Owning your own home: reality or myth

The focus of the white paper will be to highlight the housing challenges that people in the New England region and in the United States face. Affordability, sustainability, people needs, societal needs, environmental needs, economic incentives and impact of government policies are just a few of the topics that will be explored

Performance of Agronomic Crop Varieties in Alaska 1978 –2002

There is no such thing as the perfect variety for Alaska. Some varieties are adapted to a wide range of climatic and geographic locations, while others are more specific in their adaptation. The change in elevation of a few hundred feet or a move of a few miles can have a considerable effect on the performance of any variety. Also, cultural practices such as tillage, fertilizer rates, planting date, seeding rate, pest control, and a multitude of other factors can also influence crop yields. This is especially noticeable in northern environments such as Alaska. For example, date-of-planting studies done by F.J. Wooding (1973) and C.W. Knight (1989) found that any date after the middle of May for planting an agronomic crop can result in delayed maturity, low yields, and low quality grain, even for the best adapted varieties for Alaska

Endogenous Growth, Public Capital, and the Convergence of Regional Manufacturing Industries

Several explanations can be offered for the unbalanced growth of U.S. regional manufacturing industries in the decades after World War II. The convergence hypothesis suggests that the success of the South in catching up to the Northeast and Midwest should be understood by analogy with the economic success of Japan and the rest of the G-7 in closing the gap relative to the U.S. as a whole. Endogenous growth theory, on the other hand, assigns a central role to capital formation, broadly defined. A variant of endogenous growth theory focuses on investments in public infrastructure as a key determinant of regional growth. Finally, traditional location theory stresses the evolution of regional supply and demand and the role of economies of scale and agglomeration. This paper compares these alternative explanations of U.S. regional growth by testing their predictions about the productive efficiency of regional manufacturing industries. We find little evidence that technological convergence explains the regional evolution of U.S. manufacturing industry, or that endogenous growth was an important factor. We also find little evidence that public capital externalities played a significant role in explaining the relative success of industries in the South and West. The main engine of differential regional manufacturing growth over the period 1970-86 seems to be inter-regional flows of capital and labor. The growth of multifactor productivity is essentially uniform across regions, although there is some variation in the initial levels of efficiency.

Income Originating in the State and Local Sector

In this paper we develop an accounting framework for the state and local sector which is consistent with the accounting framework for the private sector of the economy. We show that the public sector capital stock generates an imputed return which takes the form of a reduction in local taxes and that failure to recognize this income distorts the measurement of the output of this sector, confuses the debate over federal tax reform, and hides the distinction between general subsidies for capital formation. Our implementation of those accounts for the 1959- 1985 period indicates that current national income accounting procedures misstate the amount of income originating in the state and local sector; in recent years this misstatement has been on the order of $100 billion. We also show that the state and local sector is one of the more capital intensive sectors of the economy.

8. The 1980s

From the Introduction, “The Changes at ILR that began in the seventies slipped imperceptibly into the eighties, and those that may have originated at that time have, for better or worse, left their mark on the present decade. In other words, dividing history into decades is not a particularly precise way of delineating times. Clearly, there was much gaiety preceding and following the Gay Nineties, as there were certainly many roars heard before and after the Roaring Twenties. Moreover, since the speed of change in academia runs at such a leisurely pace, it is virtually impossible to say exactly when an idea found its way into formal practice. Includes: Introduction; A Dean’s View, 1980-85; Deaning, 1985-88; Robert Risley; and An Advisory Council Perspective

Masers and the Massive Star Formation Process: New Insights Through Infrared Observations

Our mid-infrared and near-infrared surveys over the last five years have helped to strengthen and clarify the relationships between water, methanol, and OH masers and the star formation process. Our surveys show that maser emission seems to be more closely associated with mid-infrared emission than cm radio continuum emission from UC HII regions. We find that masers of all molecular species surveyed trace a wide variety of phenomena and show a proclivity for linear distributions. The vast majority of these linear distributions can be explained by outflows or shocks, and in general do not appear to trace circumstellar disks as was previously thought. Some water and methanol masers that are not associated with radio continuum emission appear to trace infrared-bright hot cores, the earliest observable stage of massive stellar life before the onset of a UC HII region.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the proceedings of IAU Symposium 227: "Massive Star Birth: A Crossroads of Astrophysics", version with full-resolution images available at http://www.ctio.noao.edu/~debuize

Baryon and antibaryon production in hadron-hadron and hadron-nucleus interactions

Cascade baryon and anti-baryon yields have been measured in p+p and p+A collisions. After extraction of the projectile component in p+A interactions close similarities with A+A collisions concerning the nuclear enhancement factors are observed. In addition the importance of effects related to projectile isospin and to net baryon stopping is pointed out.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, Presented at Quark Matter 2002, Nantes, Franc

Riverine ecosystem services and the thermoelectric sector: strategic issues facing the Northeastern United States

Major strategic issues facing the global thermoelectric sector include environmental regulation, climate change and increasing electricity demand. We have addressed such issues by modeling thermoelectric generation in the Northeastern United States that is reliant on cooling under five sensitivity tests to evaluate losses/gains in power production, thermal pollution and suitable aquatic habitat, comparing the contemporary baseline (2000–2010) with potential future states. Integral to the analysis, we developed a methodology to quantify river water availability for cooling, which we define as an ecosystem service. Projected climate conditions reduce river water available for efficient power plant operations and the river\u27s capacity to absorb waste heat, causing a loss of regional thermoelectric generation (RTG) (2.5%) in some summers that, compared to the contemporary baseline, is equal to the summertime electricity consumption of 1.3 million Northeastern US homes. Vulnerabilities to warm temperatures and thermal pollution can be alleviated through the use of more efficient natural gas (NG) power plants that have a reduced reliance on cooling water. Conversion of once-through (OT) to cooling tower (CT) systems and the Clean Water Act (CWA) temperature limit regulation, both of which reduce efficiencies at the single plant level, show potential to yield beneficial increases in RTG. This is achieved by obviating the need for large volumes of river water, thereby reducing plant-to-plant interferences through lowering the impact of upstream thermal pollution and preserving a minimum standard of cooling water. The results and methodology framework presented here, which can be extrapolated to other regional assessments with contrasting climates and thermoelectric profiles, can identify opportunities and support decision-making to achieve more efficient energy systems and riverine ecosystem protection