Gasoline Taxes in Georgia

This report describes and compares Georgia's fuel tax with other states and evaluates it as a long-term dedicated revenue source for highway funding in the state. FRC Report 12

Civil Procedure and the Ministerial Exception

In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a ministerial exception to the ordinary rules of employer liability. The Court also concluded that the exception operates as an affirmative defense rather than a jurisdictional bar. This conclusion raises quite significant questions about how courts should address the exception in the course of litigation. This Article posits that courts should approach these procedural questions in light of the underlying justification for the ministerial exception. The exception reflects a longstanding constitutional limitation on the competence of courts to resolve “strictly and purely ecclesiastical” questions. To conclude that the exception operates as an affirmative defense does not alter this fundamental limitation on the authority of secular courts. As a practical matter, this means that in litigation between religious institutions and their employees, courts may be required to manage discovery to resolve threshold questions about the application of the ministerial exception before permitting broader discovery. Similarly, courts should consider permitting interlocutory appeals of trial court decisions that deny motions for summary judgment based on the exception. And courts not only should conclude that religious institutions do not waive the defense by failing to raise it but also ought to raise it sua sponte when the facts indicate that the exception may apply. These departures from the ordinary treatment of affirmative defenses are necessary to respect the constitutional principles that the Court articulated in Hosanna-Tabor

Distribution of Per Capita Income in Georgia: 1969-2000

Since the mid 1980s, the state of Georgia has been popularly characterized as consisting of two (or more) distinct economies or economic regions, the Atlanta Region and the remainder of the state. Since the appearance of the term "two Georgias" in the local lexicon, policy makers have attempted to address problems associated with the perception that Atlanta and its surrounding counties are experiencing tremendous economic growth, while the remainder of the state languishes. Because the quality and quantity of local public services are determined, in part, by local economic activity, concerns have been raised about the existence of two Georgias and how such an economic partition might affect the distribution of revenue generating capacity among counties across the state.Past research suggests that the average income of different areas of a country tend to converge as overall income rises. Using per capita personal income (PCI) data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), we compare 1969 PCI with 2000 PCI to determine: 1) if convergence has occurred 2) how changes in PCI are geographically distributed, and 3) whether these data support the popular conception that Georgia consists of two separate economies. Report #9

Transparency, financial accounting information, and corporate governance

Audited financial statements along with supporting disclosures form the foundation of the firm-specific information set available to investors and regulators. In this article, the authors discuss economics-based research focused on the properties of accounting systems and the surrounding institutional environment important to effective governance of firms. They provide a framework for understanding the operation of accounting information in an economy, discuss a broad range of important research findings, present a conceptual framework for characterizing and measuring corporate transparency at the country level, and isolate a number of future research possibilities.Corporations - Accounting ; Stockholders ; Corporate governance

Redundancy for electric motors in spacecraft applications

The parts of electric motors which should be duplicated in order to provide maximum reliability in spacecraft application are identified. Various common types of redundancy are described. The advantages and disadvantages of each are noted. The principal types are illustrated by reference to specific examples. For each example, constructional details, basic performance data and failure modes are described, together with a discussion of the suitability of particular redundancy techniques to motor types

Decision making with decision event graphs

We introduce a new modelling representation, the Decision Event Graph (DEG), for asymmetric multistage decision problems. The DEG explicitly encodes conditional independences and has additional significant advantages over other representations of asymmetric decision problems. The colouring of edges makes it possible to identify conditional independences on decision trees, and these coloured trees serve as a basis for the construction of the DEG. We provide an efficient backward-induction algorithm for finding optimal decision rules on DEGs, and work through an example showing the efficacy of these graphs. Simplifications of the topology of a DEG admit analogues to the sufficiency principle and barren node deletion steps used with influence diagrams

Monthly progress report

This report is the mid-year report intended for the design concepts for the communication network for the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM) facility being built at Yellow Creek near Iuka, MS. The overall network is to include heterogeneous computers, to use various protocols, and to have different bandwidths. Performance consideration must be given to the potential network applications in the network environment. The performance evaluation of X window applications was given the major emphasis in this report. A simulation study using Bones will be included later. This mid-year report has three parts: Part 1 is an investigation of X window traffic using TCP/IP over Ethernet networks; part 2 is a survey study of performance concepts of X window applications with Macintosh computers; and the last part is a tutorial on DECnet protocols. The results of this report should be useful in the design and operation of the ASRM communication network

Effect of Tryptophan Analogs on Derepression of the \u3cem\u3eEscherichia coli\u3c/em\u3e Tryptophan Operon by Indole-3-Propionic Acid

The abilities of 14 tryptophan analogs to repress the tryptophan (trp) operon have been studied in Escherichia coli cells derepressed by incubation with 0.25 mM indole-3-propionic acid (IPA). trp operon expression was monitored by measuring the specific activities of anthranilate synthase (EC 4.1.3.27) and the tryptophan synthase (EC 4.2.1.20) β subunit. Analogs characterized by modification or removal of the α-amino group or the α-carboxyl group did not repress the trp operon. The only analogs among this group that appeared to interact with the trp aporepressor were IPA, which derepressed the trp operon, and d-tryptophan. Analogs with modifications of the indole ring repressed the trp operon to various degrees. 7-Methyl-tryptophan inhibited anthranilate synthase activity and consequently derepressed the trp operon. Additionally, 7-methyltryptophan prevented IPA-mediated derepression but, unlike tryptophan, did so in a non-coordinate manner, with the later enzymes of the operon being relatively more repressed than the early enzymes. The effect of 7-methyltryptophan on IPA-mediated derepression was likely not due to the interaction of IPA with the allosteric site of anthranilate synthase, even though feedback-resistant mutants of anthranilate synthase were partially resistant to derepression by IPA. The effect of 7-methyltryptophan on derepression by IPA was probably due to the effect of the analog-aporepressor complex on trp operon expression