Book Review

Reviewing James Jackson Kilpatrick, The Smut Peddlers, Doubleday & Co., 196

James Jackson v. Louisville Ladder Inc

USDC for the Middle District of Pennsylvani

The wider value of rural rail provision

In the context of recent plans for public sector expenditure, the value for money provided by rural public transport is an important issue in Britain and elsewhere, and one aspect of this is the option and non-use value placed on public transport by residents. Whilst there are a small number of studies which have estimated option and non-use values, they rest largely on contingent valuation methods which are subject to dangers of bias, and concentrate on commuter services into cities rather than truly rural services. This paper seeks to overcome these problems by conducting a Stated Preference (SP) experiment in rural communities, which values the provision of rail services and compares this against Post Office provision. We believe that using this approach, and allowing respondents to compare willingness to pay for rail services with that for another important rural service subject to threatened cuts, should produce more reliable results; moreover we achieve this using self completion questionnaires rather than much more expensive interviews. Our results show much lower values for rail than previous studies, though this is to be expected in truly rural areas where the likelihood of commuting by rail is much lower. Other non-use values are greater than option values in this context

Statistics and the “little grey cells”

Can statistical analysis compete with Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple when it comes to solving Agatha Christie's many murder mysteries? James Jackson investigates

MEMS 411: Torsion Tester Design Report

The goal of this project is to provide the customer, Dr. James Jackson Potter, with a lightweight, inexpensive, and accurate alternative to modern, professional torsion-testing machines. The torsion tester developed by this team will be used in a classroom setting for design competitions on 3-D printed ABS plastic torsion bars; therefore the design also accommodate a range of functions which might be useful to the customer during testing competitions, potentially including automatic stopping at failure, a reset function, and the ability to create custom functions which can integrate into the existing function library