A Response to Seth H. Giertz

There are two aspects of Seth Giertz's excellent chapter that I want to talk about. One is slightly technical; I want to try to provide some explanation for why estimating elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is so difficult. I think this difficulty is unappreciated by nonspecialists, who are quick to latch onto a favorite estimate without understanding the weaknesses in the estimation. The other aspect is a bit more philosophical and addresses the different functions of the partial equilibrium analysis done here and the general equilibrium work done a few years back in the macro group at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Perhaps surprisingly, I strongly endorse the partial equilibrium approach taken here for the comparison of tax reforms.

Nebraska Association of County Extension Board Annual Meeting

Thank you for inviting me to be here today. I truly appreciate this opportunity to visit with you. I've been asked to tell you about some of the recent successes of the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, to talk about opportunities for the Institute in Nebraska's future, and to talk, also, about extension's role in that.

LEAD Presentation

Thank you for inviting us to share with you some information about the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and what we are doing for Nebraska. As a stakeholder in Nebraska's land-grant university, you and every other Nebraskan have every right at any time to ask us what we've done for you and your neighbors lately. We welcome the question. There is so much excellent work being accomplished on this campus and throughout Nebraska that I am delighted each time I have the opportunity to talk about it. The biggest problem I find is stopping - there's always so much more to say - than there is time to say it in!

Ag at the Crossroads

Good afternoon. It is always a pleasure to take part in Ag at the Crossroads. I am particularly pleased today to be asked to talk about one of our Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources' strategic plan priorities and that is water. One of our four strategic plan priority goals is to, "Develop an integrated, multi-disciplinary, multi-functional water resources program addressing Nebraska's needs that provides statewide, national, and international leadership in water quality and quantity management in the next decade."

PowerPoint on Water, Food, Energy, and Youth, Families and Communities

Thank you for this opportunity to speak with you today. It's always my pleasure to talk about the exciting work occurring in the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Farm Bureau Legislative Conference

Thank you for asking me to be here with you today. It's always a pleasure. I'm really pleased to talk about my requested topic, which deals with my vision for IANR. Believe me, my vision for the future of Nebraska agriculture and my vision for the future of the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources are intertwined, and very bright! That doesn't make me an oracle, of course, but it does make me enthusiastic about my topic!

Alumni Advisory Council Presentation - Wick Alumni Center

Folks, I'm so pleased to be here with you today to talk about the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and the exciting, valuable contributions our faculty, staff, and students are making to Nebraska and, indeed, the world. Last year an independent study found the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources provides a conservative 15-to-1 return on state tax dollars invested with us. We call that study the At Work for Nebraska study because well, that's what we are about.

Análise dialógica de vinhetas de Maurício de Sousa: o caso do autismo

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Science publication workshops as a strategy to improve the visibility of scholarly production: the experience of the University of Sao Paulo (USP) - Brazil

The objective of this work is to present the experience of workshops that have been developed at the University of Sao Paulo by the Integrated Library System in partnership with Research Commission. The poster presents the main results of workshops that were made in 2011, in two knowledge areas: life science and engineering, about science publication processes, and directed to graduates, pos-doctorates, researchers, professors and library staff. The realization of workshops made possible identifies gaps in different aspects of scholarly communication such as research planning, search information strategy, information organization, submission process, identification of journals with high impact, and so on, areas where professors and librarians can help. Besides, workshops reveal that the majority of participants believe in its importance. Despite the ubiquity of digital technology that transversely impacts all academic activities, it is imperative to promote efforts to find a convergence between information and media literacy in higher education and university research activities. This is particularly important when we talk about how science is produced, communicated and preserved for future use. In this scenario, libraries and librarians assume a new, more active and committed role.

Skyddandets förnuft : En studie om anhöriga till hjälpbehövande äldre som invandrat sent i livet

This dissertation aims to examine and deepen the knowledge of family member caregiving where the care recipient is an elderly person who immigrated late in life. It also aims to contribute to the knowledge of the complexities underlying informal care giving and add to our understandings of what it means to be an immigrant in Sweden. The caregiver is in focus. The research conducted is explorative and partly inductive. The main material used is a qualitative interview study carried out with family members from different countries who are providing informal care to elderly immigrant relatives. The analysis gives three patterns of caregiving. One shows help from informal caregivers only who are not compensated economically. Another shows help from family members who are compensated. The third shows help from family members and staff from the public care system. Three ideal-typical informal caregiver roles show different positions vis-à-vis the new: “guardian”, “filter” and “reinterpreter of traditional care ideals”. Swedish born and immigrated informal caregivers are also compared through analysis of data gathered in telephone interviews with a representative selection of inhabitants in the County of Stockholm. A philosophy of action together with theory on integration and multiculturalism serves as theoretical frameworks to understand discrepancies and ambiguities in the data. Young immigrants experience different integration processes than do the older ones. They strive to protect older family members from changes linked to the migration experience. Talk about dependence on culture underlines family feelings and legitimates the processes of protection. Preconceptions about great differences between Swedish born and immigrant families are not supported by quantitative data. A conclusion is that protection can be understood in relation both to the traditional and the new, the latter in the forms of meetings with Swedish society where unequal relations prevail. It is a kind of counter-strategy where the range of actions is diminished, and thus it has its own logic. Protection can be loosened up when the circumstances change and the range of actions grow.

