Forced Sale Risk: Class, Race, and the Double Discount

What impact does a forced sale have upon a property owner\u27s wealth? And do certain characteristics of a property owner such as whether they are rich or poor or whether they are black or white, tend to affect the price yielded at a forced sale? This Article addresses arguments made by some courts and legal scholars who have claimed that certain types of forced sales result in wealth maximizing, economic efficiencies. The Article addresses such economic arguments by returning to first principles and reviewing the distinction between sales conducted under fair market value conditions and sales conducted under forced sale conditions. This analysis makes it clear that forced sales of real or personal property are conducted under conditions that are rarely likely to yield market value prices. In addition, the Article addresses the fact that judges and legal scholars have utilized a flawed economic analysis of forced sales in cases that often involve property that is owned by low- to middle-class property owners in part because those who are wealthier own their property under more stable ownership structures or utilize private ordering to avoid the chance that a court might order a forced sale under the default rules of certain common ownership structures. The Article also raises the possibility for the first time that the race or ethnicity of a property owner may affect the sales price for property sold at a forced sale, resulting in a double discount, i.e. a discount from market value for the forced sale and a further discount attributable to the race of the property owner. If minorities are more susceptible to forced sales of their property than white property owners or if there does exist a phenomenon in which minorities suffer a double discount upon the sale of their property at a forced sale, then forced sales of minority-owned property could be contributing to persistent and yawning racial wealth gaps

MANCHESTER (Reino Unido). Planos de población (1794). 1:2200

Comprende los planos de las ciudades mencionadas y sus alrededores, habiendo sido englobada en la actualidad Salford por ManchesterEscala gráfica de 440 yardas o 1/4 de milla [= 18,8 cm]. Orientado con lis en cuadrante de orientaciónOrografía a trazosToponimia de las principales calles y plazas de la ciudad, así como de sus edificios más representativosLocaliza las haciendas de los alrededores, indicando los hombres de sus propietariosTítulo enmarcado en escena alegórica sobre la riqueza de Manchester (Fortuna derramando monedas sobre tres puttique le presenta el plano de la misma, figurándo al fondo el edificio de una fábrica)Forma parte de la Colección Mendoz

PhylOTU: a high-throughput procedure quantifies microbial community diversity and resolves novel taxa from metagenomic data.

Microbial diversity is typically characterized by clustering ribosomal RNA (SSU-rRNA) sequences into operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Targeted sequencing of environmental SSU-rRNA markers via PCR may fail to detect OTUs due to biases in priming and amplification. Analysis of shotgun sequenced environmental DNA, known as metagenomics, avoids amplification bias but generates fragmentary, non-overlapping sequence reads that cannot be clustered by existing OTU-finding methods. To circumvent these limitations, we developed PhylOTU, a computational workflow that identifies OTUs from metagenomic SSU-rRNA sequence data through the use of phylogenetic principles and probabilistic sequence profiles. Using simulated metagenomic data, we quantified the accuracy with which PhylOTU clusters reads into OTUs. Comparisons of PCR and shotgun sequenced SSU-rRNA markers derived from the global open ocean revealed that while PCR libraries identify more OTUs per sequenced residue, metagenomic libraries recover a greater taxonomic diversity of OTUs. In addition, we discover novel species, genera and families in the metagenomic libraries, including OTUs from phyla missed by analysis of PCR sequences. Taken together, these results suggest that PhylOTU enables characterization of part of the biosphere currently hidden from PCR-based surveys of diversity

The power of the middle bit of a #P function

Peer Reviewe

Global marine bacterial diversity peaks at high latitudes in winter.

Genomic approaches to characterizing bacterial communities are revealing significant differences in diversity and composition between environments. But bacterial distributions have not been mapped at a global scale. Although current community surveys are way too sparse to map global diversity patterns directly, there is now sufficient data to fit accurate models of how bacterial distributions vary across different environments and to make global scale maps from these models. We apply this approach to map the global distributions of bacteria in marine surface waters. Our spatially and temporally explicit predictions suggest that bacterial diversity peaks in temperate latitudes across the world's oceans. These global peaks are seasonal, occurring 6 months apart in the two hemispheres, in the boreal and austral winters. This pattern is quite different from the tropical, seasonally consistent diversity patterns observed for most macroorganisms. However, like other marine organisms, surface water bacteria are particularly diverse in regions of high human environmental impacts on the oceans. Our maps provide the first picture of bacterial distributions at a global scale and suggest important differences between the diversity patterns of bacteria compared with other organisms

Predicting the Effect of Moisture Content on the Flexural Properties of Southern Pine Dimension Lumber

Current procedures for adjusting lumber properties for changes in moisture content are based on trends observed with the mean properties. This study was initiated to develop analytical procedures for adjusting the flexural properties of 2-inch-thick southern pine dimension lumber applicable to all grades and sizes as well as all levels of the cumulative frequency distribution. Equations are derived for adjusting modulus of rupture (MOR), modulus of elasticity (MOE), moment capacity (RS), and flexural stiffness (EI) for changes in moisture content. The best of these equations are significantly more accurate than current procedures for adjusting strength properties (MOR and RS). Because MOE and EI are less affected by changes in moisture content, most of the equations, including the current American Society for Testing and Materials procedure, work well for these properties

Spectroscopic Determination of Chromium(VI) during the Reduction of Chromium(VI) to Chromium(III)

This is the published version. Copyright 1991 Society for Applied SpectroscopyReduction of chromium(VI) to chromium(III) by thiourea between pH 3.0 and 5.5 is a key aspect of the chromium(VI)/thiourea/polyacrylamide gel polymer system used in enhanced oil recovery processes. A method has been developed to determine chromium(VI) concentration during the reduction of chromium(VI) to chromium(III) in this pH range. The reduction reaction is run in the presence of an acetic acid/sodium acetate buffer which reacts with the chromium(III) produced and prevents the formation of a brown precipitate which forms in the absence of the buffer. With interference from the precipitate eliminated, chromium(VI) concentration is determined from the visible absorbance of the reaction mixture and the unique molar absorptivity spectra of the five chromium species present in the reaction mixture. An average error of approximately 1% between known and measured chromium(VI) concentrations was demonstrated over a chromium(VI) concentration range from 0.0005 to 0.0025 M

A bilingual advantage in controlling language interference during sentence comprehension

This study compared the comprehension of syntactically simple with more complex sentences in Italian–English adult bilinguals and monolingual controls in the presence or absence of sentence-level interference. The task was to identify the agent of the sentence and we primarily examined the accuracy of response. The target sentence was signalled by the gender of the speaker, either a male or a female, and this varied over trials, where the target was spoken in a male voice the distractor was spoken in a female voice and vice versa. In contrast to other work showing a bilingual disadvantage in sentence comprehension under conditions of noise, we show that in this task, where voice permits selection of the target, adult bilingual speakers are in fact better able than their monolingual Italian peers to resist sentence-level interference when comprehension demands are high. Within bilingual speakers we also found that degree of proficiency in English correlated with the ability to resist interference for complex sentences both when the target and distractor were in Italian and when the target was in English and the distractor in Italian