"Economics in Context: The Need for a New Textbook"

economics education, textbooks, economic theory

Protecting Tax Payers and Crime Victims: The Case for Restricting Utah\u27s Preliminary Hearings to Felony Offenses

Requiring preliminary hearings for Class A misdemeanors is undesirable for two simple reasons. First, the court’s decision will result in hundreds of additional preliminary hearings a year, thus imposing substantial costs on taxpayers and burdens on an already overwhelmed criminal justice system. Second, the decision will create substantial hardships for crime victims, who will now be twice subjected to cross-examination by defense attorneys—once at the preliminary hearing and again later at trial. And these costs will generate no significant benefit in return

Motion and Heating During Atmosphere Reentry of Space Vehicles

The results of an analysis of the motion and heating during atmospheric reentry of manned space vehicles has shown the following: 1. Flight-corridor depths which allow reentry in a single pass decrease rapidly as the reentry speed increases if the maximum deceleration is limited to 10 g. 2. Use of aerodynamic lift can result in a three-to five fold increase in corridor depth over that available to a ballistic vehicle for the same deceleration limits. 3. Use of aerodynamic lift to widen these reentry corridors causes a heating penalty which becomes severe for values of the lift-drag ratio greater than unity for constant lift-drag entry. 4. In the region of most intense convective heating the inviscid flow is generally in chemical equilibrium but the boundary-layer flows are out of equilibrium. Heating rates for the nonequilibrium boundary layer are generally lower than for the corresponding equilibrium case. 5. Radiative heating from the hot gas trapped between the shock wave and the body stagnation region may be as severe as the convective heating and unfortunately occurs at approximately the same time in the flight

Soft Ion Sputtering of PAni Studied by XPS, AFM, TOF-SIMS, and STS

Herein is a study of the soft sputtering method, gas cluster ion sputtering (GCIS), and its effects on the atomic, morphologic, and band structure properties of polyaniline (PAni) as studied with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, atomic force microscopy, and scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS). The GCIS source used was a 1000 argon atom cluster with 4 keV energy, which resulted in a sputter yield of 3.4 ± 0.2 × 10−3 nm3 per argon atom. Soft ion sputtering reduced the sample by explicitly removing the oxidized contaminants as determined by surface sensitive techniques: XPS and Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS). By the use of STS we found that by removing the oxidized components, an overall shift of electronic states occurred, transitioning the states closer to the Fermi edge by 0.3 V

Measuring the cost-effectiveness of treatments for people with multiple sclerosis: Beyond quality-adjusted life-years.

BACKGROUND: It is a familiar story. A promising multiple sclerosis (MS) treatment clears the three regulatory hurdles of safety, quality and efficacy, only to fall at the fourth: cost-effectiveness. This has led to concerns about the validity of the measures typically used to quantify treatment effects in cost-effectiveness analyses and in 2012, in the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence called for an improvement in the cost-effectiveness framework for assessing MS treatments. OBJECTIVE AND METHODS: This review describes what is meant by cost-effectiveness in health/social care funding decision-making, and usual practice for assessing treatment benefits. RESULTS: We detail the use of the quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) in resource allocation decisions, and set out limitations of this approach in the context of MS. CONCLUSION: We conclude by highlighting methodological and policy developments which should aid addressing these limitations

The mass ratio and formation mechanisms of Herbig Ae/Be star binary systems

We present B and R band spectroastrometry of a sample of 45 Herbig Ae/Be stars in order to study their binary properties. All but one of the targets known to be binary systems with a separation of ~0.1-2.0 arcsec are detected by a distinctive spectroastrometric signature. Some objects in the sample exhibit spectroastrometric features that do not appear attributable to a binary system. We find that these may be due to light reflected from dusty halos or material entrained in winds. We present 8 new binary detections and 4 detections of an unknown component in previously discovered binary systems. The data confirm previous reports that Herbig Ae/Be stars have a high binary fraction, 74+/-6 per cent in the sample presented here. We use a spectroastrometric deconvolution technique to separate the spatially unresolved binary spectra into the individual constituent spectra. The separated spectra allow us to ascertain the spectral type of the individual binary components, which in turn allows the mass ratio of these systems to be determined. In addition, we appraise the method used and the effects of contaminant sources of flux. We find that the distribution of system mass ratios is inconsistent with random pairing from the Initial Mass Function, and that this appears robust despite a detection bias. Instead, the mass ratio distribution is broadly consistent with the scenario of binary formation via disk fragmentation.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, minor changes made in proof stag

Occult purulent pericarditis detected by indium-111 leukocyte imaging.

Leukocyte imaging with indium-111 is a relatively new technique which, to this point in time, has been discussed almost exclusively in the radiologic literature. Although this procedure has been used mainly to detect intra-abdominal infection, the thorax is routinely imaged along with the abdomen, and therefore detection of cardiac disease may be feasible. This case report is of a young woman after liver transplantation who developed occult purulent pericarditis initially detected by a leukocyte scan with indium-111. This case demonstrates that striking pericardial uptake on a whole-body indium-111 leukocyte scan can occur with purulent pericarditis, and it reemphasizes how insidiously purulent pericarditis may present in an immunosuppressed patient