Taking the Public Trust: How a New York Real Estate Developer Is Threatening State Governments in the West

A wealthy New York developer coordinated an $8 million campaign to enact state ballot initiatives that would eviscerate state environmental safeguards in four Western states and threaten to bankrupt the state treasuries.Organizations connected to Howie Rich have primarily funded the initiatives to allow individual landowners to claim compensation from state and local governments for any decrease in property value as a result of planning, environmental or other government protections. They will be on the ballot in four states on Election Day: Arizona (Proposition 207), California (Proposition 90), Idaho (Proposition 2) and Washington (Initiative 933).Similar initiatives were bounced -- in full or in part -- from ballots in Oklahoma and Nevada because courts there found that the structure of the initiatives violated those states' requirements that ballot initiatives embrace only a single subject. In Montana, a court found that proponents engaged in massive fraud in the petition drive to win a spot on the ballot.The campaigns falsely advertise the initiatives as necessary to prevent governments from condemning property owners' land, but they instead are intended to serve as cash cows for developers. If approved, they would leave governments with an unacceptable choice between rolling back decades of environmental protection rules -- such as those to combat sprawl, protect wetlands and preserve clean air and clean water -- or paying bounties to developers as compensation for restrictions on using their land however they please

Extensible sparse functional arrays with circuit parallelism

A longstanding open question in algorithms and data structures is the time and space complexity of pure functional arrays. Imperative arrays provide update and lookup operations that require constant time in the RAM theoretical model, but it is conjectured that there does not exist a RAM algorithm that achieves the same complexity for functional arrays, unless restrictions are placed on the operations. The main result of this paper is an algorithm that does achieve optimal unit time and space complexity for update and lookup on functional arrays. This algorithm does not run on a RAM, but instead it exploits the massive parallelism inherent in digital circuits. The algorithm also provides unit time operations that support storage management, as well as sparse and extensible arrays. The main idea behind the algorithm is to replace a RAM memory by a tree circuit that is more powerful than the RAM yet has the same asymptotic complexity in time (gate delays) and size (number of components). The algorithm uses an array representation that allows elements to be shared between many arrays with only a small constant factor penalty in space and time. This system exemplifies circuit parallelism, which exploits very large numbers of transistors per chip in order to speed up key algorithms. Extensible Sparse Functional Arrays (ESFA) can be used with both functional and imperative programming languages. The system comprises a set of algorithms and a circuit specification, and it has been implemented on a GPGPU with good performance

Overview of Hydra: a concurrent language for synchronous digital circuit design

Hydra is a computer hardware description language that integrates several kinds of software tool (simulation, netlist generation and timing analysis) within a single circuit specification. The design language is inherently concurrent, and it offers black box abstraction and general design patterns that simplify the design of circuits with regular structure. Hydra specifications are concise, allowing the complete design of a computer system as a digital circuit within a few pages. This paper discusses the motivations behind Hydra, and illustrates the system with a significant portion of the design of a basic RISC processor

After the Storm: Interviews With Prominent Economists and Policy Leaders on the Future of the California Energy Market

Presents differing perspectives on the cause of California's energy crisis, and examines possible solutions for restoring a working energy market. Part of a series of research reports that examines energy issues facing California

Implementing the equality agenda: the scale of the practical problems involved and the power of the opposition should not be underestimated

Mike O’Donnell argues that reducing social inequality is a vitally important objective for the UK. In this article he examines the sizeable obstacles to substantive and meaningful reform

The RPSEA Rip-Off: How the Natural Gas Industry Extracted a Billion-Dollar Boondoggle from Congress

The report, "The RPSEA Rip-Off: How the Natural Gas Industry Extracted a Billion-Dollar Boondoggle from Congress," describes how companies with profits that totaled more than $100 billion in 2005 set up a taxpayer-funded subsidy establishing a 10-year,$1.5 billion research program to find ways to extract oil and gas from "ultra-deepwater" depths and hard-to-access onshore areas. American taxpayers will begin doling out about $400 million -- and possibly more than a billion dollars -- over 10 years to a research consortium that includes wealthy oil and gas companies due to a provision slipped quietly into the enormous 2005 energy bill.The Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America (RPSEA) was set up by the Gas Technology Institute (GTI), a group that was successor to another gas industry organization that had lost a dedicated source of funding from pipeline operators worth more than$200 million annually. GTI subsequently led the effort to help replace those lost funds with taxpayer dollars. The subsidy it secured is a relic of the tenure of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who ensured that much of the program's money would be guaranteed without further congressional action. RPSEA and GTI established offices in DeLay's former district of Sugar Land, Texas.The report documents the law's journey to passage and illustrates what is wrong with the lawmaking process and how some of the world's richest corporations are able to foist industry research costs onto taxpayers. The measure was slipped into a conference report in the dead of night, after conferees had signed off on what they thought was a final bill. The plan incorporated the use of a non-profit consortium to make the legislation look less like a special favor for a known entity. The legislative leaders who inserted the measure were among the top recipients of campaign contributions from the members of the front group

