Land Value Capture and Tax Increment Financing: Overview and Considerations for Sustainable Urban Investment

The paper reviews the notion of Land Value Capture (LVC), its advantages and disadvantages and relevance to for urban growth management. LVC encompasses a wide range of mechanisms, applied in very diverse contexts to monetize ‘windfall’ gains, accruing to landowners because of growth, infrastructure or placemaking projects. Despite widespread conviction that a proportion of these ‘unearned increments’ should somehow be harvested for the wider public good, contention, legal and pragmatic challenges remain. As policy makers confront population pressures, transport needs and inequality, LVC can help bridge infrastructure funding gaps, accelerate housing provision and temper polarisation. Betterment taxes, Tax Increment Finance (TIF) or participatory instruments like land readjustment can target ‘planning gains’ capitalized into land and property values near stations, historic monuments or upgraded precincts. As well as flagging instrument diversity and variable contexts, the literature suggests LVC mechanisms work best in a joined-up policy context. Ironically, spatial LVC schemes like TIF are most likely to fail when the regeneration need is most acute. In America, inadequate governance, scrutiny or auditing undermined schemes to fund transport or improve the public realm. In Europe LVC exists in a variety of modalities but three European examples, suggests it remains underutilized. London megaprojects, UK regional housing schemes and French sprawl, illustrate that policy makers have yet to adequately capture unearned increment

Past, Present, and Future Fishery Management in Cabinet Gorge and Noxon Rapids Reservoirs

Noxon Rapids and Cabinet Gorge Reservoirs are run-of-the-river hydroelectric impoundments on the Clark Fork River in western Montana. Operations at Noxon Rapids Reservoir changed in 1961 and 1978. The first change in operations increased average annual spring drawdown from less than 10 to more than 30 feet. The second eliminated drawdowns of more than 6 feet, except for unusual power demands. Establishment and maintenance of a satisfactory sport fishery has been largely unsuccessful in both reservoirs since the 1950\u27s. Rainbow trout (Salmo gairdneri) exhibited potential from 1958 through 1960 when they produced an excellent fishery, followed by a dramatic decline in 1961. Continued planting of rainbow trout never reestablished a substantial fishery. Other fish species planted produced similar results with the exception of brown trout (Salmo trutta) and small mouth bass (Micropterus dolomieui), which presently provide a modest fishery. Largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) were present prior to impoundment and appear to be increasing. Operation changes, combined with the brief retention times, have encouraged the downstream movement of most introduced salmonids in Noxon Rapids and Cabinet Gorge Reservoirs

The impact of new neutrino DIS and Drell-Yan data on large-x parton distributions

New data sets have recently become available for neutrino and antineutrino deep inelastic scattering on nuclear targets and for inclusive dimuon production in pp pd interactions. These data sets are sensitive to different combinations of parton distribution functions in the large-x region and, therefore, provide different constraints when incorporated into global parton distribution function fits. We compare and contrast the effects of these new data on parton distribution fits, with special emphasis on the effects at large x. The effects of the use of nuclear targets in the neutrino and antineutrino data sets are also investigated.Comment: 24 pages, 13 figure

Notes

Notes by John E. Lindberg, Lawrence S. May, Clifford A. Goodrich, William T. Huston, Louis Albert Hafner, Robert A. Stewart, Benedict R. Danko, and James D. Matthews

Generic User Process Interface for Event Generators

Generic Fortran common blocks are presented for use by High Energy Physics event generators for the transfer of event configurations from parton level generators to showering and hadronization event generators.Comment: Physics at TeV Colliders II Workshop, Les Houches, France, May 2001 14 pages, 6 figure

Huddle test measurement of a near Johnson noise limited geophone

In this paper, the sensor noise of two geophone configurations (L-22D and L-4C geophones from Sercel with custom built amplifiers) was measured by performing two huddle tests. It is shown that the accuracy of the results can be significantly improved by performing the huddle test in a seismically quiet environment and by using a large number of reference sensors to remove the seismic foreground signal from the data. Using these two techniques, the measured sensor noise of the two geophone configurations matched the calculated predictions remarkably well in the bandwidth of interest (0.01 Hz–100 Hz). Low noise operational amplifiers OPA188 were utilized to amplify the L-4C geophone to give a sensor that was characterized to be near Johnson noise limited in the bandwidth of interest with a noise value of 10−11 m/Hz⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯√10−11 m/Hz at 1 Hz

Structural and biochemical characterization of Chlamydia trachomatis DsbA reveals a cysteine-rich and weakly oxidising oxidoreductase

Copyright © 2016 Christensen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The Gram negative bacteria Chlamydia trachomatis is an obligate intracellular human pathogen that can cause pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility and blinding trachoma. C. trachomatis encodes a homolog of the dithiol oxidoreductase DsbA. Bacterial DsbA proteins introduce disulfide bonds to folding proteins providing structural bracing for secreted virulence factors, consequently these proteins are potential targets for antimicrobial drugs. Despite sharing functional and structural characteristics, the DsbA enzymes studied to date vary widely in their redox character. In this study we show that the truncated soluble form of the predicted membrane anchored protein C. trachomatis DsbA (CtDsbA) has oxidase activity and redox properties broadly similar to other characterized DsbA proteins. However CtDsbA is distinguished from other DsbAs by having six cysteines, including a second disulfide bond, and an unusual dipeptide sequence in its catalytic motif (Cys-Ser-Ala-Cys). We report the 2.7 Å crystal structure of CtDsbA revealing a typical DsbA fold, which is most similar to that of DsbA-II type proteins. Consistent with this, the catalytic surface of CtDsbA is negatively charged and lacks the hydrophobic groove found in EcDsbA and DsbAs from other enterobacteriaceae. Biochemical characterization of CtDsbA reveals it to be weakly oxidizing compared to other DsbAs and with only a mildly destabilizing active site disulfide bond. Analysis of the crystal structure suggests that this redox character is consistent with a lack of contributing factors to stabilize the active site nucleophilic thiolate relative to more oxidizing DsbA proteins

kt Effects in Direct-Photon Production

We discuss the phenomenology of initial-state parton-kt broadening in direct-photon production and related processes in hadron collisions. After a brief summary of the theoretical basis for a Gaussian-smearing approach, we present a systematic study of recent results on fixed-target and collider direct-photon production, using complementary data on diphoton and pion production to provide empirical guidance on the required amount of kt broadening. This approach provides a consistent description of the observed pattern of deviation of next-to-leading order QCD calculations relative to the direct-photon data, and accounts for the shape and normalization difference between fixed-order perturbative calculations and the data. We also discuss the uncertainties in this phenomenological approach, the implications of these results on the extraction of the gluon distribution of the nucleon, and the comparison of our findings to recent related work.Comment: LaTeX, uses revtex and epsf, 37 pages, 15 figure

Les Houches Guidebook to Monte Carlo Generators for Hadron Collider Physics

Recently the collider physics community has seen significant advances in the formalisms and implementations of event generators. This review is a primer of the methods commonly used for the simulation of high energy physics events at particle colliders. We provide brief descriptions, references, and links to the specific computer codes which implement the methods. The aim is to provide an overview of the available tools, allowing the reader to ascertain which tool is best for a particular application, but also making clear the limitations of each tool.Comment: 49 pages Latex. Compiled by the Working Group on Quantum ChromoDynamics and the Standard Model for the Workshop ``Physics at TeV Colliders'', Les Houches, France, May 2003. To appear in the proceeding