to investigate atmospheric and surface (land) components of the hydrologic cycle. Algorithms were developed to retrieve surface and atmospheric geophysical parameters which describe the variability of atmospheric moisture, its role in cloud and storm development, and the influence of surface moisture and heat sources on convective activity. Techniques derived with MAMS data are being applied to existing satellite measurements to show their applicability to regional and large process studies and their impact on operational forecasting

Arresting Banking Panics: Fed Liquidity Provision and the Forgotten Panic of 1929

Scholars differ on whether Federal Reserve intervention mitigated banking panics during the Great Depression and in recent years. The last panic prior to the Depression sheds light on this debate. In April 1929, a fruit fly infestation in Florida forced the U.S. government to quarantine fruit shipments from the state and destroy infested groves. When Congress recessed in June without approving compensation for farmers, depositors in citrus growing regions began withdrawing deposits from banks, culminating in runs on institutions in the financial center of Tampa and surrounding cities. Using archival evidence, we describe how the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta halted the spread of the panic by rushing currency to member banks. Analysis based on a new micro-level database of commercial banks in Florida shows that bank failures would have been twice as high without the Fed’s intervention. The policy response of the Fed ended the panic and suggests that similar interventions by the Fed may have been useful during the Great Depression, even in cases where banks faced questions about their solvency.

Diode laser array

A diode laser array comprises a substrate of a semiconductor material having first and second opposed surfaces. On the first surface is a plurality of spaced gain sections and a separate distributed Bragg reflector passive waveguide at each end of each gain section and optically connecting the gain sections. Each gain section includes a cavity therein wherein charge carriers are generated and recombine to generate light which is confined in the cavity. Also, the cavity, which is preferably a quantum well cavity, provides both a high differential gain and potentially large depth of loss modulation. Each waveguide has a wavelength which is preferably formed by an extension of the cavity of the gain sections and a grating. The grating has a period which provides a selective feedback of light into the gain sections to supporting lasing, which allows some of the light to be emitted from the waveguide normal to the surface of the substrate and which allows optical coupling of the gain sections. Also, the grating period provides an operating wavelength which is on the short wavelength side of the gain period of the gain sections required for laser oscillation. An RF pulse is applied so as to maximize the magnitude of the loss modulation and the differential gain in the gain sections. The array is operated by applying a DC bias to all the gain sections at a level just below the threshold of the gain sections to only one of the gain sections which raises the bias in all of the gain sections to a level that causes all of the gain sections to oscillate. Thus, a small bias can turn the array on and off

Characteristics of discipline and non-discipline freshmen living in the residence halls at the University of Northern Iowa enrolled in fall semester 1980

All through our society, people have to live and work together harmoniously or chaos is the result. Whenever a large number of different types of individuals live within close proximity of one another, problems are bound to appear. This phenomena occurs not only in the real world but in the college/university setting as well, particularly in the residence halls