Regional Socioeconomic Impact of the Devils Lake Fishery

Community/Rural/Urban Development, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Intravenous conscious sedation in patients under 16 years of age. Fact or fiction?

Recently published guidelines on the use of conscious sedation in dentistry have published varying recommendations on the lower age limit for the use of intravenous conscious sedation. There are a large number of dentists currently providing dental treatment for paediatric patients under intravenous conscious sedation. The 18 cases reported here (age range 11-15 years), were successfully managed with intravenous conscious sedation. The experience in this paper is not sufficient evidence to recommend the wholesale use of intravenous conscious sedation in patients who are under 16 years. The fact that a range of operators can use these techniques on paediatric patients would suggest that further study should be carried out in this population. The guidance should be modified to say there is insufficient evidence to support the use of intravenous conscious sedation in children, rather than arbitrarily selecting a cut off point at age 16 years

AN ECONOMIC ASSESSMENT OF WETLAND MITIGATION IN NORTHWEST MINNESOTA

The economic efficiency of wetland mitigation in Minnesota's Red River Valley was examined using the Minnesota Routine Assessment Method on ten wetland case studies to rate the functions of impacted and replacement wetlands. Secondary sources were used to assign dollar values to wetland functions of impacted and replacement wetlands. Mitigation costs for projects ranged from $279 to$4,171 per acre. Estimated annual social values ranged from $207 to$1,027 per acre for impacted wetlands and from $268 to$927 per acre for replacement wetlands. Social values of replacement wetlands exceeded the social value of impacted wetlands in seven cases. Values of replacement wetlands were 1.8 to 4 times greater than the values of impacted wetlands due to 2-to-1 replacement ratios. When society gains benefits from mitigation, public cost-sharing may be appropriate. In one case the value of the impacted wetlands was higher than the value of the replacement wetland. There were insufficient data to evaluate two cases. Results are only indicators of efficiency, since not all social costs and benefits of the impact-mitigation activity are addressed by legislation. These results suggest wetland mitigation policy in Minnesota needs to be reevaluated if efficient use of society's resources is a legislative goal.Wetland(s), mitigation, economics, values, Minnesota, Red River, Wetland Conservation Act, Minnesota Routine Assessment Method, restoration, Land Economics/Use,

AN INQUIRY INTO THE RELATIONSHIP OF WETLAND REGULATIONS AND PROPERTY VALUES IN MINNESOTA

Ownership in property can be thought of as ownership of the rights to the "incomes" associated with different uses of the property. Each potential use has a separate economic value, which can be ranked if put into money terms. The property's market value is usually held to be the highest income on that ranking. Wetland protection regulations might shift the ownership of some of these rights from private to public entities or restrict the exercise of some rights. This can result in a reduction of the property's market value, if the regulation precludes access to the income from the highest ranking use. A regulation can never increase the economic value of a property from the owner's perspective. Whether or not a reduction in property value is considered "fair" is a question usually left to the courts. If it is determined that a regulation has resulted in a "taking" of property, compensation must be paid. The appropriate level of compensation is the difference between estimated pre- and post-regulation market values. The task of the analyst is to estimate those two values, after first determining if the two uses are feasible given other physical, financial, and legal conditions. Because property prices are not determined until there is a transaction, all such valuations are necessarily estimates based on the professional judgments of the analyst. There are not easy ways to determine these values short of costly individual appraisals or extensive market studies. Wetland regulations in Minnesota do result in reduced values for some property owners--as do all land use regulations. Demonstrating that values went down on regulated properties has policy import, however, only if: (1) the examples are so egregious that the Legislature decides to change the enabling legislation to adjust the distribution of the law's benefits and costs; or (2) the sum of measured property losses exceeds any estimate of total benefits, in which case the Legislature might decide to change the law as not in the broader public interest. Should further property value analyses be conducted? Only if the Legislature is very clear about why it wants to do the study. If the concern is one of fairness, then the distribution of a regulation's costs should be examined by using parcel-by-parcel appraisals or by a careful calculation of the economic benefits and costs among different classes of people, classes of property, or regions of the state. If, on the other hand, the concern is that the aggregate costs of the regulation may exceed its total benefits, then broader economic valuation studies are called for. We are not prepared to recommend either approach at this time, because the Legislature has not yet declared what the problem really is.Land Economics/Use,

Next generation sequencing analysis reveals a relationship between rDNA unit diversity and locus number in Nicotiana diploids

