Will Increased Highway Funding Help Rural Areas?

Rural areas in the United States stand to benefit from new highway funding legislation, especially the South. The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) authorizes sharply increased funding for major roads and is the single largest public works bill in U.S. history. Over a 6-year period, it will provide $171 billion to build new roads, widen lanes, put in new interchanges, and construct bridges. Under TEA-21, some spending discrepancies will be addressed and resolved for States that contribute more money into the Federal Highway Trust Fund than they receive in benefits.Federal-aid highways, Federal highway investments, Highway Trust Fund, Federal transportation policies, rural transportation, rural development, highway funding formula, TEA-21, ISTEA, donor States, recipient States, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Public Economics,

Recreation, Tourism, and Rural Well-Being

The promotion of recreation and tourism has been both praised and criticized as a rural development strategy. This study uses regression analysis to assess the effect of recreation and tourism development on socioeconomic conditions in rural recreation counties. The findings imply that recreation and tourism development contributes to rural well-being, increasing local employment, wage levels, and income, reducing poverty, and improving education and health. But recreation and tourism development is not without drawbacks, including higher housing costs. Local effects also vary significantly, depending on the type of recreation area.recreation, tourism, recreation counties, rural development, economic indicators, social indicators, rural development policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

On Silicon Group Elements Ejected by Supernovae Type Ia

There is compelling evidence that the peak brightness of a Type Ia supernova is affected by the electron fraction Ye at the time of the explosion. The electron fraction is set by the aboriginal composition of the white dwarf and the reactions that occur during the pre explosive convective burning. To date, determining the makeup of the white dwarf progenitor has relied on indirect proxies, such as the average metallicity of the host stellar population. In this paper, we present analytical calculations supporting the idea that the electron fraction of the progenitor systematically influences the nucleosynthesis of silicon group ejecta in Type Ia supernovae. In particular, we suggest the abundances generated in quasi nuclear statistical equilibrium are preserved during the subsequent freezeout. This allows one to potential recovery of Ye at explosion from the abundances recovered from an observed spectra. We show that measurement of 28Si, 32S, 40Ca, and 54Fe abundances can be used to construct Ye in the silicon rich regions of the supernovae. If these four abundances are determined exactly, they are sufficient to recover Ye to 6 percent. This is because these isotopes dominate the composition of silicon-rich material and iron rich material in quasi nuclear statistical equilibrium. Analytical analysis shows that the 28Si abundance is insensitive to Ye, the 32S abundance has a nearly linear trend with Ye, and the 40Ca abundance has a nearly quadratic trend with Ye. We verify these trends with post-processing of 1D models and show that these trends are reflected in model synthetic spectra.Comment: Submitted to the Ap

Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Giant Planets, Oscillations, Rotation, and Massive Stars

We substantially update the capabilities of the open source software package Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA), and its one-dimensional stellar evolution module, MESA Star. Improvements in MESA Star's ability to model the evolution of giant planets now extends its applicability down to masses as low as one-tenth that of Jupiter. The dramatic improvement in asteroseismology enabled by the space-based Kepler and CoRoT missions motivates our full coupling of the ADIPLS adiabatic pulsation code with MESA Star. This also motivates a numerical recasting of the Ledoux criterion that is more easily implemented when many nuclei are present at non-negligible abundances. This impacts the way in which MESA Star calculates semi-convective and thermohaline mixing. We exhibit the evolution of 3-8 Msun stars through the end of core He burning, the onset of He thermal pulses, and arrival on the white dwarf cooling sequence. We implement diffusion of angular momentum and chemical abundances that enable calculations of rotating-star models, which we compare thoroughly with earlier work. We introduce a new treatment of radiation-dominated envelopes that allows the uninterrupted evolution of massive stars to core collapse. This enables the generation of new sets of supernovae, long gamma-ray burst, and pair-instability progenitor models. We substantially modify the way in which MESA Star solves the fully coupled stellar structure and composition equations, and we show how this has improved MESA's performance scaling on multi-core processors. Updates to the modules for equation of state, opacity, nuclear reaction rates, and atmospheric boundary conditions are also provided. We describe the MESA Software Development Kit (SDK) that packages all the required components needed to form a unified and maintained build environment for MESA. [Abridged]Comment: Accepted for publication in The ApJ Supplement Series. Extra informations required to reproduce the calculations in this paper are available at http://mesastar.org/results/mesa

B743: Primary Health Care and the Developmentally Disabled: An Analysis of the Normalization Principle in the State of Maine

At the time of publication, there existed an estimated group of 10 million American people defined as developmentally disabled. Stimulated in part by the often observed dehumanizing environment of institutional arrangement for the mentally disabled, the search for more humane treatment and management alternative has pointed in the direction of what has been termed \u27 normalization. In 1969, the Danish Mental Retardation Service defined normalization as \u27\u27 letting the mentally retarded obtain an existence as close to normal as possible. The focus of this study is on barriers to the normalization principle in the provision of primary health care to the developmentally disabled in the State of Maine. Possible barriers include attitudes toward the developmentally disabled, accessibility and quality of community based services, and lack of viable coordination mechanisms. Since 1971, the Maine Department of Mental Health and Corrections has made a concerted effort to encourage services based upon the principle of normalization. As pressures for normalization intensify, it seems warranted that those community-based structures which carry out the concept be examined as to their receptivity and the feasibility of further efforts in this direction. Although the principle of normalization has demonstrated its usefulness and potential, it is not without its limitations (Mesibov 1976). This study made no attempt to examine these limitations of the principle itself.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/aes_bulletin/1127/thumbnail.jp

Structural complexities in the Alishan area of the Taiwan fold-and-thrust belt inherited from the margin's shelf-slope transition

This article is subject to a CC Attribution 3.0 License.The Alishan area of Taiwan includes a sector of the fold-and-thrust belt that spans the transition from the platform with full thickness of the Eurasian continental margin in the north to the thinning crust of its slope in the south. This part of the fold-and-thrust belt with the highest elevations includes important along-strike changes in structure, stratigraphy, and seismic velocities. Here we present the results of new geological mapping from which we build geological cross sections both across and along the regional structural trend. Fault contour, stratigraphic cut-off, and branch line maps provide 3-D consistency between the cross sections. Minimum shortening is estimated to be 15 km, with displacement overall to the northwest. A P wave velocity model helps constrain the structure at depth by providing insight into the possible rock units that are present there. P wave velocities of > 5.2 km/s point toward the presence of basement rocks in the shallow subsurface throughout much of the south-eastern part of the area, forming a basement culmination. The changes in strike of thrusts and fold axial traces, the changing elevation of thrusts and stratigraphic contacts, and the growing importance of Middle Miocene sediments that take place from north to south are interpreted to be associated with a roughly northeast striking lateral structure coincident with the northern flank of this basement culmination. These transverse structures appear to be associated with the inversion of Eocene- and Miocene-age extensional faults, deeply rooted in the pre Cenozoic basement that were along what was the shelf-slope transition in the Early Oligocene. Inversion causes uplift of the margin sediments and their higher P wave velocity basement during Pliocene-Pleistocene thrusting.Peer Reviewe