PUBLIC ACQUISITION OF RIGHTS TO USE FARM CHEMICALS: POSSIBLE COSTS AND IMPACTS

Crop Production/Industries,

AN INQUIRY INTO THE RELATIONSHIP OF WETLAND REGULATIONS AND PROPERTY VALUES IN MINNESOTA

Ownership in property can be thought of as ownership of the rights to the "incomes" associated with different uses of the property. Each potential use has a separate economic value, which can be ranked if put into money terms. The property's market value is usually held to be the highest income on that ranking. Wetland protection regulations might shift the ownership of some of these rights from private to public entities or restrict the exercise of some rights. This can result in a reduction of the property's market value, if the regulation precludes access to the income from the highest ranking use. A regulation can never increase the economic value of a property from the owner's perspective. Whether or not a reduction in property value is considered "fair" is a question usually left to the courts. If it is determined that a regulation has resulted in a "taking" of property, compensation must be paid. The appropriate level of compensation is the difference between estimated pre- and post-regulation market values. The task of the analyst is to estimate those two values, after first determining if the two uses are feasible given other physical, financial, and legal conditions. Because property prices are not determined until there is a transaction, all such valuations are necessarily estimates based on the professional judgments of the analyst. There are not easy ways to determine these values short of costly individual appraisals or extensive market studies. Wetland regulations in Minnesota do result in reduced values for some property owners--as do all land use regulations. Demonstrating that values went down on regulated properties has policy import, however, only if: (1) the examples are so egregious that the Legislature decides to change the enabling legislation to adjust the distribution of the law's benefits and costs; or (2) the sum of measured property losses exceeds any estimate of total benefits, in which case the Legislature might decide to change the law as not in the broader public interest. Should further property value analyses be conducted? Only if the Legislature is very clear about why it wants to do the study. If the concern is one of fairness, then the distribution of a regulation's costs should be examined by using parcel-by-parcel appraisals or by a careful calculation of the economic benefits and costs among different classes of people, classes of property, or regions of the state. If, on the other hand, the concern is that the aggregate costs of the regulation may exceed its total benefits, then broader economic valuation studies are called for. We are not prepared to recommend either approach at this time, because the Legislature has not yet declared what the problem really is.Land Economics/Use,

Reducing CO2 Emissions in the Upper Midwest: Technology, Resources, Economics, and Policy

We develop scenarios for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector in the upper Midwest (Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Manitoba) by 80% relative to 1990 levels. The report has three major components: 1) an inventory of CO2 emissions from all fossil fuel combustion in the region from 1960-2001, subdividing by economic sector and specific electricity generating station; 2) an evaluation of all electricity resources in the region and all technologies for utilizing them, taking into account the overall scale of the resource, technology costs, and other issues that influence the selection of a certain technology; and 3) the development of a simulation model to examine the impact of various factors (policies, prices, technologies, resources) on the regional electricity supply and its emissions from 2005-2055.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Orbit Determination with the two-body Integrals

We investigate a method to compute a finite set of preliminary orbits for solar system bodies using the first integrals of the Kepler problem. This method is thought for the applications to the modern sets of astrometric observations, where often the information contained in the observations allows only to compute, by interpolation, two angular positions of the observed body and their time derivatives at a given epoch; we call this set of data attributable. Given two attributables of the same body at two different epochs we can use the energy and angular momentum integrals of the two-body problem to write a system of polynomial equations for the topocentric distance and the radial velocity at the two epochs. We define two different algorithms for the computation of the solutions, based on different ways to perform elimination of variables and obtain a univariate polynomial. Moreover we use the redundancy of the data to test the hypothesis that two attributables belong to the same body (linkage problem). It is also possible to compute a covariance matrix, describing the uncertainty of the preliminary orbits which results from the observation error statistics. The performance of this method has been investigated by using a large set of simulated observations of the Pan-STARRS project.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figur

Outdoor education camp and group cohesion: an investigation in the teacher education institute of Malaysia

The study seeks to investigate the effect of outdoor education camp toward group cohesion among second year undergraduate teacher trainees from selected Teacher Education Institutes of Malaysia. A pre-test and post-test approach with non-equivalent control group was utilised among 350 second year undergraduate teacher trainees from four selected campuses. A modified version of Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ) was used to gather data from pre-test and post-test. Results from MANCOVA procedures suggested that the camp had positively improved the group cohesion aspects of the experimental group with significant gain in ATG-T, ATG-S, GI-T and GI-S. Furthermore, results also highlight the improvement of group outcome aspects (GI-T and GI-S) which surpassed individual aspects (ATG-T and ATG-S). Overall, the results of this study showed that outdoor education improves teacher trainees’ group cohesion.Keywords: outdoor education; cohesion; teacher; adventure

Osculating orbits in Schwarzschild spacetime, with an application to extreme mass-ratio inspirals

