Educating the leaders of tomorrow : the library without walls

A description of library services offered to students in distance programs within Canada and Ecuador

Booms, Busts, and Gambling: Can Gaming Revenues Reduce Budget Volatility?

Over the past 20 years, state and provincial governments in North America have expanded legal gambling opportunities to consumers. One of the primary policy goals of this expansion of gambling opportunities has been to increase government revenues. Gambling is an attractive source of new government revenues because consumers are relatively insensitive to the implicit “tax” rate imposed on gambling activities and gambling is a voluntary activity; only those who chose to gamble are subject to this implicit tax. In this paper, we document the contribution that gambling revenues make to state and provincial tax receipts, and the extent to which variation in gambling revenues contributes to the volatility of tax revenues over time. We adopt an approach from the finance literature. In finance, the relationship of the return to an individual stock to total return in a portfolio, or total return the entire stock market, is often summarized by a “Beta” which can be estimated from actual returns on portfolios and individual stocks. We investigate the contribution of gambling revenue, and revenue from other sources, to variation in total government revenues, by estimating a beta for various government revenue sources in states and provinces in North America over the period 1989-2009. The estimated betas for gambling revenue in many provinces and states are negative, indicating that variation in gaming revenue has negative correlation with variation in own source revenues, reducing the variation in total state and provincial revenue over time.gambling, lottery, public finance

In Search of a Fair Bet in the Lottery

Although state-operated lotto games have the worst average expected payoffs among common games of chance, because the jackpot can accumulate, the maximum expected payoff is potentially unlimited. It is possible, therefore, that lotto can exhibit a positive expected return. This paper examines 18,000 drawings in 34 American lotteries and finds approximately 1 percent of these drawings provided players with a fair bet. If it were possible for a bettor to purchase every possible combination, however, most lotteries commonly experience circumstances where such a purchase would provide a positive return with 11 percent of the drawings providing a fair bet to the player.

An analysis of the relationship of school entrance age to mental age and school achievement in grades I, III, V, and VIII

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

The nature and treatment of trophic pressure sores

The development of trophic sores in an analgesic part of the body is a feature of many conditions, medical and surgical. While the vast majority can be prevented by simple methods, the cure of an established, penetrating trophic ulcer is a difficult and taxing problem. Their management merits most careful attention. Experience with paraplegic patients reveals the marked contrast in the maintenance of fair general condition and consequent speedy rehabilitation in those in whom this complication has been avoided and the dreadful, steady, septic deterioration in the untreated or badly treated case.Our experience is based upon the management of a paraplegic unit of 40 beds. While no fundamentally new principles are iterated, it is felt that-since this is the only such unit in southern Africa-experience gained there could well be applied elsewhere in the country

CO and CI maps of the starburst galaxy M82

The first map of an external galaxy in the 3P₁ - 3P0 fine-structure line of atomic carbon (CI) is presented towards the nucleus of the starbuster M82, and compared with the distinction of the CO J = 4 - 3 molecular emission. The CI traces features that are seen in lower transition CO maps, and shows that CI and the CO are well mixed and have similar spatial distributions. There are small differences between the CO J = 4 - 3 line and lower transition CO data towards the NE part of the molecular ring, where the emission is less prominent. The abundance ratio [CI]/[CO] across M82 is very high, with an average value ~ 0.5 across most of the nucleus, a factor at least 5 times that which is typical of dense molecular cloud cores seen in our own Galaxy. This means that on average, CI is overabundant towards M82. This result can be explained using models which provide enhancements to the CI abundance above normal Interstellar Medium values, a result of a greater cosmic ray flux in M82, or where there is substantial mixing of the gas

Educating the leaders of tomorrow : the library without walls

A description of library services offered to students in distance programs within Canada and Ecuador

Booms, Busts, and Gambling: Can Gaming Revenues Reduce Budget Volatility?

Over the past 20 years, state and provincial governments in North America have expanded legal gambling opportunities to consumers. One of the primary policy goals of this expansion of gambling opportunities has been to increase government revenues. Gambling is an attractive source of new government revenues because consumers are relatively insensitive to the implicit “tax” rate imposed on gambling activities and gambling is a voluntary activity, only those who chose to gamble are subject to this implicit tax. In this paper, we document the contribution that gambling revenues make to state and provincial tax receipts, and the extent to which variation in gambling revenues contributes to the volatility of tax revenues over time. We adopt an approach from the finance literature. In finance, the relationship of the return to an individual stock to total return in a portfolio, or total return the entire stock market, is often summarized by a “Beta” which can be estimated from actual returns on portfolios and individual stocks. We investigate the contribution of gambling revenue, and revenue from other sources, to variation in total government revenues, by estimating a beta for various government revenue sources in states and provinces in North America over the period 1989-2009. The estimated betas for gambling revenue in many provinces and states are negative, indicating that variation in gaming revenue has negative correlation with variation in own source revenues, reducing the variation in total state and provincial revenue over time

Engaging with economic geography in the "real" world: a central role for field teaching

Debates concerning how to engage students with economic geography have ignored the important role of field teaching. This paper argues that fieldwork must remain a key component of economic geographical teaching and that it offers a variety of advantages to overcoming student disinterest in the sub-discipline. It goes on to argue that field teaching must be developed, not neglected, in economic geography and illustrates its pedagogical advantages with reference to the example of a field class in north-east England