How Can We Change Our Habits If We Don’t Talk About Them?

For the late nineteenth century pragmatists, habits were of great interest. Habits, and the habit of changing habits, they believed, reflected if not defined human rationality, leadingWilliam James to describe habit as “the enormous fly-wheel of society.” What the pragmatists did not adequately address (at least for us) is the role of power relations in the process of changing habits. In this article we discuss our experience of attempting to engage critique and reflection on habitual practices in music teacher education, offering the reader an article within an article. That is, we reflect on our failure to publish a critical article in a widely read practitioner journal by sharing the original manuscript and its reviews, with the hope that our experience might shed additional light on social reproduction and efforts aimed at change

A Comparison of Timber Models for Use in Public Policy Analysis

In this paper, we compare and contrast two types of timber models that have been used for public policy analysis. These models have been variously used to predict price, inventory and market welfare impacts under different exogenous forces that impact timber markets. The framework and theory for each model type is presented and discussed. We then thoroughly test the two model types across six potential exogenous shocks to timber markets, ranging from instantaneous demand shocks to gradual supply adjustments. Our comparison indicates that these models predict potentially important differences in timber market behavior. These differences are important to consider for those who do public policy analysis.

Forestry Sequestration of CO2 and Markets for Timber

Forestry has been considered to have potential in reducing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide by sequestrating carbon in above-ground timber and below-ground roots and soil. This potential has been noted in the Kyoto Protocol, which identified specific forestry activities for which carbon sequestration credits could be obtained. To date, a few forestry efforts have been undertaken for carbon purposes, but most of these efforts have been on a small scale. Proposals have been under discussion, however, that would result in the creation of very large areas of new forest for the purpose of offsetting some of the additional carbon that is being released into the atmosphere. Concerns are expressed, however, that large-scale sequestration operations might have impacts on the world timber market, affecting timber prices and thereby reducing the incentives of traditional suppliers to invest in forest management and new timber production. Such a "crowding out" or "leakage" effect, as it is called in the literature, could negate much or all of the sequestered carbon by the newly created sequestration forests. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to examine and assess the interactions between carbon sequestration forestry, particularly, newly created carbon forests, and the markets for timber. The approach of this study involves utilizing an existing Dynamic Timber Supply Model (DTSM) to examine the interactions between newly created sequestration forests and the markets for timber. This model has been used to examine global timber supply and, more recently, has been modified to include carbon considerations. This study suggests that even without any specific sequestration efforts, commercial forestry offers the potential to sequester substantial volumes of carbon, approaching ten gigatons (Gt) (or petagrams (Pg)), in vegetation, soils and market products over the next century. At current rates of atmospheric carbon build up this is equal to about three years of net carbon releases into the atmosphere. This volume of carbon sequestration could be increased 50–100% by 50 million hectares (ha) of rapidly growing carbon-sequestering plantation forests, even given the anticipated leakages due to market price effects. Finally, the projections suggest that the amount of crowding out and carbon leakages are likely to be very modest. The 50 million ha of carbon plantations are projected to reduce land areas in industrial plantations, that is, crowd out, only from 0.2 to 7.8 million ha over the 100-year period. The addition of carbon sequestration forests offers the potential to increase the carbon sequestration of the forest system more than 50%, up to 5.7 Gts, above that already captured from market activity. This estimate assumes that crowding out and associated projected leakages will occur. At current rates of atmospheric carbon buildup, about 2.8% of the expected total buildup in atmospheric carbon over the next century could be offset by 50 million ha of carbon plantations.

Carbon Credits for Avoided Deforestation

Several important issues need to be addressed to make avoided deforestation (AD) a feasible option for climate change policy. Traditional questions associated with land-based sequestration options have largely been discussed in terms of project-based approaches to carbon sequestration. For country-level commitments these concepts remain important, but we argue in this paper that they can and should be addressed differently. In order to address AD, it is useful to begin by outlining the international climate control regimes under which AD could be included as an option. Two general alternatives are discussed - an arrangement that is a linear extension of the current Kyoto Protocol but that involves more countries with specific emission reduction targets, and an alternative expanded arrangement that requires that essentially all countries have greenhouse gas emission targets. We consider how AD would fit into these two general types of international agreements and address questions related to baselines, additionality, permanence, and leakage. We conclude that the key issues related to including deforestation in either of these arrangements revolve around measuring, monitoring (e.g., additionality), and the development of efficient incentives by countries to alter their land-use regimes.avoided deforestation, carbon, sequestration, credits, climate, warming

Power and responsibility

A commentary from Roger Brent on synthetic biology and its relation to issues of personal responsibility and biological security.Peter Parker and Uncle Ben are on my mind. The reason is that is that a month ago I was jumped by Craig Venter. There were TV cameras around. The live audience was an interesting, edgy mix, on the interface between "technology", meaning computer technology, and culture/ media/ journalism; I had just given a closely prepared talk on the history, promises, and perils of biology, 20 minutes from solar system formation to origin of life to photosynthesis to agriculture to Asilomar to now; and I had paid particular attention to the existing threat from remade and lightly engineered viruses, and the various technology-empowered approaches that could contribute to a defense against unpredictable viral and bacterial pathogens. The whole set of ways the defense strategy needs to shift