We present a method to integrate the equations of motion that govern bound, accelerated orbits in Schwarzschild spacetime. At each instant the true worldline is assumed to lie tangent to a reference geodesic, called an osculating orbit, such that the worldline evolves smoothly from one such geodesic to the next. Because a geodesic is uniquely identified by a set of constant orbital elements, the transition between osculating orbits corresponds to an evolution of the elements. In this paper we derive the evolution equations for a convenient set of orbital elements, assuming that the force acts only within the orbital plane; this is the only restriction that we impose on the formalism, and we do not assume that the force must be small. As an application of our method, we analyze the relative motion of two massive bodies, assuming that one body is much smaller than the other. Using the hybrid Schwarzschild/post-Newtonian equations of motion formulated by Kidder, Will, and Wiseman, we treat the unperturbed motion as geodesic in a Schwarzschild spacetime whose mass parameter is equal to the system's total mass. The force then consists of terms that depend on the system's reduced mass. We highlight the importance of conservative terms in this force, which cause significant long-term changes in the time-dependence and phase of the relative orbit. From our results we infer some general limitations of the radiative approximation to the gravitational self-force, which uses only the dissipative terms in the force.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, final version to be published in Physical Review

Large-Scale Release of Campylobacter Draft Genomes: Resources for Food Safety and Public Health from the 100K Pathogen Genome Project.

Campylobacter is a food-associated bacterium and a leading cause of foodborne illness worldwide, being associated with poultry in the food supply. This is the initial public release of 202 Campylobacter genome sequences as part of the 100K Pathogen Genome Project. These isolates represent global genomic diversity in the Campylobacter genus

The Use of Mentored Inquiry Communities to Foster Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): Outcomes of the American Occupational Therapy Association SoTL Program (2007-2017)

Scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is recognized in Boyer’s model, along with discovery, integration, and application, as one of four essential scholarships and is the systematic study of teaching and learning. As such, in 2007, the American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF), and later the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), supported the development of a SoTL mentorship program in an effort to foster SoTL within the discipline of occupational therapy. This mixed-methods study describes AOTA SoTL Program outcomes across ten years, 2007-2017, gathered via survey of past program mentee (n = 50) and mentor (n = 12) participants. Results suggest that mentored inquiry communities are a useful approach to fostering SoTL collaborations. In the future, the AOTA SoTL Program and similar disciplinary-specific SoTL programs should consider additional strategies for supporting mentee participants to completion with their projects

The Large Quasar Reference Frame (LQRF) - an optical representation of the ICRS

The large number and all-sky distribution of quasars from different surveys, along with their presence in large, deep astrometric catalogs,enables the building of an optical materialization of the ICRS following its defining principles. Namely: that it is kinematically non-rotating with respect to the ensemble of distant extragalactic objects; aligned with the mean equator and dynamical equinox of J2000; and realized by a list of adopted coordinates of extragalatic sources. Starting from the updated and presumably complete LQAC list of QSOs, the initial optical positions of those quasars are found in the USNO B1.0 and GSC2.3 catalogs, and from the SDSS DR5. The initial positions are next placed onto UCAC2-based reference frames, following by an alignment with the ICRF, to which were added the most precise sources from the VLBA calibrator list and the VLA calibrator list - when reliable optical counterparts exist. Finally, the LQRF axes are inspected through spherical harmonics, contemplating to define right ascension, declination and magnitude terms. The LQRF contains J2000 referred equatorial coordinates for 100,165 quasars, well represented across the sky, from -83.5 to +88.5 degrees in declination, and with 10 arcmin being the average distance between adjacent elements. The global alignment with the ICRF is 1.5 mas, and the individual position accuracies are represented by a Poisson distribution that peaks at 139 mas in right ascension and 130 mas in declination. It is complemented by redshift and photometry information from the LQAC. The LQRF is designed to be an astrometric frame, but it is also the basis for the GAIA mission initial quasars' list, and can be used as a test bench for quasars' space distribution and luminosity function studies.Comment: 23 pages, 23 figures, 6 tables Accepted for publication by Astronomy & Astrophysics, on 25 May 200

How much noise is too much? Methods for identifying thresholds for soundscape quality and ecosystem services

The United States National Park Service mandate is to conserve park resources and provide superlative visitor experience. In the context of acoustic resources, Denali National Park and Preserve provides an advantageous opportunity to understand the effect of aircraft noise on visitor experience because it possesses high levels of air tour traffic in a park renowned for its remote, wilderness character. Park visitors in four different settings were asked to rate the acceptability of recordings of aircraft noise, presented in randomized order relative to noise level. A cumulative link mixed model fitted visitor assessments to acoustic and nonacoustic factors. In addition to noise level, interest in an air tour was an important predictor of sound clip acceptability. For visitors uninterested in an air tour, the probability of rating aircraft noise as unacceptable at 54 dB LAeq,30 s or higher was 26%. For reference, this aligns with federal guidance that identified 55 dB as a threshold for interference with outdoor activities at rural residences and schools. Predictions of visitor response were joined to a spatial model of aircraft noise propagation to map visitor acceptability of aircraft noise in Denali’s entrance area (frontcountry). This map can be used to assess the condition of park management zones, to inform hiking recommendations for visitors, and to predict the range of soundscape conditions experienced by park visitors Soundscapes Threshold Indicators Aircraft noise Spatial analysis Ecosystem servicespublishedVersio