The costs of urban physical infrastructure services

The traditional methods of funding physical infrastructure - roads, public transport, water, sewerage, drainage, electricity, gas, telephones and garbage disposal - have involved varying combinations of loans amortised from current revenue, property taxes, user charges, access charges, developer charges, fuel taxes and subsidies from general tax revenue. These methods of funding have come under pressure in recent years for a number of reasons: shortages of government capital funds, pressures to reduce taxes, and attempts to make the funding systems more equitable and to use it to increase efficiency in the supply of these services and to reduce their adverse effects on the environment

Observable frequency shifts via spin-rotation coupling

The phase perturbation arising from spin-rotation coupling is developed as a natural extension of the celebrated Sagnac effect. Experimental evidence in support of this phase shift, however, has yet to be realized due to the exceptional sensitivity required. We draw attention to the relevance of a series of experiments establishing that circularly polarized light, upon passing through a rotating half-wave plate, is changed in frequency by twice the rotation rate. These experiments may be interpreted as demonstrating the role of spin-rotation coupling in inducing this frequency shift, thus providing direct empirical verification of the coupling of the photon helicity to rotation. A neutron interferometry experiment is proposed which would be sensitive to an analogous frequency shift for fermions. In this arrangement, polarized neutrons enter an interferometer containing two spin flippers, one of which is rotating while the other is held stationary. An observable beating in the transmitted neutron beam intensity is predicted.Comment: LaTeX, 15 pages with 4 PostScript figures, submitted to Phys. Lett.

A tale of two cities : public land ownership in Canberra and Stockholm

Public ownership and development of land is a powerful means of controlling the development of an urban area, avoiding high speculative costs of land for housing and public purposes, and siphoning increases in land values that accompany urban growth into the public purse. In Stockholm and Canberra, the balance between these three objectives in the use of public land has differed over time. Control of development has become dominant in Canberra while financial objectives have continued to be important in Stockholm. Whereas public ownership and leasehold tenure of developed land have been used by Stockholm City Council as a means of maintaining a public role in the land market following urban development, the Federal Government in Canberra have done this to a much smaller extent. The City of Stockholm has been an active ground landlord; the Government in Canberra has been almost completely passive, using lease conditions solely as a means of controlling land use. The paper explores historical reasons for the difference between the two cities. Importantly, both the initiative and financial responsibility were taken locally in Stockholm but by the national government in relation to its national capital, Canberra.Australian Policy Online (APO)'s Linked Data II project, funded by the Australian Research Council, with partners at the ANU Library, Swinburne University and RMIT

Achievement of home ownership among post-war Australian cohorts

There has been concern for many years that it has been becoming more difficult for people to afford to buy a home. Despite this, the proportion of home owners among Australian households has remained much the same for some twenty years or more. In part, this is probably because the longterm rewards from being a home owner have increased at the same time as the costs of becoming an owner. This paper examines in some detail the factors which have affected the ability of people to become owners. It uses a unique set of data which were gathered in a survey which collected retrospective information about the experience of women and men aged 20 to 60 over their adult life. The paper shows that more recent cohorts of women have become owners at younger ages than earlier cohorts. There is limited evidence that, in recent years, women who worked for a longer time after marriage, and men with higher incomes and higher occupations, were able to become owners more quickly. This may point to home ownership becoming increasingly confined to those on higher incomes, whether from high individual incomes or from having two incomes in household

Bayesian algorithms for recovering structure from single-particle diffraction snapshots of unknown orientation: a comparison

The advent of X-ray Free Electron Lasers promises the possibility to determine the structure of individual particles such as microcrystallites, viruses and biomolecules from single-shot diffraction snapshots obtained before the particle is destroyed by the intense femtosecond pulse. This program requires the ability to determine the orientation of the particle giving rise to each snapshot at signal levels as low as ~10-2 photons/pixel. Two apparently different approaches have recently demonstrated this capability. Here we show they represent different implementations of the same fundamental approach, and identify the primary factors limiting their performance.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Leasehold policies and land use planning in Canberra

With self-government, a worldwide reputation as a beautiful, planned city, and a stable base of people and jobs, Canberra has achieved much. The time has come, not only for birthday congratulations, but also for a look to the future. In particular, we ask how the public sector-now the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government-should participate in the growth and development of this future Canberra? More specifically, given the fact that all land is publicly owned and leased to private users, how could the ACT Government best manage this asset

Planning as urban management : a critical assessment

A long-standing debaJe over the nature and merits of 'rational comprehensive' versus 'incrementalist' models of public decision-making is continued in the papers on their application to planning by Max Neutze andlohnMant. Neutze reviews the post-war optomistic rise of comprehensive planning, and its subsequent replacement by more modest 'urban management' strategies in the wake of its apparent failure to 'deliver the goods'. During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a growing perception of the planning process as inherently political, of end-state planning as inflexible and bureaucratic, of collective action as less beneficial socially and economical}y than individual, and of the inability of planning to substantially affect the lot of the poor. This perception led to the development of minimalist and prophylactic planning strategies and a retreat from bold and visionary planning approaches which require sufficient determination to allow long-term decision-making. Master planning assumes the lead should be taken by a planning authority with a comprehensive view of all parts of the system. I ncrementalist approaches implicitly accept the leading role of the private sector despite possible detriments, especially in the area of service provision efficiency. The shift to urban management allows flexible responses to individual decisions, a characteristic particularly useful in the area of environmental and amenity protection, but it sacrifices the benefits of continuing commitments to a choosen alternative. The gains inflexibility which come with the kind of urban management which is less oriented to a long-term vision will necessarily be accompanied by losses in efficiency through less effective coordination between different investment decisions, and an inability to consider large scale alternatives in patterns of development. Mant argues that urban management is not an instrument of planning. Plan-making is an instrument of urban management. Plans are needed from time to time for particular purposes. It is a mistake to conceive of 'planning' as a simple lineal progression from plan to implementation. Further, 'planning' and 'urban management' should not be conceived as competing approaches to urban public poliq. The making of plans should be seen as a public policy tool for the achievement of del{berate and, at times, quite limited objectives. This paper discusses the role and limitations of plan-making as an urban management tool. The traditional comprehensive end-state planning exercise suffers from the same deficiencies as a public policy tool as other rational comprehensive policy activities.The instruments of planning : urban management by John Mant / Planning as urban management : a critical assessment by Max Neutze

Does fish oil during pregnancy help prevent asthma in kids?

Does fish oil during pregnancy help prevent asthma in kids? The evidence on fish oil has been mixed, but this study affirms its benefits--in certain women. PRACTICE CHANGER: Fish oil supplementation taken by women in the third trimester of pregnancy can reduce the risk of persistent wheeze, asthma, and infections of the lower respiratory tract in their children.Authors: Dana Neutze, MD, PhD; Kelly Lacy Evans, MD; Marianne Koenig, PharmD, BCPS; Gregory Castelli, PharmD, BCPS, BC-ADM; Anne Mounsey, MD Department of Family Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Drs. Neutze, Evans, and Mounsey); UPMC St. Margaret Family Medicine Residency Program, Pittsburgh, Pa (Drs. Koenig and Castelli)