In the valley of the shadow of death

Roger Brent provides a commentary on current and future biological security challenges and possible strategies / approaches.During the 20th century, advances in biological understanding sparked a global revolution in biological capability, or RBC. Since that time, the revolution has proceeded in a Moore's-law-like fashion for many decades. One negative consequence of the RBC is that the US now faces a large and growing threat of catastrophic biological attack. To deal with the threat, this article advocates a two-part strategy. First, during the current period of high and growing risk, Period 1, "the Valley of the Shadow of Death", the US should bring into being a patchwork of agile technical capabilities to detect and respond to attacks, and social and normative policies to diminish their risk of occurrence. Second and simultaneously, the US should initiate research whose fruits will eventually deter biological attacks by rendering them "impotent and obsolete". Creation of effective, responsive, and agile Period 1 capabilities will buy time, by lowering the probability of attacks and blunting their impact, until strong technical defenses enabled by longer-term research can become operational in Period 2. Executing the two components of this strategy will be far more costly and complex than is generally contemplated, albeit probably less expensive and difficult than execution of the containment strategy during the Cold War. However, the increased security, human health and felicity, and economic growth that this activity will engender will repay the effort and cost many times over. Entry into Period 2, defense so strong as to deter attack by making it unlikely to have any effect, coincides with the effective elimination of most naturally occurring infectious diseases as a factor in human affairs. But at the moment, the best names for Period 2 seem to be "Partial Victory" or "Basin and Range", in that later trends may shift once again to favor attack

Estimating Carbon Supply Curves for Global Forests and Other Land Uses

This study develops cumulative carbon “supply curves” for global forests utilizing an dynamic timber supply model for sequestration of forest carbon. Because the period of concern is the next century, and particular time points within that century, the curves are not traditional Marshallian supply curves or steady-state supply curves. Rather, the focus is on cumulative carbon cost curves (quasi-supply curves) at various points in time over the next 100 years. The research estimates a number of long-term, cumulative, carbon quasi-supply curves under different price scenarios and for different time periods. The curves trace out the relationship between an intertemporal price path for carbon, as given by carbon shadow prices, and the cumulative carbon sequestered from the initiation of the shadow prices, set at 2000, to a selected future year (2010, 2050, 2100). The timber supply model demonstrates that cumulative carbon quasi-supply curves that can be generated through forestry significantly depend on initial carbon prices and expectations regarding the time profile of future carbon prices. Furthermore, long-run quasi-supply curves generated from a constant price will have somewhat different characteristics from quasi-supply curves generated with an expectation of rising carbon prices through time. The “least-cost” curves vary the time periods under consideration and the time profile of carbon prices. The quasi-supply curves suggest that a policy of gradually increasing carbon prices will generate the least costly supply curves in the shorter periods of a decade or so. Over longer periods of time, however, such as 50 or 100 years, these advantages appear to dissipate.carbon supply curves, sequestration, timber, forests, model, global warming, prices, markets

Detailed simulations of cell biology with Smoldyn 2.1.

Most cellular processes depend on intracellular locations and random collisions of individual protein molecules. To model these processes, we developed algorithms to simulate the diffusion, membrane interactions, and reactions of individual molecules, and implemented these in the Smoldyn program. Compared to the popular MCell and ChemCell simulators, we found that Smoldyn was in many cases more accurate, more computationally efficient, and easier to use. Using Smoldyn, we modeled pheromone response system signaling among yeast cells of opposite mating type. This model showed that secreted Bar1 protease might help a cell identify the fittest mating partner by sharpening the pheromone concentration gradient. This model involved about 200,000 protein molecules, about 7000 cubic microns of volume, and about 75 minutes of simulated time; it took about 10 hours to run. Over the next several years, as faster computers become available, Smoldyn will allow researchers to model and explore systems the size of entire bacterial and smaller eukaryotic cells

COOPERATIVE FORMATION AND FINANCIAL CONTRACTING IN AGRICULTURAL MARKETS

We use historical variation in the market share of agricultural cooperatives to examine the nature of the cooperative firm. Our data include the share of sectoral output accounted for by cooperative firms across 15 commodity sectors during the period 1930-2002. We test a simple financial contracting model where the cooperative firm is viewed as a particular implementation of "monitored credit" (or "informed intermediation"). Controlling for sectoral and year effects, we find support for the main prediction of our model with a positive and statistically significant relationship between cooperative market share and real annual lending rates.Agribusiness,

A GLOBAL MODEL OF CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS ON TIMBER MARKETS

Several papers have now estimated the impact of climate change on national timber markets, but few studies have measured impacts globally. Further, the literature on impacts has focused heavily on changes in productivity and has not integrated movements of biomes as well. Here, a dynamic model of ecological change and economic change is developed to capture the impact of climate change on world timber markets. Climate change is predicted to increase global timber production as producers in low-mid latitude forests react quickly with more productive short-rotation plantations, driving down timber prices. Producers in mid-high latitude forests, in contrast, are likely to be hurt by the lower prices, dieback, and slower productivity increases because of long-rotation species. Consumers in all regions benefit from the lower prices, and the overall impacts of climate change in timber markets are expected to be beneficial, increasing welfare in those markets from 2% to 8%.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,