Housing the Aging Baby Boomers: Implications for Local Policy

Most elderly want to age in place. Yet, most elderly live in suburban and rural communities ill-suited to meet the changing aging-related demands. This paper discusses various issues communities need to address when balancing the demands of aging baby boomers against those of younger households. Accommodating changes in life stage needs requires revising building and zoning codes to permit mixed use and mixed density development incorporating greater varieties of housing units and easier accessibility. Developing support arrangements for naturally occurring retirement communities will become important for state and local governments. A significant number of aging adults will move to locales with natural and augmented civic amenities. Such migration is double-edged; features that attract "gray gold" also attract needy elderly. Finally, affordable housing will be an issue for a growing number of elderly, calling for targeted tax and financial assistance policies for lower income elderly homeowners. Working Paper 08-0

Classroom Dialogue in Technology

This paper investigates the role that classroom conversations and dialogue play in learning in technology education. It reviews literature in this area. It argues that to enhance our understanding of how children learn in technology it is necessary understand the impact clearly focused conversations of children, amongst themselves and between children and their teachers while undertaking technological practice has on advancing thinking and understanding. This will enhance understanding of how learning occurs in technology and how interaction with peers and teachers advances thinking around technological concepts and components of practice and give teacher insight into children’s understanding of technological knowledge and concepts. It gives early insight into what directed conversation with students can reveal. It also asks the questions: “What defines a quality conversation in technology? What can conversation do to facilitate, develop and enhance children’s learning in technology education

The Public Trust Doctrine: Accommodating the Public Need Within Constitutional Bounds—Orion Corp. v. State, 109 Wash. 2d 621, 747 P.2d 1062 (1987), cert. denied, 108 S. Ct. 1996 (1988)

Following decades of neglecting its public trust duties, Washington now accepts the public trust doctrine as a permanent fixture in its law. In Orion Corp. v. State, the Washington Supreme Court reaffirmed the state\u27s sovereign interest as the public\u27s trustee in its tidelands, marshes, and shorelands. The court declared that private use of protected trust lands must conform to the public\u27s interest in navigation, fishing, and recreation, and must not be harmful to the land\u27s dependent wildlife. The court, however, declined to define the public trust\u27s reach, stating only that it is coextensive with the public need. This standard suggests a willingness to further extend the public trust beyond its water-based context. Such an extension could encounter constitutional obstacles

The Public Trust Doctrine: Accommodating the Public Need Within Constitutional Bounds—Orion Corp. v. State, 109 Wash. 2d 621, 747 P.2d 1062 (1987), cert. denied, 108 S. Ct. 1996 (1988)

Following decades of neglecting its public trust duties, Washington now accepts the public trust doctrine as a permanent fixture in its law. In Orion Corp. v. State, the Washington Supreme Court reaffirmed the state\u27s sovereign interest as the public\u27s trustee in its tidelands, marshes, and shorelands. The court declared that private use of protected trust lands must conform to the public\u27s interest in navigation, fishing, and recreation, and must not be harmful to the land\u27s dependent wildlife. The court, however, declined to define the public trust\u27s reach, stating only that it is coextensive with the public need. This standard suggests a willingness to further extend the public trust beyond its water-based context. Such an extension could encounter constitutional obstacles

The devil in the deep: Expanding the known habitat of a rare and protected fish

The accepted geographic range of a species is related to both opportunity and effort in sampling that range. In deepwater ecosystems where human access is limited, the geographic ranges of many marine species are likely to be underestimated. A chance recording from baited cameras deployed on deep uncharted reef revealed an eastern blue devil fish (Paraplesiops bleekeri) at a depth of 51 m and more than 2 km further down the continental shelf slope than previously observed. This is the first verifiable observation of eastern blue devil fish, a protected and endemic southeastern Australian temperate reef species, at depths greater than the typically accepted depth range of 30 m. Knowledge on the ecology of this and many other reef species is indeed often limited to shallow coastal reefs, which are easily accessible by divers and researchers. Suitable habitat for many reef species appears to exist on deeper offshore reefs but is likely being overlooked due to the logistics of conducting research on these often uncharted habitats. On the basis of our observation at a depth of 51 m and observations by recreational fishers catching eastern blue devil fishes on deep offshore reefs, we suggest that the current depth range of eastern blue devil fish is being underestimated at 30 m. We also observed several common reef species well outside of their accepted depth range. Notably, immaculate damsel (Mecaenichthys immaculatus), red morwong (Cheilodactylus fuscus), mado (Atypichthys strigatus), white-ear (Parma microlepis) and silver sweep (Scorpis lineolata) were abundant and recorded in a number of locations at up to a depth of at least 55 m. This underestimation of depth potentially represents a large area of deep offshore reefs and micro habitats out on the continental shelf that could contribute to the resilience of eastern blue devil fish to extinction risk and contribute to the resilience of many reef species to climate change

Indirect inference for survival data

In this paper we describe the so-called “indirect” method of inference, originally developed from the econometric literature, and apply it to survival analyses of two data sets with repeated events. This method is often more convenient computationally than maximum likelihood estimation when handling such model complexities as random effects and measurement error, for example; and it can also serve as a basis for robust inference with less stringent assumptions on the data generating mechanism. The first data set concerns recurrence times of mammary tumors in rats and is modeled using a Poisson process model with covariates and frailties. The second data set involves times of recurrences of skin tumors in individual patients in a clinical trial. The methodology is applied in both parametric and semi-parametric regression analyses to accommodate random effects and covariate measurement error.Peer Reviewe

b anti-b Higgs production at the LHC: Yukawa corrections and the leading Landau singularity

At tree-level Higgs production in association with a b-quark pair proceeds through the small Yukawa bottom coupling in the Standard Model. Even in the limit where this coupling vanishes, electroweak one-loop effects, through the top-Higgs Yukawa coupling in particular, can still trigger this reaction. This contribution is small for Higgs masses around 120GeV but it quickly picks up for higher Higgs masses especially because the one-loop amplitude develops a leading Landau singularity and new thresholds open up. These effects can be viewed as the production of a pair of top quarks which rescatter to give rise to Higgs production through WW fusion. We study the leading Landau singularity in detail. Since this singularity is not integrable when the one-loop amplitude is squared, we regulate the cross section by taking into account the width of the internal top and W particles. This requires that we extend the usual box one-loop function to the case of imaginary masses. We show how this can be implemented analytically in our case. We study in some detail the cross section at the LHC as a function of the Higgs mass and show how some distributions can be drastically affected compared to the tree-level result.Comment: 48 pages, 20 figures. Phys.Rev.D accepted version. Conclusions unchanged, minor changes and references adde

Indirect inference for survival data

In this paper we describe the so-called "indirect" method of inference, originally developed from the econometric literature, and apply it to survival analyses of two data sets with repeated events. This method is often more convenient computationally than maximum likelihood estimation when handling such model complexities as random effects and measurement error, for example; and it can also serve as a basis for robust inference with less stringent assumptions on the data generating mechanism. The first data set concerns recurrence times of mammary tumors in rats and is modeled using a Poisson process model with covariates and frailties. The second data set involves times of recurrences of skin tumors in individual patients in a clinical trial. The methodology is applied in both parametric and semi-parametric regression analyses to accommodate random effects and covariate measurement error