Applying the Private Benefit Doctrine to Farmland Conservation Easements

Farmland or working-land conservation easements serve two purposes. One is charitable, to protect open space from development; the other is practical, to preserve the land in productive agricultural use. These purposes, however, create a tension in the easement itself that can force the land trust that holds the easement to choose between the two purposes when the easement, meant in part to protect the farm, threatens the farm\u27s continued viability. Neutral-impact amendments are amendments to working-land easements that allow farmers to improve farm production or viability without harming the conservation value of the easements. Such amendments seem beneficial: a land trust can advance one of its goals of keeping agricultural land productive–without sacrificing the other goal of preserving the conservation value of the land. By approving such an amendment, however, a land trust likely violates the private benefit doctrine and risks losing its tax-exempt status. This Note argues that the IRS should explicitly decide not to apply the private benefit doctrine to neutral-impact amendments of farmland and working-land conservation easements

The augmented marking complex of a surface

We build an augmentation of the Masur-Minsky marking complex by Groves-Manning combinatorial horoballs to obtain a graph we call the augmented marking complex, $\mathcal{AM}(S)$. Adapting work of Masur-Minsky, we prove that $\mathcal{AM}(S)$ is quasiisometric to Teichm\"uller space with the Teichm\"uller metric. A similar construction was independently discovered by Eskin-Masur-Rafi. We also completely integrate the Masur-Minsky hierarchy machinery to $\mathcal{AM}(S)$ to build flexible families of uniform quasigeodesics in Teichm\"uller space. As an application, we give a new proof of Rafi's distance formula for the Teichm\"uller metric.Comment: 30 pages; significantly rewritten to strengthen main construction

Increasing turnover through time in tropical forests

Tree turnover rates were assessed at 40 tropical forest sites. Averaged across inventoried forests, turnover, as measured by tree mortality and recruitment, has increased since the 1950's, with an apparent pantropical acceleration since 1980. Among 22 mature forest sites with two or more inventory periods, forest turnover also increased. The trend in forest dynamics may have profound effects on biological diversity

The Genuine Cosmic Rosetta

Reexamination of general relativistic experimental results shows the universe is governed by Einstein's static-spacetime general relativity instead of Friedmann-Lemaitre expanding-spacetime general relativity. The absence of expansion redshifts in a static-spacetime universe suggests a reevaluation of the present cosmology is needed.Comment: 9 pages LaTeX, no figure

Requirements for a geometry programming language for CFD applications

A number of typical problems faced by the aerodynamicist in using computational fluid dynamics are presented to illustrate the need for a geometry programming language. The overall requirements for such a language are illustrated by examples from the Boeing Aero Grid and Paneling System (AGPS). Some of the problems in building such a system are also reviewed along with suggestions as to what to look for when evaluating new software problems

Search for and analysis of radioactive halos in lunar material

The lunar halo search was conducted because halos in terrestrial minerals serve as pointers to localized radioactivity, and make possible analytical studies on the problems of isotopic dating and mode of crystallization of the host mineral. Ancillary studies were conducted on terrestrial halos and on certain samples of special origin such as tektites and meteorites

Haptic dancing: human performance at haptic decoding with a vocabulary

The inspiration for this study is the observation that swing dancing involves coordination of actions between two humans that can be accomplished by pure haptic signaling. This study implements a leader-follower dance to be executed between a human and a PHANToM haptic device. The data demonstrates that the participants' understanding of the motion as a random sequence of known moves informs their following, making this vocabulary-based interaction fundamentally different from closed loop pursuit tracking. This robot leader does not respond to the follower's movement other than to display error from a nominal path. This work is the first step in an investigation of the successful haptic coordination between dancers, which will inform a subsequent design of a truly interactive robot leader