Revealed Preferences for Car Tax Cuts: an Empirical Study of Perceived Fiscal Incidence

Voting in an election in which elimination of the local car tax is the central issue shows how a highly visible universal tax cut can prevail in the electoral process even if benefits are skewed toward upper income households. These results are consistent with positive models of fiscal structure choice in which fiscal systems are the consequence of support maximizing politicians attempting to supply net benefits to easily identifiable interest groups without generating significant opposition from other groups.personal property taxes, tax revolt,targeted universalism

Functional Equations and the Generalised Elliptic Genus

We give a new derivation and characterisation of the generalised elliptic genus of Krichever-H\"ohn by means of a functional equation.Comment: To be published in the collection honouring Francesco Calogero's 70-th birthda

Lunar Resource Assessment: an Industry Perspective

The goals of the U.S. space program are to return to the Moon, establish a base, and continue onward to Mars. To accomplish this in a relatively short time frame and to avoid the high costs of transporting materials from the Earth, resources on the Moon will need to be mined. Oxygen will be one of the most important resources, to be used as a rocket propellant and for life support. Ilmenite and lunar regolith have both been considered as ores for the production of oxygen. Resource production on the Moon will be a very important part of the U.S. space program. To produce resources we must explore to identify the location of ore or feedback and calculate the surface and underground reserves. Preliminary resource production tests will provide the information that can be used in final plant design. Bechtel Corporation's experience in terrestrial engineering and construction has led to an interest in lunar resource assessment leading to the construction of production facilities on the Moon. There is an intimate link between adequate resource assessment to define feedstock quantity and quality, material processing requirements, and the successful production of lunar oxygen. Although lunar resource assessment is often viewed as a research process, the engineering and production aspects are very important to consider. Resource production often requires the acquisition of different types, scales, or resolutions of data than that needed for research, and it is needed early in the exploration process. An adequate assessment of the grade, areal extent, and depth distribution of the resources is a prerequisite to mining. The need for a satisfactory resource exploration program using remote sensing techniques, field sampling, and chemical and physical analysis is emphasized. These data can be used to define the ore for oxygen production and the mining, processing facilities, and equipment required

The Temperature and Density Structure of the Solar Corona. I. Observations of the Quiet Sun with the EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) on Hinode

Measurements of the temperature and density structure of the solar corona provide critical constraints on theories of coronal heating. Unfortunately, the complexity of the solar atmosphere, observational uncertainties, and the limitations of current atomic calculations, particularly those for Fe, all conspire to make this task very difficult. A critical assessment of plasma diagnostics in the corona is essential to making progress on the coronal heating problem. In this paper we present an analysis of temperature and density measurements above the limb in the quiet corona using new observations from the EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) on \textit{Hinode}. By comparing the Si and Fe emission observed with EIS we are able to identify emission lines that yield consistent emission measure distributions. With these data we find that the distribution of temperatures in the quiet corona above the limb is strongly peaked near 1 MK, consistent with previous studies. We also find, however, that there is a tail in the emission measure distribution that extends to higher temperatures. EIS density measurements from several density sensitive line ratios are found to be generally consistent with each other and with previous measurements in the quiet corona. Our analysis, however, also indicates that a significant fraction of the weaker emission lines observed in the EIS wavelength ranges cannot be understood with current atomic data.Comment: Submitted to Ap

Unseen Affective Faces Influence Person Perception Judgments in Schizophrenia.

To demonstrate the influence of unconscious affective processing on consciously processed information among people with and without schizophrenia, we used a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to examine whether early and rapid processing of affective information influences first impressions of structurally neutral faces. People with and without schizophrenia rated visible neutral faces as more or less trustworthy, warm, and competent when paired with unseen smiling or scowling faces compared to when paired with unseen neutral faces. Yet, people with schizophrenia also exhibited a deficit in explicit affect perception. These findings indicate that early processing of affective information is intact in schizophrenia but the integration of this information with semantic contexts is problematic. Furthermore, people with schizophrenia who were more influenced by smiling faces presented outside awareness reported experiencing more anticipatory pleasure, suggesting that the ability to rapidly process affective information is important for anticipation of future pleasurable events

Ultralight reactive metal foams produced as structural shapes in space: System design

This autonomous experiment for foaming metals in space involved: (1) payload support structure; (2) furnace and foaming apparatus; (3) electronic controls; (4) battery power; and (5) metallurgy. Emphasis was laid on a modular design which was easily modifiable and which offered maximum durability, safety, and failure tolerance

Perturbation Theory around Non-Nested Fermi Surfaces I. Keeping the Fermi Surface Fixed

