Estimating the Impact of California Tribal Gaming on Demand for Casino Gaming in Nevada

Since 1990, the California tribal casino industry has grown from a very small and insignificant industry to one with annual gross gaming revenues of about $7.5 billion per annum by 2009. Over this same period, Nevada\u27s gaming revenues grew from approximately$5.0 billion in 1990 to $10.4 billion in 2009, having declined from a peak of$12.8 billion in 2007. Much of the recent decline in Nevada and especially Las Vegas can be attributed to the severity of the economic recession of 2007-2009. However, the major Northern Nevada destination resorts of Reno and South Lake Tahoe had experienced substantial slowdowns or contraction of their gaming industries since the advent of California tribal gaming in the early 1990s, as measured in a number of ways, including number of gaming devices, employment, and gross gaming revenues adjusted for inflation. Las Vegas, on the other hand, had experienced substantial real growth over this same period, until the Great Recession of 2007-2009, at which point it experienced a dramatic reversal of fortune. This analysis estimates demand relationships for gaming activity in the major tourism markets in Northern and Southern Nevada, by specifying a number of variables that relate to the demand for gambling in these markets as well as noting monthly seasonal shifts. It also examines the competitive links between the expansion of California tribal gaming and the Nevada casino industry\u27s economic performance. Regression analysis is utilized to establish the relationship between the growth and expansion of tribal casinos in California and the expansion or contraction of gaming in Nevada\u27s major regions of Reno, Lake Tahoe, and the Las Vegas Strip

One-Dimensional Heat Conduction Through the Skin of a Vehicle upon Entering a Planetary Atmosphere at Constant Velocity and Entry Angle

Closed-form solutions of the one-dimensional heat-conduction equations for the flow of heat into a plate with a laminar boundary layer have been obtained for a configuration entering a planetary atmosphere with constant velocity and negative entry angle. The atmospheric density was assumed to obey an exponential law and the temperature was assumed constant initially. The solution is in the form of a Fourier series expansion which, for most practical applications, can be approximated by retaining only one term of the expression. The solution applies to the initial part of the entry before the maximum heating conditions are encountered

Nitrogen Fertilizer Use by a High Yielding No-Till Corn Crop

At the present time there is public concern about the effect which nitrogen (N) fertilizer use by farmers has on groundwater quality. This has resulted in research efforts to describe what happens to nitrogen fertilizer after it is applied to a crop. We have conducted a study for the past 3 years which enables us to make a reasonable estimate of how much fertilizer N is taken up by a high yielding corn crop. And, depending on whether the corn is harvested for silage or grain, we have estimated how much of the fertilizer N is removed from the field. Such an evaluation provides a good picture of the extent to which fertilizer N is utilized by the crop and its potential as a groundwater pollutant

New Deal Agricultural Appropriations: A Political Influence

This study investigates the allocation of New Deal appropriations to agricultural interests in Alabama's sixty-seven counties during the Great Depression. Conventional wisdom indicates that Roosevelt, through the New Deal, brought assistance to those in need. However, recent literature has identified a political motivation to the pattern of spending that emerged during the economic downturn. The authors develop and estimate a model with data which has only recently become available. The results show that while communities with the highest farm income received larger appropriations as expected, counties that experienced a collapse in farm income during the Great Depression received no special consideration from those officials responsible for distributing New Deal dollars across the state. These results indicate that self-interest was an important motivator in allocating agricultural appropriations in the state of Alabama during the Great Depression.Depression

The potential of genetic algorithms for conceptual design of rotor systems

The capabilities of genetic algorithms as a non-calculus based, global search method make them potentially useful in the conceptual design of rotor systems. Coupling reasonably simple analysis tools to the genetic algorithm was accomplished, and the resulting program was used to generate designs for rotor systems to match requirements similar to those of both an existing helicopter and a proposed helicopter design. This provides a comparison with the existing design and also provides insight into the potential of genetic algorithms in design of new rotors

Segmentation of image ensembles via latent atlases

Spatial priors, such as probabilistic atlases, play an important role in MRI segmentation. However, the availability of comprehensive, reliable and suitable manual segmentations for atlas construction is limited. We therefore propose a method for joint segmentation of corresponding regions of interest in a collection of aligned images that does not require labeled training data. Instead, a latent atlas, initialized by at most a single manual segmentation, is inferred from the evolving segmentations of the ensemble. The algorithm is based on probabilistic principles but is solved using partial differential equations (PDEs) and energy minimization criteria. We evaluate the method on two datasets, segmenting subcortical and cortical structures in a multi-subject study and extracting brain tumors in a single-subject multi-modal longitudinal experiment. We compare the segmentation results to manual segmentations, when those exist, and to the results of a state-of-the-art atlas-based segmentation method. The quality of the results supports the latent atlas as a promising alternative when existing atlases are not compatible with the images to be segmented.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (U.S.)/National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (U.S.) U54-EB005149)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (National Center for Research Resources (U.S.)/Neuroimaging Analysis Center (U.S.) P41-RR13218)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (U.S.) R01-NS051826)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (National Center for Research Resources (U.S.)/Biomedical Informatics Research Network U24-RR021382)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CAREER Award 0642971)German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (Fellowship LPDS 2009-10)Academy of Finland (Grant 133611

External Enrichment of Minihalos by the First Supernovae

Recent high-resolution simulations of early structure formation have shown that externally enriched halos may form some of the first metal enriched stars. This study utilizes a 1 comoving Mpc$^3$ high-resolution simulation to study the enrichment process of metal-enriched halos down to $z=9.3$. Our simulation uniquely tracks the metals ejected from Population III stars, and we use this information to identify the origin of metals within metal-enriched halos. These halos show a wide range of metallicities, but we find that the source of metals for $\gtrsim$ 50\% of metal-enriched halos is supernova explosions of Population III stars occuring outside their virial radii. The results presented here indicate that external enrichment by metal-free stars dominates the enrichment process of halos with virial mass below $10^{6}\,M_\odot$ down to $z=9.3$. Despite the prevalence of external enrichment in low mass halos, Pop II stars forming due to external enrichment are rare because of the small contribution of low-mass halos to the global star formation rate combined with low metallicities towards the center of these halos resulting from metal ejecta from external sources mixing from the outside-in. The enriched stars that do form through this process have absolute metallicities below $10^{-3}\,Z_\odot$. We also find that the fraction of externally enriched halos increases with time, $\sim 90\%$ of halos that are externally enriched have $M_\mathrm{vir} < 10^6\,M_\odot$, and that pair-instability supernovae contribute the most to the enrichment of the IGM as a whole and are thus are the predominant supernova type contributing to the external enrichment of halos.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, Accepted for publication in Ap