ECONOMIC IMPACT OF RAILROAD ABANDONMENT: CARRINGTON-TO-TURTLE LAKE RAIL LINE

The Carrington-to-Turtle Lake rail line serves five agricultural shippers in a four county area in central North Dakota. Service on the line has been affected by recent embargoes, floods, and poor, deteriorating track conditions. The line is a strong candidate for abandonment as efforts to rehabilitate the line have lacked financial support. Prior to this study, a benefit/cost study, which compares benefits and costs of a rail line reconstruction, was performed for the rail line in an attempt to secure financial assistance for rehabilitation. Railroad abandonment impacts rural communities and local economies in a variety of ways. Businesses that use rail for transportation usually experience a change in their shipping options. Instead of sending and/or receiving materials and supplies by rail, those items must be moved by truck. The severity of the change is often a function of the amount of material shipped and distance hauled. Rail abandonment affects property values. In the absence of tax rate changes, reduced property values translate directly into lower property tax revenues for local governments. Rural areas, especially in North Dakota, often do not have adequate road and highway infrastructure to absorb movements of grain and agricultural inputs exclusively by truck. The transference of rail movements to truck traffic accelerates the deterioration of local roads and highways. Abandonment of the Carrington-to-Turtle Lake rail line was estimated to increase transportation costs for shippers on the line by $329,000 annually. A majority of the increase in transportation costs would be incurred by farmers in the form of reduced commodity prices. The North Dakota Input-Output Model estimated that the$329,000 in direct impacts would generate an additional $682,000 in secondary impacts. Total economic losses for the regional economy were estimated to be$1 million annually. Additional impacts included an annual loss of $17,900 in state-collected tax revenue. Annual net costs (i.e., damages less additional user revenues) to repair and maintain state roads impacted from increased truck traffic were estimated at$297,000 for resurfacing and $868,000 for reconstruction.rail abandonment, economic impact, rural communities, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Public Economics,

Performance of Barrows and Gilts in Hoop Structures and Confinement during Winter and Summer

The objectives of the study were to document the performance of barrows and gilts fed in hoops during the summer and winter, and to evaluate barrow and gilt performance in hoops compared with barrows and gilts in a confinement housing system

Access Control in a Workstation-Based Distributed Computing Environment

This paper describes the mechanisms employed to control access to system services on the IFS project. We base our distributed computing environment on systems that we trust, and run those systems in physically secure rooms. From that base, we add services, modifying them to interoperate with existing access control mechanisms. Some weaknesses remain in our environment; we conclude with a description of present vulnerabilities and future plans.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107869/1/citi-tr-90-2.pd

Two Year Summary of the Performance of Finishing Pigs in Hoop Structures and Confinement During Winter and Summer

Finishing pigs were fed for two years in bedded hoop structures and a confinement building with slotted floors in central Iowa. When summer and winter feeding periods for two years were combined, the trials showed that the finishing pigs in hoops ate more feed, grew faster, and required more feed per unit of liveweight gain than confinement pigs. The mortality rate was similar and percentage of culls was higher for hoops compared with confinement. Also, the hoop pigs were fatter with smaller loin muscle area and a lower percentage of carcass lean and carcass yield compared with confinement pigs. The efficiency of lean gain was also poorer for the hoop pigs. Because the hoops are cold structures, there were seasonal effects. The hoop pigs ate more feed, particularly in the winter, grew faster in the summer, and were less efficient particularly in the winter than the confinement pigs. The hoop pigs were fatter in the summer only and less efficient in converting feed to lean in the winter only. Also the hoop pigs had a greater incidence of roundworm infestations particularly in the later trials, in spite of a thorough deworming regimen. Therefore, hoop pigs may need to be fed diets somewhat differently than the diets fed to confinement pigs to optimize lean growth, and the control of internal parasites in hoop pigs may need to be more aggressive than in confinement. Bedding use was approximately 220 lb per pig on a year round basis. Approximately 204 lb of bedding was used in summer and approximately 236 lb of bedding was used in winter

Distributed Management of Massive Data: an Efficient Fine-Grain Data Access Scheme

This paper addresses the problem of efficiently storing and accessing massive data blocks in a large-scale distributed environment, while providing efficient fine-grain access to data subsets. This issue is crucial in the context of applications in the field of databases, data mining and multimedia. We propose a data sharing service based on distributed, RAM-based storage of data, while leveraging a DHT-based, natively parallel metadata management scheme. As opposed to the most commonly used grid storage infrastructures that provide mechanisms for explicit data localization and transfer, we provide a transparent access model, where data are accessed through global identifiers. Our proposal has been validated through a prototype implementation whose preliminary evaluation provides promising results