Tempered Experience: The Educational Foundation of Democratic Ideology

Democracy is a political ideology, one that requires a person to believe in that ideology for it to exist. The contemporary political landscape is dominated by democracies, and for this reason we need to understand how to build and sustain them. There needs to be a well-educated populace of citizens, who are able to engage in democratic actions, and aid the community. What they need is tempered experience, experience that is understood though the knowledge that a citizen already has

Issues in the Implementation of Interregional Commodity by Industry Input-Output Models

A number of procedures for generating interregional social accounting matrices have been developed recently (Canning and Wang 2005, Robinson and Liu 2006, Jackson et al. 2006, Lindall, Olson and Alward 2006). While each approach shares the fundamental structure of the resulting accounting framework, very little attention has been devoted to the use of these accounts in impacts assessment application. This paper presents the common framework for organization of the data, addresses a number of issues surrounding such applications and demonstrates the implications of adopting different assumptions

An Economic Impact Study of the Pennsylvania Section of the Cove Point Expansion

Dominion Resources, Inc. engaged the Regional Research Institute to determine the total economic impacts associated with pipeline construction and/or modernization proposals traversing several Pennsylvania jurisdictions. The proposed project represents an investment of approximately $200 million. The scope of this analysis consists of estimating varying economic effects including job creation and resulting personal income, output and fiscal or tax revenue impacts directly associated with both the operational and construction phases of the proposed Pipeline expansion project. We calculate the spill-over or multiplicative impacts that will arise from the proposed Pipeline project. Additionally, some attempt is made in this analysis to capture the enhanced economic development potential of the region created by the new access to a secure, competitively priced energy source

Examining and Evaluating Aggregation Scale Effects on Interregional Commodity by Industry Trade Flow Estimates

This study tests the implementation of interindustry transaction flows in a national system of economic regions derived from an interregional accounting framework and initial information on interregional shipments. The interregional flows connecting states are estimated using a method based on the Commodity Flow Survey data published by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which adjusts the estimated interregional SAM to insure the integrity of intraregional and system-wide, national accounts. The resulting US interregional framework describes flows within and among the 51 regions We examine results of a series of trials testing the validity of the resulting interregional trade-flow data versus other data sources and estimates such as Liu and Vilain (2004). The overall difference in estimation accuracy arising from differences in the base aggregation level is a quantity that has attracted little prior attention. To address this issue this paper, in addition to estimating and comparing trade flows using aggregated sectors, also estimates the flows using the 509 disaggregated IMPLAN sectors applies aggregation only in the final comparison steps. This allows us to comment on the additional role sectoral aggregation scale may play in the relative accuracy of trade flow estimation results

Accounting foundations for interregional commodity-by-industry input-output models

Several procedures for generating interregional commodity flow matrices have been developed in the U.S. in recent years (see, e.g., Canning and Wang 2005, Jackson et al. 2006, Lindall, Olsen and Alward 2006). Despite the fact that these methods derive from the commodity-by-industry framework, very little attention has been given recently to the fundamental conceptual issues that must be confronted to generate a consistently defined interregional model or to conduct an interregional impacts assessment using an appropriate interregional framework. This paper revives the focus on interregional modeling issues initiated by Oosterhaven (1984), identifies and elaborates on these and additional issues, and traces the development of the accounting foundations from single-region inter-industry through interregional commodity-by-industry accounts. Its contribution lies in the provision of a high-level perspective on these frameworks that in the process both clarifies and simplifies key conceptual issues and operational decisions

An Evaluation of Method for Constructing Commodity by Industry Flow Matrices

The lack of consistent, reliable data on interregional trade and interindustry transactions hampers complete analysis of regional models. This study implements and tests interindustry transaction flows in a national system of economic regions derived from an interregional accounting framework and initial information on interregional shipments. The method used to construct an interregional Commodity by Industry Flow matrix for the United States involves the construction of single-state SAMs. The interregional flows connecting states are estimated using a method based on the Commodity Flow Survey data published by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which adjusts the estimated interregional SAM to insure the integrity of intraregional and system-wide, national accounts. This paper presents the results of exercises testing the validity of the resulting interregional trade-flow data using, among other data sources, the CFS itself, the FAFD and S&P/DRI regional estimates. The model is tested is a US interregional framework describing flows within and among the 50 states and the District of Colombia