© 2012 Matyášek et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Parameter Estimation from Improved Measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background from QUaD

We evaluate the contribution of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization spectra to cosmological parameter constraints. We produce cosmological parameters using high-quality CMB polarization data from the ground-based QUaD experiment and demonstrate for the majority of parameters that there is significant improvement on the constraints obtained from satellite CMB polarization data. We split a multi-experiment CMB data set into temperature and polarization subsets and show that the best-fit confidence regions for the ΛCDM six-parameter cosmological model are consistent with each other, and that polarization data reduces the confidence regions on all parameters. We provide the best limits on parameters from QUaD EE/BB polarization data and we find best-fit parameters from the multi-experiment CMB data set using the optimal pivot scale of k_p = 0.013 Mpc^(–1) to be {h^2Ω_c, h^2Ω_b, H_0, A_s, n_s, τ} = {0.113, 0.0224, 70.6, 2.29 × 10^(–9), 0.960, 0.086}

Heavy Quarkonia Production in p+p Collisions from the PHENIX Experiment

Quarkonia provide a sensitive probe of the properties of the hot dense medium created in high energy heavy ion collisions. Hard scattering processes result in the production of heavy quark pairs that interact with the collision medium during hadronization. These in-medium interactions convey information about the fundamental properties of the medium itself and can be used to examine the modification of the QCD confining potential in the collision environment. Baseline measurements from p+p and d+Au collision systems are used to distinguish cold nuclear matter effects while measurements from heavy ion collision systems are used to quantify in-medium effects. The PHENIX experiment has the capability of detecting heavy quarkonia at $1.2<|\eta|<2.2$ via the $\mu^+\mu^-$ decay channel and at $|\eta|<0.35$ via the $e^+e^-$ decay channel. Recent runs have resulted in the collection of high statistics p+p data sets that provide an essential baseline reference for heavy ion measurements and allow for further critical evaluation of heavy quarkonia production mechanisms. The latest PHENIX results for the production of the $J/\psi$ in p+p collisions are presented and future prospects for $\psi'$, $\chi_{c}$ and $\Upsilon$ measurements are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings for Quark Matter 200

Optical Observations of the Binary Millisecond Pulsars J2145-0750 and J0034-0534

We report on optical observations of the low-mass binary millisecond pulsar systems J0034-0534 and J2145-0750. A faint (I=23.5) object was found to be coincident with the timing position of PSR J2145-0750. While a galaxy or distant main-sequence star cannot be ruled out, its magnitude is consistent with an ancient white dwarf, as expected from evolutionary models. For PSR J0034-0534 no objects were detected to a limiting magnitude of R=25.0, suggesting that the white dwarf in this system is cold. Using white dwarf cooling models, the limit on the magnitude of the PSR J0034-0534 companion suggests that at birth the pulsar in this system may have rotated with a period as short as 0.6 ms. These observations provide further evidence that the magnetic fields of millisecond pulsars do not decay on time scales shorter than 1 Gyr.Comment: 6 pages, uuencoded, gz -9 compressed postscript, accepted by ApJ

The Role of Chromatin Modifications in the Evolution of Giant Plant Genomes.

Angiosperm genome sizes (GS) range ~2400-fold and comprise genes and their regulatory regions, repeats, semi-degraded repeats, and 'dark matter'. The latter represents repeats so degraded that they can no longer be recognised as repetitive. In exploring whether the histone modifications associated with chromatin packaging of these contrasting genomic components are conserved across the diversity of GS in angiosperms, we compared immunocytochemistry data for two species whose GS differ ~286-fold. We compared published data for Arabidopsis thaliana with a small genome (GS = 157 Mbp/1C) with newly generated data from Fritillaria imperialis, which has a giant genome (GS = 45,000 Mbp/1C). We compared the distributions of the following histone marks: H3K4me1, H3K4me2, H3K9me1, H3K9me2, H3K9me3, H3K27me1, H3K27me2, and H3K27me3. Assuming these histone marks are associated with the same genomic features across all species, irrespective of GS, our comparative analysis enables us to suggest that while H3K4me1 and H3K4me2 methylation identifies genic DNA, H3K9me3 and H3K27me3 marks are associated with 'dark matter', H3K9me1 and H3K27me1 mark highly homogeneous repeats, and H3K9me2 and H3K27me2 mark semi-degraded repeats. The results have implications for our understanding of epigenetic profiles, chromatin packaging and the divergence of genomes, and highlight contrasting organizations of the chromatin within the nucleus depending on GS itself