Economic Impacts of Planned Transportation Investments in New Jersey

This report demonstrates that New Jersey's plans to invest in transportation infrastructure over the next decade will result in nearly 27,000 full-time jobs per year. It also shows that the state's transportation investments will generate economic impacts in the form of employment, income, gross domestic product, and state and local tax revenues. The report is the result of a joint study conducted by the Heldrich Center and the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University's Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy

Stability of spherically symmetric solutions in modified theories of gravity

In recent years, a number of alternative theories of gravity have been proposed as possible resolutions of certain cosmological problems or as toy models for possible but heretofore unobserved effects. However, the implications of such theories for the stability of structures such as stars have not been fully investigated. We use our "generalized variational principle", described in a previous work, to analyze the stability of static spherically symmetric solutions to spherically symmetric perturbations in three such alternative theories: Carroll et al.'s f(R) gravity, Jacobson & Mattingly's "Einstein-aether theory", and Bekenstein's TeVeS. We find that in the presence of matter, f(R) gravity is highly unstable; that the stability conditions for spherically symmetric curved vacuum Einstein-aether backgrounds are the same as those for linearized stability about flat spacetime, with one exceptional case; and that the "kinetic terms" of vacuum TeVeS are indefinite in a curved background, leading to an instability.Comment: ReVTex; 20 pages, 3 figures. v2: references added, submitted to PRD; v3: expanded discussion of TeVeS; v4: minor typos corrected (version to appear in PRD

The rigorous determination of orthometric heights

The main problem of the rigorous definition of the orthometric height is the evaluation of the mean value of the Earth’s gravity acceleration along the plumbline within the topography. To find the exact relation between rigorous orthometric and Molodensky’s normal heights, the mean gravity is decomposed into: the mean normal gravity, the mean values of gravity generated by topographical and atmospheric masses, and the mean gravity disturbance generated by the masses contained within geoid. The mean normal gravity is evaluated according to Somigliana–Pizzetti’s theory of the normal gravity field generated by the ellipsoid of revolution. Using the Bruns formula, the mean values of gravity along the plumbline generated by topographical and atmospheric masses can be computed as the integral mean between the Earth’s surface and geoid. Since the disturbing gravity potential generated by masses inside the geoid is harmonic above the geoid, the mean value of the gravity disturbance generated by the geoid is defined by applying the Poisson integral equation to the integral mean. Numerical results for a test area in the Canadian Rocky Mountains show that the difference between the rigorously defined orthometric height and the Molodensky normal height reaches 0.5 m

From exam to education: the math exam/educational resources

peer-reviewedThe Math Exam/Education Resources (MER) is an open online learning resource hosted at The University of British Columbia (UBC), aimed at providing mathematics education resources for students and instructors at UBC. In this paper, there will be a discussion of the motivation for creating this resource on the MediaWiki platform, key features of the implementation that support student learning (including the evolution of the MER wiki from an exam database to more general learning resource), data on student use and response, potential for future development, and a brief description of how the project was implemented. Preliminary correlation data between wiki usage and exam performance are shared along with some preliminary data from an ongoing impact study.peer-reviewe