Lost: The Crisis Of Jobless and Out Of School Teens and Young Adults In Chicago, Illinois and the U.S.

This report contains compilations and calculations of various employment data for males and females 16 to 24 years old by race/ethnicity from 2005 to 2014, comparing Chicago, Illinois, the U.S. and in some instances, adding Los Angeles and New York. Besides an array of figures and tables, the report contains GIS generated maps that illustrate the relationship between employment data and population distribution by race/ethnicity. A significant contribution of this report is its demonstration that low rates of employment are spatially concentrated in neighborhoods that are also racially segregated. This report clearly highlights that youth employment rates are tied to conditions in neighborhoods and cannot be seen as distinct from what is happening in the neighborhoods themselves. The devastation of unemployment in turn, wreaks havoc on the neighborhood

Catalytic Decomposition of Nitrous Oxide Monopropellant for Hybrid Motor Ignition

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is an inexpensive and readily available non-toxic rocket motor oxidizer. It is the most commonly used oxidizer for hybrid bipropellant rocket systems, and several bipropellant liquid rocket designs have also used nitrous oxide. In liquid form, N2O is highly stable, but in vapor form it has the potential to decompose exothermically, releasing up to 1865 Joules per gram of vapor as it dissociates into nitrogen and oxygen. Consequently, it has long been considered as a potential green replacement for existing highly toxic and dangerous monopropellants. This project investigates the feasibility of using the nitrous oxide decomposition reaction as a monopropellant energy source for igniting liquid bipropellant and hybrid rockets that already use nitrous oxide as the primary oxidizer. Because nitrous oxide is such a stable propellant, the energy barrier to dissociation is quite high; normal thermal decomposition of the vapor phase does not occur until temperatures are above 800 C. The use of a ruthenium catalyst decreases the activation energy for this reaction to allow rapid decomposition below 400 C. This research investigates the design for a prototype device that channels the energy of dissociation to ignite a laboratory scale hybrid rocket motor

Finding bridges in packings of colloidal spheres

We identify putative load-bearing structures (bridges) in experimental colloidal systems studied by confocal microscopy. Bridges are co-operative structures that have been used to explain stability and inhomogeneous force transmission in simulated granular packings with a range of densities. We show that bridges similar to those found in granular simulations are present in real experimental colloidal packings. We describe critically the bridge-finding procedure for real experimental data and propose a new criterion-Lowest Mean Squared Separation (LSQS)-for selecting optimum stabilisations

An Intelligent Fuse-box for use with Renewable Energy Sources integrated within a Domestic Environment

This paper outlines a proposal for an intelligent fuse-box that can replace existing fuse-boxes in a domestic context such that a number of renewable energy sources can easily be integrated into the domestic power supply network, without the necessity for complex islanding and network protection. The approach allows intelligent control of both the generation of power and its supply to single or groups of electrical appliances. Energy storage can be implemented in such a scheme to even out the power supplied and simplify the control scheme required, and environmental monitoring and load analysis can help in automatically controlling the supply and demand profiles for optimum electrical and economic efficiency. Simulations of typical scenarios are carried out to illustrate the concept in operation

Quality Uncertainty and Grain Merchandising Risk: Vomitoxin in Spring Wheat

Marketing, Risk and Uncertainty,

Ecosystem Services on New Zealand Arable Farms

Researchers have estimated the total economic value of global ecosystem goods and services showing that a significant portion of humanity's economic well being is unaccounted for in conventional GNP accounting (Constanza et al., 1997). To demonstrate this point, authors have conventionally used highly aggregated landscape units for analysis (e.g., biomes), and average, not marginal values, of each ecosystem good or service are estimated for each unit using value transfer methodologies (Wilson et al., 2004). For example, Patterson and Cole (1999a, b) replicated the Constanza et al., (1997) approach by estimating economic values for Waikato and New Zealand ecosystem goods and services associated with standard land cover classes including horticulture, agriculture and cropping. As a result, Patterson and Cole (1999b) argue that only five ecosystem services associated with cropping have non-zero value. One of the reasons for this low number of non-zero values assorted with arable lands is that the original economic studies used by Patterson and Cole, are heavily weighted towards natural and undisturbed ecosystems rather than disturbed systems like agricultural or urban landscapes. To address this issue, more recently researchers have noted that many landscapes are actively modified by humans who seek to realise economic gain and this topic is thus an important one because in the 21st century, many of our homes, workplaces and recreational spaces are embedded within, or adjacent to, landscape mosaics that are to a greater or lesser degree affected by the conscious efforts of people to harness goods and services provided by ecological systems (Palmer et al., 2004). An engineered or designed ecosystem is one that has been extensively modified by humans to explicitly provide a set of ecosystem goods and services including more fresh water, trees, and food products and fewer floods and pollutants. These modified landscapes provide a range of ecosystem goods and services, particularly food production as farmers seek to maximize commercial gain from land use. The current paper examines issues in valuation of ecosystem goods and services derived from land used for arable farming in New Zealand and proposes ways to provide more detailed estimates of the flow and value of the flow of ecosystem services provided.Ecosystem management, Arable farming, Engineered ecosystem, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

Values of Ecosystem Services Associated with Intense Dairy Farming in New Zealand

The increase in greenhouse gas emissions and degradation of water quality and quantity in waterways due to dairy farming in New Zealand have become of growing concern. Compared to traditional sheep and beef cattle farming, dairy farming is more input intensive and more likely to cause such environmental damage. Our study uses choice modeling to explore New Zealanders' willingness to pay for sustainable dairy and sheep/beef cattle farming. We investigate respondents' level of awareness of the environmental degradation caused by dairy farming and their willingness to make trade-offs between economic growth and improvements in the level of ecosystem services associated with pastoral farming.ecosystem services, greenhouse gas emissions, dairy farming, choice modeling, Environmental Economics and Policy, Livestock Production/Industries,

Stochastic Weighted Graphs: Flexible Model Specification and Simulation

In most domains of network analysis researchers consider networks that arise in nature with weighted edges. Such networks are routinely dichotomized in the interest of using available methods for statistical inference with networks. The generalized exponential random graph model (GERGM) is a recently proposed method used to simulate and model the edges of a weighted graph. The GERGM specifies a joint distribution for an exponential family of graphs with continuous-valued edge weights. However, current estimation algorithms for the GERGM only allow inference on a restricted family of model specifications. To address this issue, we develop a Metropolis--Hastings method that can be used to estimate any GERGM specification, thereby significantly extending the family of weighted graphs that can be modeled with the GERGM. We show that new flexible model specifications are capable of avoiding likelihood degeneracy and efficiently capturing network structure in applications where such models were not previously available. We demonstrate the utility of this new class of GERGMs through application to two real network data sets, and we further assess the effectiveness of our proposed methodology by simulating non-degenerate model specifications from the well-studied two-stars model. A working R version of the GERGM code is available in the supplement and will be incorporated in the gergm CRAN package.Comment: 33 pages, 6 figures. To appear in Social Network