Funding Resilient Infrastructure in New Jersey: Attitudes Following a Natural Disaster

Recent major natural disasters in New Jersey have demonstrated the need to increase the resilience of transportation infrastructure. This research examines public attitudes toward revenue sources that can be dedicated to protecting vulnerable areas, most notably the transportation linkages on which the state depends. A statewide survey was conducted to gather data approximately four months following Superstorm Sandy, the costliest natural disaster in the state’s history. The authors’ objective was to sample public attitudes while the impacts of the disaster were still fresh. They found little support for temporary tax increases to improve resiliency, with the most positive support for taxing visitors (i.e., a hotel and recreational tax) and for a 30-year bond measure (i.e., taxing the future). This observation seemingly contradicts broad support for investing in new infrastructure, as well as maintaining and protecting existing infrastructure. Multivariate analysis to understand the underlying attitudes toward raising revenue found that more left-leaning or communitarian attitudes are associated with more support for gasoline, income, or sales taxes devoted to mitigating vulnerability. Those who supported investment in transit and protecting infrastructure also were more likely to support these taxes. There was no parallel finding of factors associated with taxing visitors or issuing bonds

Modern Observational Techniques for Comets

Techniques are discussed in the following areas: astrometry, photometry, infrared observations, radio observations, spectroscopy, imaging of coma and tail, image processing of observation. The determination of the chemical composition and physical structure of comets is highlighted

On a conjecture of Bennewitz, and the behaviour of the Titchmarsh-Weyl matrix near a pole

For any real limit-$n$ $2n$th-order selfadjoint linear differential expression on $[0,\infty)$, Titchmarsh- Weyl matrices $M(\lambda)$ can be defined. Two matrices of particu lar interest are the matrices $M_D(\lambda)$ and $M_N(\lambda)$ assoc iated respectively with Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions at $x=0$. These satisfy $M_D(\lambda) = -M_{N}(\lambda)^{-1}$. It is known that when these matrices have poles (which can only lie on the real axis) the existence of valid HELP inequalities depends on their behaviour in the neighbourhood of these poles. We prove a conjecture of Bennewitz and use it, together with a new algorithm for computing the Laurent expansion of a Titchmarsh-Weyl matrix in the neighbourhood of a pole, to investigate the existence of HELP inequalities for a number of differential equations which have so far proved awkward to analys

Paper Session II-B - The Selection of a Launch Vehicle

The selection of a launch vehicle should not depend on any single vehicle attribute (i.e., price, reliability, availability, insurance rate, final payload placement accuracy, etc.), but rather on the effect of the interaction of multiple vehicle attributes in combination with payload configuration and sparing/maintenance strategy. For commercial organizations, selection decisions should be based on performance measures such as ROI and risk. For government operations, selections should be based on measures such as present value of life cycle cost in combination with availability constraints. Methods for analyzing launch vehicle and related choices are described together with parametric results illustrating important tradeoffs