VALUING INJURY TO NATURAL RESOURCES: THE EFFECT OF RESOURCE QUALITY INFORMATION ON PERCEPTIONS AND CONTINGENT VALUES

Respondents are heterogeneous in their prior information about resource injury. The analysis derives an updating model of how heterogeneous respondents incorporate new information contained in resource injury descriptions. The analysis confirms that the sign of the information effect is determined by the difference between new and prior information. However, in the present analysis, respondents differ in prior information so that treatment information induces different perceptions and different values in different respondents. The empirical analysis confirms that identical treatments result in different injury perceptions. Across respondents, treatment induced changes in perceived injury vary not only in size, but also in sign. Both theory and empirical results show that willingness to pay varies directly with perceived injury.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

An Analysis of a Special Cheese Promotion Program: Houston, Texas

Report for American Dairy Association of AMPICheese, Promotion, Houston, Texas, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Marketing,

On the thin-string limit of the 6d stringlike defect model

We show that in 6d models localizing gravity on stringlike defects and satisfying the dominant energy condition, the metric exterior to the string inevitably depends on the string's thickness. As a consequence, in the limit of thin string either the gravity delocalizes, or the six-dimensional Planck scale must be much larger that the four-dimensional one.Comment: 3 pages; v2: an alternative interpretation of our results, overlooked in the first version, is adde

Making a Business Case for Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care: Key Issues and Observations

Offers lessons from RWJF's Finding Answers program around issues involved in laying out financial reasons for providers, caregivers, and others to adopt ongoing, effective interventions to improve quality of care for minority patients

Kinetics of the HO_2 + BrO reaction over the temperature range 233–348 K

The reaction BrO + HO_2 → products is the rate-limiting step in a key catalytic ozone destruction cycle in the lower stratosphere. In this study a discharge-flow reactor coupled with molecular beam mass spectrometry has been used to study the BrO + HO_2 reaction over the temperature range 233-348 K. Rate constants were measured under pseudo-first-order conditions in separate experiments with first HO_2 and then BrO in excess in an effort to identify possible complications in the reaction conditions. At 298 K, the rate constant was determined to be (1.73 ± 0.61) x 10^(-11) cm^3 molecule^(-1) s^(-1) with HO_2 in excess and (2.05 ± 0.64) x 10^(-11) cm^3 molecule^(-1) s^(-1) with BrO in excess. The combined results of the temperature-dependent experiments gave the following fit to the Arrhenius expression : k = (3.13 ± 0.33)]10^(-12) exp(536 ± 206/T) where the quoted uncertainties represent two standard deviations. The reaction mechanism is discussed in light of recent ab initio results on the thermochemistry of isomers of possible reaction intermediates

Studies of ClO and BrO reactions important in the polar stratosphere: Kinetics and mechanism of the ClO+BrO and ClO+ClO reactions

The reactions, BrO + ClO yields Br + ClOO (1a) yields Br + OClO (1b) yields BrCl + O2 (1c) and ClO + ClO yields Cl + CiOO (2a) yields Cl + OClO (2b) yields Cl2 + O2 (2c) yields (ClO)2 (2d) have assumed new importance in explaining the unusual springtime depletion of ozone observed in the Antarctic stratosphere. The mechanisms of these reactions involve the formation of metastable intermediates which subsequently decompose through several energetically allowed products providing the motivation to study these reactions using both the discharge flow-mass spectrometric and flash photolysis - ultraviolet absorption techniques. These methods have also been used to explore aspects of the kinetics and spectroscopy of the ClO dimer

"Securitization"

"At the annual banking structure and competition conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in May 1987, the buzzword heard in the corridors and used by many of the speakers was 'that which can be securitized, will be securitized.'" So notes Hyman Minsky in a prescient memo on the nature, and the implications, of securitization, written 20 years before an explosion in the securitization of home mortgages helped create the current financial crisis. This memo, which served as the basis for a lecture in Minsky's monetary theory class at Washington University, has not been widely circulated. It is published here in its entirety, with a preface and an afterword by Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray that places Minsky's work in context.

Straight Round the Twist: Frustration and Chirality in Smectics-A

Frustration is a powerful mechanism in condensed matter systems, driving both order and co plexity. In smectics, the frustration between macroscopic chirality and equally spaced layers generates textures characterised by a proliferation of defects. In this article, we study several different ground states of the chiral Landau-de Gennes free energy for a smectic liquid crystal. The standard theory finds the twist grain boundary (TGB) phase to be the ground state for chiral type II smectics. However, for very highly chiral systems, the hierarchical helical nanofilament (HN) phase can form and is stable over the TGB.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, submitted to J. Interface Focu

Identifying new physics contributions in the Higgs sector at linear e+e- colliders

Loop driven decay modes of the Higgs are sensitive to new physics contributions because of new particles in the loops. To highlight this we look at the dilepton-dijet signal in the dominant Higgs production channel at a linear e+e- collider. We show that by taking a simple ratio between cross-sections of two different final states such contributions can be very easily identified.Comment: Latex 4 pages, 2 eps figures (style files included). Talk given at the linear collider workshop LCWS06, Bangalore, March 200