Commentary

This paper was presented at the conference "Policies to Promote Affordable Housing," cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and New York University's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, February 7, 2002. It was part of Session 2: Affordable Housing and the Housing Market, and is a commentary on "Government regulation and changes in the affordable housing stock" by C. Tsuriel Somerville and Christopher J. Mayer.Housing - Finance ; Rent control ; Local government ; Rent ; Construction industry ; Metropolitan areas - Statistics

Greek in Marriage, Latin in Giving: The Greek Community of Fourteenth-century Palermo and the Deceptive Will of Bonannus de Geronimo

This article explores some of the difficulties inherent in the discussion of medieval ethnicity. Early fourteenth-century Palermo was a city with a celebrated multi-ethnic Latin, Arabic, and Greek past, but by the 1300s, much had changed, with Latin culture eclipsing the others. However, two small Greek ethnic minorities persisted in this culture: one indigenous, descending from the ministers, notaries, and monks who thrived under twelfth-century Norman rule, and the other immigrant, composed primarily of Byzantine slaves and freed slaves. The second group is identified in the sources as grecus, while the indigenous Italo-Greeks cannot easily be located in the documentation. The 1333 will of Bonannus de Geronimo appears to offer insights into the Italo-Greek population. Bonannus was not identified as a grecus, but this testament con firms that Bonnanus was married according to the Greek marriage rite. A close examination of his will, in the context of other Latin wills within the same notarial register, indicates that this was the will of a Latin, not an Italo-Greek. The will of Bonannus is an example of the difficulties of document interpretation with regard to medieval ethnicity, but similar in-depth document analysis is necessary to prove or disprove the Italo-Greek presence

Policy Priorities of Municipal Candidates in the 2014 Local Ontario Elections

This paper reports the results of a survey on the policy priorities of municipal candidates in the 2014 municipal elections in Ontario. As part of a survey of municipal candidates in 47 Ontario municipalities, we asked a series of questions relating to perceived policy priorities, election issues, and electoral success to shed light on the extent to which municipal political candidates are “policy seekers,” and the extent to which their policy priorities vary across municipalities and municipal types, successful and unsuccessful candidates, and urban and rural candidates. We find that reported policy priorities tend to fall into two major categories: fiscal issues and economic development or administration and good governance. The prominence of these fiscal and procedural priorities is steady across a range of local candidate types, including successful and unsuccessful candidates, incumbent and non-incumbent candidates, and even urban and rural candidates. Only in very large municipalities, according to our findings, does the structure of candidate priorities begin to diverge from this standard emphasis on finance and procedure

Rendezvous Integration Complexities of NASA Human Flight Vehicles

Propellant-optimal trajectories, relative sensors and navigation, and docking/capture mechanisms are rendezvous disciplines that receive much attention in the technical literature. However, other areas must be considered. These include absolute navigation, maneuver targeting, attitude control, power generation, software development and verification, redundancy management, thermal control, avionics integration, robotics, communications, lighting, human factors, crew timeline, procedure development, orbital debris risk mitigation, structures, plume impingement, logistics, and in some cases extravehicular activity. While current and future spaceflight programs will introduce new technologies and operations concepts, the complexity of integrating multiple systems on multiple spacecraft will remain. The systems integration task may become more difficult as increasingly complex software is used to meet current and future automation, autonomy, and robotic operation requirements

The Public Interest Standard: The Search for the Holy Grail

During the last eighty years, there is likely no single area of communications policy that has generated as much scholarly discourse, judicial analysis, and political debate as has the simple directive to regulate in the public interest. While remaining at the heart of current communications regulatory policy debate, the public interest standard has been subject to evolving, and often elusive definitions that reflect the change in American culture from generation to generation. As broadcasters begin the transition to a more flexible digital technology, there have been calls for a reexamination of the public interest standard. But the genius of the public interest standard is its breadth and flexibility, and the advent of digital television should not be an occasion for increasing public interest requirements. If anything, the development of new technologies justifies greater reliance on broadcasters and the market to ensure service to the public

The Public Interest Standard: The Search for the Holy Grail

During the last eighty years, there is likely no single area of communications policy that has generated as much scholarly discourse, judicial analysis, and political debate as has the simple directive to regulate in the public interest. While remaining at the heart of current communications regulatory policy debate, the public interest standard has been subject to evolving, and often elusive definitions that reflect the change in American culture from generation to generation. As broadcasters begin the transition to a more flexible digital technology, there have been calls for a reexamination of the public interest standard. But the genius of the public interest standard is its breadth and flexibility, and the advent of digital television should not be an occasion for increasing public interest requirements. If anything, the development of new technologies justifies greater reliance on broadcasters and the market to ensure service to the public

Computer simulations of peptide nucleic acid under external force

The research question, “Can molecular dynamics be used to assess and screen the single-molecular binding properties of a candidate bioadhesive?" is answered in this thesis using molecular dynamics simulations. A ‘nearest-neighbour’ model was produced that related the candidate bioadhesive peptide nucleic acid’s (PNA’s) primary sequences with equilibrium binding enthalpies and could predict experimental binding enthalpies with an accuracy of 8.7%. In addition, the relationship between PNA rupture forces and loading rates at high loading rates was established for two distinct loading axes, and internal cohesive energies between two bound strands under external force were expressed as a function of displacements along unbinding coordinates. In addition, a novel coarse-grained model for ds-PNA that is natively integrable into other related coarse-grained models was produced and found capable of replicating both experimental structures and rupture forces as determined by all-atom models.This thesis presents the first time that the relationship between primary sequence and PNA binding energies have been derived. In addition, it presents the first time that the relationship between rupture force and loading rate has been established for PNA and the first time this relationship has been expressed in terms of inter-strand energies for PNA-containing nucleic acids. This thesis is of general interest for the development of a PNA bioadhesive by providing the single-molecular framework against which macroscopic observables can be interpreted and compared. In addition, the methods presented are broadly available and do not require specialist equipment, making them of interest to developing single-molecular interpretations of bioadhesive properties without significant financial or experimental investment