Go Hence; Have More Talk of These Sad Things: Reading and Relationality in the English Language Arts Classroom

Drawing upon my own experiences as a high school English Language Arts teacher, I seek a satisfying response to offer students when they ask, “Why are we reading this?” Such a query often leads teachers and students to consider broader questions of the purposes of literature. This paper presents a hermeneutic exploration of the practice of teaching (with) literature in the high school classroom. Using the writings of Gadamer (1989/2013) and Sumara (1996, 2002), and their conceptualizations of aesthetic (literary) experience, I outline a process of engaging with students in their desire to understand their roles as readers in the classroom. In doing so, I make an argument for playful and dialogic interactions between reader and text—an approach that both retains the integrity of aesthetic experience, and also invites a relational pedagogy among those who share a literary reading

Continuous-wave Cascaded-Harmonic Generation and Multi-Photon Raman Lasing in Lithium Niobate Whispering-Gallery Resonators

We report experimental demonstration of continuous-wave cascaded-harmonic generation and Raman lasing in a millimeter-scale lithium niobate whispering-gallery resonator pumped at a telecommunication-compatible infrared wavelength. Intensity enhancement through multiple recirculations in the whispering-gallery resonator and quasi phase-matching through a nonuniform crystal poling enable simultaneous cascaded-harmonic generation up to the fourth-harmonic accompanied by stimulated Raman, two-photon, three-photon, and four-photon Raman scattering corresponding the molecular vibrational wavenumbers 632 cm-1 and 255 cm-1 in z-cut lithium niobate at pump power levels as low as 200mW. We demonstrate simultaneous cascaded-harmonic generation and Raman lasing by observing the spectrum of the scattered light from the resonator and by capturing the image of the decoupled light from the resonator on a color CCD camera

Impact of U.S.-EU Open Aviation Area Treaty on U.S. Aviation: A Parametric Analysis with Simulation

The Open Aviation Area Treaty (OAA) between the European Union (EU) and the United States (U.S.) went into effect on March 30, 2008. Faced with an economic slowdown and unprecedented increase in fuel costs, factors which were uncertain a priori, the projected effects of OAA have been dampened compared to previous projections. In this paper, a framework is offered that combines a parametric approach with uncertainty in demand estimation and forecasts. This framework is then used to generate probabilistic forecasts for U.S.-EU passenger traffic for the period of 2008-2015

New Vehicle Feebates

New vehicle feebate programs encourage improved fleet‐wide vehicle fuel efficiency; yet analyses of these policies have been limited to ad hoc proposals. In this paper, we exploit an extensive, multi‐year dataset which includes more than 16 million observations to evaluate the welfare implications of a long‐standing vehicle feebate program in the Canadian province of Ontario. We: (1) show that second‐best optimal feebates can be written as a function of new vehicle Pigouvian taxes; (2) find that Ontario\u27s feebate program was welfare‐enhancing relative to a no feebate scenario but that a second‐best optimal benchmark would have yielded additional welfare while reducing fleet‐wide emissions; and (3) find that Ontarian consumers responded asymmetrically to fees versus rebates

The Effect of Carbon Taxes on Agricultural Trade

This study evaluates the implications of an actual carbon tax on international trade in the agricultural sector. Applying uniformly to all fossil fuels combusted within its borders, the province of British Columbia unilaterally introduced a carbon tax on July 1, 2008. In 2012, the province granted an exemption from the tax to certain agricultural sectors. Using commodity specific trade flows and exploiting cross-provincial and inter-temporal variation, we find little evidence that the carbon tax is associated with any meaningful effects on agricultural trade despite the sector being singled out as “at risk” by the provincial government. Our findings suggest that there is not compelling evidence to support exempting the agricultural sector from the tax. Discussion of potential policy remedies to address the tax’s potential effects on firm profitability and international competitiveness is also included

Salience of Carbon Taxes in the Gasoline Market

We demonstrate that the carbon tax imposed by the Canadian province of British Columbia caused a decline in short-run gasoline demand that is significantly greater than would be expected from an equivalent increase in the market price of gasoline. That the carbon tax is more salient, or yields a larger change in demand than equivalent market price movements, is robust to a range of specifications. As a result of the large consumer response to the tax, we calculate that during its first four years, the tax reduced carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline consumption by 3.6 million tonnes

Pollution and Politicians: The Effect of PM on MPs

Applying methods of textual and stylometric analysis to all 119,225 speeches made in the Canadian House of Commons between 2006 and 2011, we establish that air pollution reduces the speech quality of Canadian Members of Parliament (MPs). Exposure to fine particulate matter concentrations exceeding 15 μg/m3 causes a 3.1 percent reduction in the quality of MPs speech (equivalent to a 3.6 months of education). For more difficult communication tasks the decrement in quality is equivalent to the loss of 6.5 months of schooling. Our design accounts for the potential endogeneity of exposure and controls for many potential confounders including individual fixed effects. Politicians are professional communicators and as such the analysis contributes to our evolving understanding of how pollution exposure impacts the execution of work-relevant skills. Though we are cautious in interpreting the effect as a clean metric for performance, the effect size is around half that established in recent research for workers engaged in physical work tasks. Insofar as the changed speech patterns reflect diminished mental acuity the results make plausible detrimental effects of air pollution on productivity in a wider set of communication-intensive work settings

Demand Shocks Change the Excess Burden From Carbon Taxes

Two basic propositions underlying the economics of taxation -- that excess burdens increase in elasticities and tax rates -- are shown to cause the stringency of a Pigouvian tax to vary nonlinearly with output prices. This varying stringency of carbon taxation contributes to unfavorable competitiveness consequences following shocks to demand. Empirically, this paper measures the change in carbon tax stringency by structurally recovering the supply schedule for a particular industry such that elasticities and carbon tax rates change according to the distribution of output prices. Based on this supply function, the relationship between marginal excess burden, a measure of policy stringency from the industry's perspective, and product prices is estimated. Results for the Canadian cattle industry show that with moderately high output prices, supply elasticities are small, tax rates are low and the efficiency cost of a carbon tax (gross of environmental benefits), such as the one introduced in Canada, is less than \$0.01 per dollar tax revenue. As prices decline, supply curves become increasingly elastic, tax rates rise and marginal excess burdens grow rapidly