Willful Misconduct: How Bill Frist and the Drug Lobby Covertly Bagged a Liability Shield

Drug industry lobbyists conspired with the White House and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) last year to craft a sweeping liability provision that shields the industry from lawsuits over products used to treat pandemic illnesses, even in cases of gross negligence or gross recklessness.This report relies on internal documents and e-mails of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) to illustrate the degree to which Frist's office deferred to drug industry demands and describes Frist's sleight of hand in securing passage of the provision. It underscores the enormous power of the drug industry and its lobbyists to steer a highly controversial provision into law.Frist inserted the shield provision into an already-completed conference report for the defense appropriations bill in the dead of night, with the aid of House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). Many of the members of the conference committee had never seen the language, let alone approved it. Committee leaders explicitly assured Democrats, made wary by rumors circulating in the preceding days, that no attempt would be made to insert the liability measure into the spending bill.The shield is unnecessary because the government now can -- and does -- indemnify drug companies in contracts, using provisions saying that the government will cover costs in excess of the companies' insurance.The pharmaceutical industry used legions of influence-peddlers to push for the measure. The industry deployed at least 158 lobbyists to influence policies relating to vaccines and pandemic preparedness in 2004 and 2005, including 84 who were previously employed by the federal government. Of those, seven were former members of Congress, two were former top health care aides to Frist and another was the son of the speaker of the House

Nitrogen retention in the riparian zone of watersheds underlain by discontinuous permafrost

Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2005Riparian zones function as important ecotones for reducing nitrate concentration in groundwater and inputs into streams. In the boreal forest of interior Alaska, permafrost confines subsurface flow through the riparian zone to shallow organic horizons, where plant uptake of nitrate and denitrification are typically high. Two research questions were addressed in this study: 1) how does riparian zone nitrogen retention vary in watersheds underlain by discontinuous permafrost, and 2) what is the contribution of denitrification to riparian zone nitrogen retention? To estimate the contribution of the riparian zone to watershed nitrogen retention, I analyzed groundwater chemistry using an end-member mixing model. To assess the importance of denitrification as a mechanism of nitrogen retention, I conducted field denitrification assays using the acetylene block technique. Over the summer, nitrogen retention averaged 0.75 and 0.22 mmol N m⁻² d⁻¹ in low and high permafrost watersheds, respectively. Compared with the fluvial export of nitrogen, the retention rate of nitrogen in the riparian zone is 10 - 15% of the loss rate in stream flow. Denitrification accounted for a small proportion (3%) of total nitrogen retention in the riparian zone. Variation in nitrogen retention between watersheds did not account for differences in stream nitrate concentration between watersheds.Introduction -- Factors controlling denitrification -- Riparian zones as nutrient filters -- Models of riparian zone function -- Permafrost and hydrology -- Caribou Poker Creeks Research Watershed (CPCRW) -- References -- Nitrogen retention in the riparian zone of watersheds underlain by discontinuous permafrost -- Conclusions -- References

The alternative uses of disused dairy factories in Taranaki : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Geography at Massey University

Small local dairy factories have long been a part of New Zealand's dairying heritage. No longer profitable in their original use, subsequent redundancy and abandonment has seen the appearance of the "disused dairy factory" in the rural landscape. In disuse these buildings find their greatest asset for potential reuse. As existing capital stock, these disused dairy factories manifest potential opportunities for enterprises other than dairying, to establish alternative uses. As a product of the past, the phenomenon of dairy factory reuse represents a change in use to meet the demands of the present. The extent to which this has been achieved, and how this pattern can be explained, evidences the interaction of past and present forces in effecting a potential future for these buildings

Light Mesons from Heavy B and Hyperon Decays

Decays of heavy mesons and of heavy hyperons are used to provide tests of the standard model and information about new mixing schemes for the $\eta$ and $\eta^{'}$ mesons. These include the two body decays $B_s \to J / \psi M$ and $B_d \to J / \psi M$, $B \to \eta (\eta ^{'})K(K^\ast)$ and $\Lambda_b \to \Lambda \eta (\eta ^{'})$, semileptonic $D$ decays, and properties of radially excited mesons.Comment: Four pages. Talk given at the Fifth International Conference on Hyperons, Charm and Beauty Hadrons, Vancouver, BC, Canada, July 25-29, 200