Rural America At A Glance, 2007 Edition

Rural America At A Glance, 2007 highlights the most recent indicators of social and economic conditions in rural areas for use in developing policies and programs to assist rural areas. The brochure provides information on key rural conditions and trends for use by public and private decisionmakers and others involved in efforts to enhance the economic opportunities and quality of life for rural people and their communities.rural indicators, population growth, employment, rural unemployment, rural economy, nonmetro, metro, creative occupations, rural America, natural amenities, census data, educational attainment, college education, poverty, domestic migration, ERS, USDA, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Charging and Growth of Fractal Dust Grains

The structure and evolution of aggregate grains formed within a plasma environment are dependent upon the charge acquired by the micron-sized dust grains during the coagulation process. The manner in which the charge is arranged on developing irregular structures can affect the fractal dimension of aggregates formed during collisions, which in turn influences the coagulation rate and size evolution of the dust within the plasma cloud. This paper presents preliminary models for the charge and size evolution of fractal aggregates immersed in a plasma environment calculated using a modification to the orbital-motion-limited (OML) theory. Primary electron and ion currents incident on points on the aggregate surface are determined using a line-of-sight (LOS) approximation: only those electron or ion trajectories which are not blocked by another grain within the aggregate contribute to the charging current. Using a self-consistent iterative approach, the equilibrium charge and dipole moment are calculated for the dust aggregate. The charges are then used to develop a heuristic charging scheme which can be implemented in coagulation models. While most coagulation theories assume that it is difficult for like-charged grains to coagulate, the OML_LOS approximation indicates that the electric potentials of aggregate structures are often reduced enough to allow significant coagulation to occur

Effects of the Charge-Dipole Interaction on the Coagulation of Fractal Aggregates

A numerical model with broad applications to complex (dusty) plasmas is presented. The self-consistent N-body code allows simulation of the coagulation of fractal aggregates, including the charge-dipole interaction of the clusters due to the spatial arrangement of charge on the aggregate. It is shown that not only does a population of oppositely charged particles increase the coagulation rate, the inclusion of the charge-dipole interaction of the aggregates as well as the electric dipole potential of the dust ensemble decreases the gelation time by a factor of up to twenty. It is further shown that these interactions can also stimulate the onset of gelation, or "runaway growth," even in a population of particles charged to a monopotential where previously it was believed that like-charged grains would inhibit coagulation. Gelation is observed to occur due to the formation of high-mass aggregates with fractal dimensions greater than two which act as seeds for runaway growth.Comment: 9 page

The Encyclopaedia of Literature in African Languages

.wav and .mp3 versions of audio recording of part of the lectureThe Encyclopaedia of Literature in African Languages (ELLAF) project focuses on oral and written literature in African languages. The ELLAF project proposes the creation of a website presenting and analysing literary texts in African languages, in order to make a wide range of these written or oral texts, in Sub-Saharan African and Malagasy languages, available to enthusiasts, students and specialists from around the world. The project aims to build up a research database based on literary works produced in their original languages, translated into French and/or English and presented in their linguistic, social and cultural contexts.The website signifies the creation of new tools for presenting and analysing textual data, centred on written/oral African literature in African languages regardless of their sociolinguistic status. This presentation favoured research through various fields (language, author, literary genre, predefined keyword and/or full text keyword) using a cross-disciplinary and comparative method. The method provides access to, for example: every text from a particular literature, the same genre found in several literatures, one theme in several literatures, a figurative element in several genres, notional degrees not necessarily made explicit by lexical occurrences. The material available here is ready for teaching straight away in regards to the transmission of factual knowledge: presentation of a language, overview of literature, contextualisation of literary production, bibliographic data. Furthermore, the bringing together of oral and written literary texts is not only of interest in a practical and documentary sense, but equally from a theoretical point of view.World Oral Literature Projec

Do Better Customers Utilize Electronic Distribution Channels: The Case of PC Banking

Firms are increasingly implementing electronic distribution strategies to augment existing physical infrastructure for product and service delivery. However, to date there has been little systematic study on how these distribution channels affect customer profitability. In this study, we explore the revenue enhancement potential for electronic delivery in retail banking by comparing customers who utilize personal-computer based home banking ("PC Banking) to other bank customers. Our results, based on case studies and detailed customer data from four institutions, suggest that while PC banking customers appear to be more profitable, most of the differences are due to unobservable characteristics of these customers that were present before PC banking was adopted. Demographic characteristics and changes in customer behavior following the adoption of the product account for only a small fraction of the overall differences. We conclude that, at least to date, the primary potential value of the product is in the retention of high value customers rather than cost savings or incremental sales. Our results also suggest that it is important to distinguish behavioral changes from pre-existing customer characteristics when evaluating the impact of added electronic delivery channels.

Vertical Scope Revisited: Transaction Costs vs Capabilities & Profit Opportunities in Mortgage Banking

What determines vertical scope? Transactions cost economics (TCE) has been the dominant paradigm for understanding "make" vs. "buy" choices. However, the traditional focus on empirically validating or refuting TCE has taken attention away from other possible drivers of scope, and it has rarely allowed us to understand the explanatory power of TCE versus other competing theories. This paper, using a particularly rich panel dataset from the Mortgage Banking industry, explores both the extent to which TCE predictions hold, and their ability to explain the variance in scope, when compared to all other possible drivers of integration. Using some direct measures of transaction costs, we observe that integration does mitigate risks; yet such risks and transaction costs do not seem to drive firm-level decisions of integration in retail production of loans. Rather, capability-driven and capacity- (or limit to growth-) driven considerations explain a significant amount of variance in our sample, under a variety of specifications and tests. We thus conclude that while TCE explanations of vertical scope are important, their impact is dwarfed by capability differences and by the desire of firms to leverage their capabilities and productive capacity by using the market.Mortgage Banking; Transaction Costs; Integration; Capabilities; Capacity Constraints; Limits to Growth