A posteriori agreement as a quality measure for readability prediction systems

All readability research is ultimately concerned with the research question whether it is possible for a prediction system to automatically determine the level of readability of an unseen text. A significant problem for such a system is that readability might depend in part on the reader. If different readers assess the readability of texts in fundamentally different ways, there is insufficient a priori agreement to justify the correctness of a readability prediction system based on the texts assessed by those readers. We built a data set of readability assessments by expert readers. We clustered the experts into groups with greater a priori agreement and then measured for each group whether classifiers trained only on data from this group exhibited a classification bias. As this was found to be the case, the classification mechanism cannot be unproblematically generalized to a different user group

No distinct difference in the excretion of large particles of varying size in a wild ruminant, the banteng ( Bos javanicus )

The forestomach of ruminants and camelids does not only allow a differential excretion of fluids and small particles but also a differential excretion of small and large particles. The question whether larger particles of different size classes are also retained for different time periods, or whether simply a particle-size threshold exists above which all particles of a size higher than this threshold are retained in an undifferentiated manner, has not been addressed so far. We determined the mean retention time (MRT) of different-sized large particles (10 and 20mm) in three banteng (Bos javanicus) on two forage only diets, grass and grass hay. We used cerium-mordanted fibre (10mm) and lanthanum-mordanted fibre (20mm) as particle markers, mixed in the food. Average total tract MRT for large and very large particles at the grass diet was 58 and 56h and at the grass hay diet 66 and 64h, respectively. Very large particles moved slightly faster than large particles through the gut of the banteng. Three interpretations are possible: Very large particles are resubmitted to rumination sooner than large particles; ingestive mastication of the particle markers could have reduced the difference in the size of the particle markers; alternatively, particle retention may be governed by a threshold, above which all particles of a size higher than this threshold are retained in an undifferentiated manner. In order to test these possibilities, experiments with fistulated animals would have to be performe

Indications for a lower methane yield from digested fibre in ruminants digesting fibre more efficiently

It is assumed that the absolute amount of methane (CH4) produced on a given diet increases proportionately (i.e., in a linear manner) with the amount of digested fibre. Therefore, the CH4 yield per unit of digested fibre is considered constant for a given diet. This conceptually matches findings of lower digestibility in low-CH4 emitting animals, and of lower CH4 yield at higher intake levels due to shorter digesta passage and hence reduced digestibility. Irrespective of these observations, this general assumption was challenged by findings in one study where CH4 yield per unit of digested fibre had unexpectedly declined in individuals digesting the fibre provided by the same diet more efficiently. To investigate this finding in more detail, we collated a dataset from 16 studies with cattle and sheep with a total of 61 forage-based diet groups consisting of at least five animals each (472 animals in total). We assessed whether there was a linear relationship between the daily CH4 emission and the amount of digested fibre, both within the same and across the different diet groups. Across diets, CH4 emissions did not increase linearly with the amount of digested neutral or acid detergent fibre in either species. Within diet groups, the majority of cases also showed evidence for less-than-linear increase of CH4 emissions with increasing amount of digested neutral or acid detergent fibre, even though the 95 % confidence intervals could not rule out a linear relationship in many cases. Reasons why this phenomenon was not described earlier may include that the great individual variation associated with an accumulation of errors in the variables concerned often prevented statistical significance in individual studies. Although the findings across diets concerning the variation in CH4 yield per unit of digested fibre do not exclude some diet-specific effects, the within-diet assessment clearly points towards individual animal effects in microbial fibre digestion in a way that CH4 production is proportionately lower when fibre is digested more efficiently. Mechanistically, animals with a more efficient fibre digestion might produce volatile fatty acids at a higher rate and have a locally lower ruminal pH, favouring microbiota of propionate-producing pathways. The presence of animal-individual differences in CH4 yield per unit of digested fibre with varying efficiency of fibre fermentation should be confirmed in a specific experiment where also the reasons for such a phenomenon are further investigated