The perturbation expansion for a general class of many-fermion systems with a non-nested, non-spherical Fermi surface is renormalized to all orders. In the limit as the infrared cutoff is removed, the counterterms converge to a finite limit which is differentiable in the band structure. The map from the renormalized to the bare band structure is shown to be locally injective. A new classification of graphs as overlapping or non-overlapping is given, and improved power counting bounds are derived from it. They imply that the only subgraphs that can generate $r$ factorials in the $r^{\rm th}$ order of the renormalized perturbation series are indeed the ladder graphs and thus give a precise sense to the statement that `ladders are the most divergent diagrams'. Our results apply directly to the Hubbard model at any filling except for half-filling. The half-filled Hubbard model is treated in another place.Comment: plain TeX with postscript figures in a uuencoded gz-compressed tar file. Put it on a separate directory before unpacking, since it contains about 40 files. If you have problems, requests or comments, send e-mail to [email protected]

Transition Region Abundance Measurements During Impulsive Heating Events

It is well established that elemental abundances vary in the solar atmosphere and that this variation is organized by first ionization potential (FIP). Previous studies have shown that in the solar corona low-FIP elements, such as Fe, Si, Mg, and Ca, are generally enriched relative to high-FIP elements, such as C, N, O, Ar, and Ne. In this paper we report on measurements of plasma composition made during impulsive heating events observed at transition region temperatures with the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) on Hinode. During these events the intensities of O IV, V, and VI emission lines are enhanced relative to emission lines from Mg V, VI, and VII and Si VI and VII and indicate a composition close to that of the photosphere. Long-lived coronal fan structures, in contrast, show an enrichment of low-FIP elements. We conjecture that the plasma composition is an important signature of the coronal heating process, with impulsive heating leading to the evaporation of unfractionated material from the lower layers of the solar atmosphere and higher frequency heating leading to long-lived structures and the accumulation of low-FIP elements in the corona.Comment: Not yet submitted to ApJ. Comments are welcome

The Solar Photospheric-to-Coronal Fe abundance from X-ray Fluorescence Lines

The ratio of the Fe abundance in the photosphere to that in coronal flare plasmas is determined by X-ray lines within the complex at 6.7~keV (1.9~\AA) emitted during flares. The line complex includes the He-like Fe (\fexxv) resonance line $w$ (6.70~keV) and Fe K$\alpha$ lines (6.39, 6.40~keV), the latter being primarily formed by the fluorescence of photospheric material by X-rays from the hot flare plasma. The ratio of the Fe K$\alpha$ lines to the \fexxv\ $w$ depends on the ratio of the photospheric-to-flare Fe abundance, heliocentric angle $\theta$ of the flare, and the temperature $T_e$ of the flaring plasma. Using high-resolution spectra from X-ray spectrometers on the {\em P78-1} and {\em Solar Maximum Mission} spacecraft, the Fe abundance in flares is estimated to be $1.6\pm 0.5$ and $2.0 \pm 0.3$ times the photospheric Fe abundance, the {\em P78-1} value being preferred as it is more directly determined. This enhancement is consistent with results from X-ray spectra from the {\em RHESSI} spacecraft, but is significantly less than a factor 4 as in previous work.Comment: Accepted for publication by MNRA

The X-ray spectrum of Fe XVII revisited with a multi-ion model

The theoretical intensities of the soft X-ray Fe XVII lines arising from 2l-3l' transitions are reexamined using a three-ion collisional-radiative model that includes the contributions to line formation of radiative recombination (RR), dielectronic recombination (DR), resonant excitation (RE), and inner-shell collisional ionization (CI), in addition to the usual contribution of collisional excitation (CE). These additional processes enhance mostly the 2p-3s lines and not the 2p-3d lines. Under coronal equilibrium conditions, in the electron temperature range of 400 to 600 eV where the Fe XVII line emissivities peak, the combined effect of the additional processes is to enhance the 2p-3s lines at 16.78, 17.05, and 17.10 A, by ~ 25%, 30%, and 55%, respectively, compared with their traditional, single-ion CE values. The weak 2p-3d line at 15.45 A is also enhanced by up to 20%, while the other 2p-3d lines are almost unaffected. The effects of DR and RE are found to be dominant in this temperature range (400 - 600 eV), while that of CI is 3% at the most, and the contribution of RR is less than 1%. At lower temperatures, where the Fe XVII / Fe XVIII abundance ratio is high, the RE effect dominates. However, as the temperature rises and the Fe XVIII abundance increases, the DR effect takes over. The newly calculated line powers can reproduce most of the often observed high values of the (I17.05 + I17.10) / I15.01 intensity ratio. The importance of ionization and recombination processes to the line strengths also helps to explain why laboratory measurements in which CE is essentially the sole mechanism agree well with single-ion calculations, but do not reproduce the astrophysically observed ratios.Comment: Submitted to Ap