Land use of northern megalopolis

The major objective is to map and digitize the land use of northern megalopolis, the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and to evaluate ERTS as a planning tool for megalopolitan areas. The southern New England region provides a good test ERTS's capabilities because of its complex landscape. Not only are there great differences in the degree of urban development, but in relief and vegetative cover as well

Recognition of settlement patterns against a complex background

Photointerpretation of aerial color infrared photography for analysis of urban land us

Compatibility of Glyphosate with Galerucella calmariensis; a Biological Control Agent for Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria)

By integrating Galerucella calmariensis with glyphosate there is potential to achieve both immediate and sustained control of purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria). The objective of this study was to determine the compatibility of glyphosate on the oviposition and survival of adult G. Calmariensis and on the ability of G. calmariensis third instar larvae to pupate to teneral adults. Our results revealed glyphosate (formulated as Roundup) at a concentration of 2% (2.43L/acre) and 4% solution (4.86 L/acre) had no impact on the ability of G. calmariensis third instar larvae to pupate to new generation adults. To examine the effect of a 2% solution of glyphosate on adult G. calmariensis oviposition and survival, adults were randomly divided between a direct contact group (adults sprayed directly), an indirect contact group (host plants with adults were sprayed), and a control group. Our results revealed that glyphosate does not impact G. calmariensis oviposition or adult survival. The results of this study indicate that G. calmariensis is compatible with glyphosate indicating that further field studies examining integrated control strategies for purple loosestrife are warranted

Estimating the Expected Value of Partial Perfect Information in Health Economic Evaluations using Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation

The Expected Value of Perfect Partial Information (EVPPI) is a decision-theoretic measure of the "cost" of parametric uncertainty in decision making used principally in health economic decision making. Despite this decision-theoretic grounding, the uptake of EVPPI calculations in practice has been slow. This is in part due to the prohibitive computational time required to estimate the EVPPI via Monte Carlo simulations. However, recent developments have demonstrated that the EVPPI can be estimated by non-parametric regression methods, which have significantly decreased the computation time required to approximate the EVPPI. Under certain circumstances, high-dimensional Gaussian Process regression is suggested, but this can still be prohibitively expensive. Applying fast computation methods developed in spatial statistics using Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations (INLA) and projecting from a high-dimensional into a low-dimensional input space allows us to decrease the computation time for fitting these high-dimensional Gaussian Processes, often substantially. We demonstrate that the EVPPI calculated using our method for Gaussian Process regression is in line with the standard Gaussian Process regression method and that despite the apparent methodological complexity of this new method, R functions are available in the package BCEA to implement it simply and efficiently

Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal

Before there was a scandal, there was a book - Michael A. Bellesiles\u27s Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. Arming America is a well-written and compelling story of how early Americans were largely unfamiliar with guns until the approach of the Civil War. It tells a wide-ranging, detailed, but relatively unnuanced story of gunlessness in early America. Bellesiles writes: The vast majority of those living in British North American colonies had no use for firearms, which were costly, difficult to locate and maintain, and expensive to use. His primary evidence was low counts of guns in probate records, gun censuses, militia muster records, and homicide accounts. According to Bellesiles, in early America there were very few guns. Privately owned guns were mostly in poor working condition. By law, guns were not kept in the home but rather stored in central armories, and guns were too expensive for widespread private ownership. He even claims that men generally were unfamiliar with guns and that they did not want guns - preferring axes and knives instead, in part because guns were so inaccurate that they were of little use. He argues that axes made very good weapons in hunting, and in battle, people considered the ax the equal of a gun. Bellesiles claims that states enacted laws that restricted gun ownership to white Protestants who owned property. White-on-white homicide was rare in colonial America, according to Bellesiles, and guns were rarely the weapon used in homicides. Guns were not culturally important, either: Travel narratives do not show that guns were part of everyday life, even on the frontier. At least in probate records, women did not own guns. He further claims that the background of the Second Amendment shows that the Anti-Federalists had no problem with restricting militia membership to those above the lower social classes. Last, with a few exceptions, the militia were extremely ineffective. Unfortunately, except for the last claim of militia ineffectiveness, all 15 of these major contentions of Arming America turn out to be false. Two meta-arguments by Bellesiles might have direct public policy applications (though, as a work of history, Arming America does not directly advocate any gun policies). One is that guns and violence go together. In early America, he claims, we had very low gun ownership and low homicide rates; after the Civil War, we had lots of guns and high homicide rates. The second is that if guns were not widely owned, then it is unlikely that gun owning was understood as an individual right in the Second Amendment. In this review article, I examine the following questions: How Common Was Gun Ownership? Was Homicide Rare? Were Privately Owned Guns Mostly in Poor Working Condition? How Expensive Were Guns? How Effective Were Guns, Bladed Weapons, and the Militia? Were Guns Kept in the Home? Were Guns Common in Travel Accounts? How Central Are the Errors to the Thesis of Arming America? Since the book\u27s publication, scholars who have checked the book\u27s claims against its sources have uncovered an almost unprecedented number of discrepancies, errors, and omissions. Indeed, the review ends with an appendix documenting over 200 specific errors in Arming America. When these are taken into account, a markedly different picture of colonial America emerges: Household gun ownership in early America was more widespread than today - in a much poorer world. Arming America claims that we did not have a gun culture before the Civil War, but that we have had one since then. There is an obvious conceptual problem with this thesis: What would it mean to have - or not have - a gun culture? It is hard to judge the truth of this claim without deciding on what a gun culture is. Bellesiles gives us some hints of what he means, but he never clearly states his criteria. This is an unfortunate way to frame the inquiry. Cultural analysis is not an all-or-nothing proposition. America had one form of gun culture in the late eighteenth century, it had another form of gun culture in the late nineteenth century, and it has another form today. Although Bellesiles never defines what he means by having a gun culture, he puts great store in owning guns, familiarity with guns, and the prevalence of guns in popular culture - such as in magazines, television, and movies. If having a gun culture requires gun-lover magazines and violent film and television crime stories (or the contemporary equivalent), then we have a gun culture today, but did not two centuries ago. If, instead, having a gun culture means growing up in households with guns, learning how to shoot them, widespread participation in military training where guns are used, and using guns as a tool (such as for vermin control), then we definitely had more of a gun culture in the eighteenth century than we do today. Arming America is an impressive book, especially to those not versed in the materials that Bellesiles wrote about. It is extremely well-written for a book that covers so many apparent specifics of gun ownership and use. Superb historians praised it on its release. Yet even from the beginning, there were those who found disturbing differences between Arming America and its sources. As time has passed and other scholars have entered the debate, these errors - which once looked like such serious defects that they could not be true - have been confirmed. The book and the scandal it generated are hard to understand. How could Bellesiles count guns in about a hundred Providence wills that never existed, count guns in San Francisco County inventories that were apparently destroyed in 1906, report national means that are mathematically impossible, change the condition of most guns in a way that fits his thesis, misreport the counts of guns in censuses or militia reports, have over a 60% error rate in finding guns in Vermont estates, and have a 100% error rate in finding homicide cases in the Plymouth records he cites? We may never know the truth of why or how Arming America made such basic errors, but make them it did. As scholars, we must content ourselves with correcting errors and searching for the realities of gun ownership, use, and social meaning. [Note: Although this review was first posted on SSRN in March 2005, it was previously downloaded from Instapundit.com in 2002-2003 over 130,000 times and probably downloaded from the History News Network several hundred thousand times more.

Examining the American Bar Association\u27s Ratings of Nominees to the U.S. Courts of Appeals for Political Bias, 1989-2000

In this study, Professor Lindgren examined data on the 108 confirmed nominees to the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal from the administrations of George H.W. Bush and William J. Clinton. He shows - for the first time - evidence of differential treatment of nominees by the American Bar Association\u27s rating committee. Yet this is not a simple story of apparent ABA bias toward Clinton nominees. Among confirmed nominees with the most important credential - prior judicial experience - Bush nominees fare roughly as well and sometimes even better than Clinton nominees. The problem arises for those without judicial experience. Here the apparent preference for Clinton appointees is strikingly large. Without controlling for any credentials, Clinton confirmed nominees have 9.1 times as high odds of getting a unanimous well qualified rating as do Bush confirmed nominees. Controlling for credentials, Clinton nominees have 9.7-15.9 times as high odds of getting a unanimous well qualified ABA rating as similarly credentialed Bush appointees. For those without prior judicial experience, just being nominated by Clinton instead of Bush is a stronger positive variable than any other credential or than all other credentials put together. The differences in how the ABA treats Bush and Clinton nominees reaches even to the committee\u27s internal decision making. The ABA committee split its vote 33% of the time while evaluating Bush appointees, but only 17% of the time when evaluating Clinton appointees. This difference was concentrated among those who lacked prior judicial experience, where 50% of Bush appointees had split ratings, compared to only 10% of Clinton appointees with split ratings

Investigation of land use of northern megalopolis using ERTS-1 imagery

The author has identified the following significant results. It was concluded that ERTS land use mapping, in spite of portraying megalopolis more accurately and dramatically than the best past efforts, is in danger of falling into the category of being too revolutionary for many planners and too conventional for many electronics engineers. Two alternative solutions are implied: one is to improve the ERTS product to the level where it will be completely accepted by planners, and the other is to increase support for the present somewhat primitive product through education, cost-sharing, and legislation