Excerpts from the Novel, Bear War-den

A woman park warden who works in Rocky Mountain National Park spends her time on such tasks as bear patrol, locating tourists who are lost or in other physical danger, and policing park rules. She has a particular affinity for grizzly bears, largely stemming from an experience she had in a Neolithic cave in Spain. During her work and her travels, she observes various ways in which bears are mistreated in parks, sometimes even by researchers with seemingly good intentions. While an out-of-control fire rages through the national park, the woman park warden, with two grizzly bear skulls in hand, begins a difficult and dream-like journey to the park boundary—where wild animals can seem like ghosts and trauma can strike as suddenly as lightning

Unintended Consequences and Intended Non-Consequences

The idea that government policies have unintended consequences has become a fixture of political argument, indeed a cliché. One can hardly get through a day’s newspaper editorials without encountering it with respect to something in the news—the TARP bailouts, the North Korea bailouts, executive pay caps, local issues such as the drinking age and the driving age.

Rationalism in Regulation

This Review follows the structure of Retaking Rationality. In Part I we criticize the book’s narrative (summarized above) as cartoonish and unhistorical—we think it is confusing rather than helpful to understanding recent developments and controversies in cost-benefit analysis and the organization of regulatory decisionmaking within the executive branch. In Part II we consider the book’s “Eight Fallacies of Cost-Benefit Analysis.” We find that these discussions are generally well informed and interesting but suffer from the effort to squeeze cost-benefit issues into the antiregulation-versusproregulation narrative; moreover the discussions are often excessively abstract and ambitious concerning the function of cost-benefit analysis, and they entirely fail to support the thesis that cost-benefit fallacies have been used to defeat beneficial regulations. Finally, in Part III we discuss the authors’ arguments about the need for and practice of OMB/OIRA oversight of agency rulemaking. Here we criticize as naïve the book’s argument that there is no need for an institutional counterweight to agency parochialism and that OIRA’s role should be recast as one of coordination, calibration, and promotion of a proregulatory agenda against the forces of agency sloth. A concluding Part sums up our arguments.

Signalling Rivalry and Quality Uncertainty in a Duopoly

This paper considers price competition in a duopoly with quality uncertainty. The established firm (the `incumbent') offers a quality that is publicly known; the other firm (the `entrant') offers a new good whose quality is not known by some consumers. The incumbent is fully informed about the entrant's quality. This leads to price signalling rivalry because the incumbent gains and the entrant loses if observed prices make the uninformed consumers more pessimistic about the entrant's quality. When the uninformed consumers' beliefs satisfy the `intuitive criterion' and the `unprejudiced belief refinement', prices signal the entrant's quality only in a two-sided separating equilibrium and are identical to the full information outcome

Experiments on multiplane balancing using a laser for material removal

The modifications of a flexible rotor system for two-plane laser balancing is described. Experimental testing of the laser material removal method for balancing through the first bending critical speed was demonstrated. The test rig, optical configuration, and a neodymium glass laser system were assembled and calibrated for static and rotating material removal rates. The laser control computer program was combined with the influence coefficient balancing process, resulting in a completely automated data acquisition, laser, and balancing system. The laser system rotor was balanced through the first bending critical speed using the laser material removal procedure to apply trial weights and correction weights without stopping the rotor

Development of high-speed balancing technology

An investigation into laser material removal showed that laser burns act in a manner typical of mechanical stress raisers causing a reduction in fatigue strength; the fatigue strength is lowered relative to the smooth specimen fatigue strength. Laser-burn zones were studied for four materials: Alloy Steel 4340, Stainless Steel 17-4 PH, Inconel 718, and Aluminum Alloy 6061-T6. Calculations were made of stress concentration factors K, for laser-burn grooves of each material type. A comparison was then made to experimentally determine the fatigue strength reduction factor. These calculations and comparisons indicated that, except for the 17-4 PH material, good agreement (a ratio of close to 1.0) existed between Kt and Kf. The performance of the 17-4 PH material has been attributed to early crack initiation due to the lower fatigue resistance of the soft, unaged laser-affected zone. Also covered in this report is the development, implementation, and testing of an influence coefficient approach to balancing a long, slender shaft under applied-torque conditions. Excellent correlation existed between the analytically predicted results and those data obtained from testing

On the discrete spectrum of non-selfadjoint operators

We prove quantitative bounds on the eigenvalues of non-selfadjoint unbounded operators obtained from selfadjoint operators by a perturbation that is relatively-Schatten. These bounds are applied to obtain new results on the distribution of eigenvalues of Schroedinger operators with complex potentials