ADJUSTING TO ECONOMIC GROWTH IN TORONTO AMALGAMATION AND FEDERALISM

This paper is concerned with how the Toronto-based economy adjusted to the problems of rapid economic and population growth and to political changes that were shaped by forces beyond its control. As a result, the City had to change its local government machinery, expand its infrastructure, and face many social problems with a revenue base setup to handle the pre-growth pattern of expenditures. The paper will discuss how two important functions of local government, local transportation and social services, were affected by the changes.

The State of State Science Standards 2012

American science performance is lagging as the economy becomes increasingly high tech, but our current science standards are doing little to solve the problem. Reviewers evaluated science standards for every state for this report and their findings were deeply troubling: The majority of states earned Ds or Fs for their standards in this crucial subject, with only six jurisdictions receiving As. Explore all the state report cards and see how your state performed

Substituent effects on the nitrogen-15 and carbon-13 shieldings of some N-arylguanidinium chlorides

The 13C and 15N chemical shifts of five N-arylguanidinium chlorides carrying polar substituents, ranging in character from 4-methoxy to 4-nitro groups, have been determined by NMR spectroscopy at the natural-abundance level of 13C and 15N in dimethyl sulfoxide solution. Comparison of the 13C shifts of these salts with those of monosubstituted benzenes shows that the guanidinium group induces an average downfield shift of -5.8 ppm of the resonance of the aryl carbon to which it is attached (C1), an average upfield shift of +4.2 ppm for C2 and C6, and a small upfield shift of +1.9 ppm for C4. The shifts of C3 and C5 are small and erratic relative to the corresponding carbons in monosubstituted benzenes. The 15N resonances of the guanidinium nitrogens are quite sensitive to electric effects resulting from substitution of polar groups at C4. The 15N shift of the ==NAr nitrogen relative to that of the salts suggests that the predominant tautomer for N-arylguanidines is (H2N)2C==NAr. The 15N shifts of the (NH2) 2 nitrogens correlate rather well with σp- parameters, whereas the shifts of the -NHAr nitrogens seem to correlate only with R values derived from the σp- substituent constants

Letters from a Footloose Forester

Dear Ken: Really I\u27m sorry, old fellow, that you didn\u27t come out here with me this summer. You’re missing some wonderful experiences, and a great deal of good fresh mountain air, by hanging around town

Incentive Mechanisms for Internet Congestion Management: Fixed-Budget Rebate versus Time-of-Day Pricing

Mobile data traffic has been steadily rising in the past years. This has generated a significant interest in the deployment of incentive mechanisms to reduce peak-time congestion. Typically, the design of these mechanisms requires information about user demand and sensitivity to prices. Such information is naturally imperfect. In this paper, we propose a \emph{fixed-budget rebate mechanism} that gives each user a reward proportional to his percentage contribution to the aggregate reduction in peak time demand. For comparison, we also study a time-of-day pricing mechanism that gives each user a fixed reward per unit reduction of his peak-time demand. To evaluate the two mechanisms, we introduce a game-theoretic model that captures the \emph{public good} nature of decongestion. For each mechanism, we demonstrate that the socially optimal level of decongestion is achievable for a specific choice of the mechanism's parameter. We then investigate how imperfect information about user demand affects the mechanisms' effectiveness. From our results, the fixed-budget rebate pricing is more robust when the users' sensitivity to congestion is "sufficiently" convex. This feature of the fixed-budget rebate mechanism is attractive for many situations of interest and is driven by its closed-loop property, i.e., the unit reward decreases as the peak-time demand decreases.Comment: To appear in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networkin

The antibody loci of the domestic goat (Capra hircus)

The domestic goat (Capra hircus) is an important ruminant species both as a source of antibody-based reagents for research and biomedical applications and as an economically important animal for agriculture, particularly for developing nations that maintain most of the global goat population. Characterization of the loci encoding the goat immune repertoire would be highly beneficial for both vaccine and immune reagent development. However, in goat and other species whose reference genomes were generated using short-read sequencing technologies, the immune loci are poorly assembled as a result of their repetitive nature. Our recent construction of a long-read goat genome assembly (ARS1) has facilitated characterization of all three antibody loci with high confidence and comparative analysis to cattle. We observed broad similarity of goat and cattle antibody-encoding loci but with notable differences that likely influence formation of the functional antibody repertoire. The goat heavy-chain locus is restricted to only four functional and nearly identical IGHV genes, in contrast to the ten observed in cattle. Repertoire analysis indicates that light-chain usage is more balanced in goats, with greater representation of kappa light chains (~ 20-30%) compared to that in cattle (~ 5%). The present study represents the first characterization of the goat antibody loci and will help inform future investigations of their antibody responses to disease and vaccination

Forest structure, stand composition, and climate-growth response in montane forests of Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve, China.

Montane forests of western China provide an opportunity to establish baseline studies for climate change. The region is being impacted by climate change, air pollution, and significant human impacts from tourism. We analyzed forest stand structure and climate-growth relationships from Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve in northwestern Sichuan province, along the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. We conducted a survey to characterize forest stand diversity and structure in plots occurring between 2050 and 3350 m in elevation. We also evaluated seedling and sapling recruitment and tree-ring data from four conifer species to assess: 1) whether the forest appears in transition toward increased hardwood composition; 2) if conifers appear stressed by recent climate change relative to hardwoods; and 3) how growth of four dominant species responds to recent climate. Our study is complicated by clear evidence of 20(th) century timber extraction. Focusing on regions lacking evidence of logging, we found a diverse suite of conifers (Pinus, Abies, Juniperus, Picea, and Larix) strongly dominate the forest overstory. We found population size structures for most conifer tree species to be consistent with self-replacement and not providing evidence of shifting composition toward hardwoods. Climate-growth analyses indicate increased growth with cool temperatures in summer and fall. Warmer temperatures during the growing season could negatively impact conifer growth, indicating possible seasonal climate water deficit as a constraint on growth. In contrast, however, we found little relationship to seasonal precipitation. Projected warming does not yet have a discernible signal on trends in tree growth rates, but slower growth with warmer growing season climates suggests reduced potential future forest growth