Petroleum development and climate change: Risks of being a host country

[EN]A petroleum expert’s view on risks and benefits of oil exploration today in Canarias, considering the climate change facts. The talk starts with an overview of the total petroleum development process, from exploration to post-abandonment, indicating some important risks and benefits for each, from a petroleum industry and a personal perspective. Then there is a part of the talk about the agreed facts of climate change, and what this means for us all. The end of the talk brings together these two sections in a summary.

Centrifuge Modeling of Sandy Slopes

Slope failure occurs in many areas throughout the world and it becomes an important problem when it interferes with human activity, in which disasters provoke loss of life and property damage. In this research we investigate the slope failure through the centrifuge modeling, where a reduced-scale model, N times smaller than the full-scale (prototype), is used whereas the acceleration is increased by N times (compared with the gravity acceleration) to preserve the stress and the strain behavior. The aims of this research “Centrifuge modeling of sandy slopes” are in extreme synthesis: 1) test the reliability of the centrifuge modeling as a tool to investigate the behavior of a sandy slope failure; 2) understand how the failure mechanism is affected by changing the slope angle and obtain useful information for the design. In order to achieve this scope we arranged the work as follows: Chapter one: centrifuge modeling of slope failure. In this chapter we provide a general view about the context in which we are working on. Basically we explain what is a slope failure, how it happens and which are the tools available to investigate this phenomenon. Afterwards we introduce the technology used to study this topic, that is the geotechnical centrifuge. Chapter two: testing apparatus. In the first section of this chapter we describe all the procedures and facilities used to perform a test in the centrifuge. Then we explain the characteristics of the soil (Nevada sand), like the dry unit weight, water content, relative density, and its strength parameters (c,φ), which have been calculated in laboratory through the triaxial test. Chapter three: centrifuge tests. In this part of the document are presented all the results from the tests done in centrifuge. When we talk about results we refer to the acceleration at failure for each model tested and its failure surface. In our case study we tested models with the same soil and geometric characteristics but different angles. The angles tested in this research were: 60°, 75° and 90°. Chapter four: slope stability analysis. We introduce the features and the concept of the software: ReSSA (2.0). This software allows us to calculate the theoretical failure surfaces of the prototypes. Then we show in this section the comparisons between the experimental failure surfaces of the prototype, traced in the laboratory, and the one calculated by the software. Chapter five: conclusion. The conclusion of the research presents the results obtained in relation to the two main aims, mentioned above.

Self-Organizing Mechanisms for Task Allocation in a Knowledge-Based Economy

A prevalent claim is that we are in knowledge economy. When we talk about knowledge economy, we generally mean the concept of “Knowledge-based economy” indicating the use of knowledge and technologies to produce economic benefits. Hence knowledge is both tool and raw material (people’s skill) for producing some kind of product or service. In this kind of environment economic organization is undergoing several changes. For example authority relations are less important, legal and ownership-based definitions of the boundaries of the firm are becoming irrelevant and there are only few constraints on the set of coordination mechanisms. Hence what characterises a knowledge economy is the growing importance of human capital in productive processes (Foss, 2005) and the increasing knowledge intensity of jobs (Hodgson, 1999). Economic processes are also highly intertwined with social processes: they are likely to be informal and reciprocal rather than formal and negotiated. Another important point is also the problem of the division of labor: as economic activity becomes mainly intellectual and requires the integration of specific and idiosyncratic skills, the task of dividing the job and assigning it to the most appropriate individuals becomes arduous, a “supervisory problem” (Hogdson, 1999) emerges and traditional hierarchical control may result increasingly ineffective. Not only specificity of know how makes it awkward to monitor the execution of tasks, more importantly, top-down integration of skills may be difficult because ‘the nominal supervisors will not know the best way of doing the job – or even the precise purpose of the specialist job itself – and the worker will know better’ (Hogdson,1999). We, therefore, expect that the organization of the economic activity of specialists should be, at least partially, self-organized. The aim of this thesis is to bridge studies from computer science and in particular from Peer-to-Peer Networks (P2P) to organization theories. We think that the P2P paradigm well fits with organization problems related to all those situation in which a central authority is not possible. We believe that P2P Networks show a number of characteristics similar to firms working in a knowledge-based economy and hence that the methodology used for studying P2P Networks can be applied to organization studies. Three are the main characteristics we think P2P have in common with firms involved in knowledge economy: - Decentralization: in a pure P2P system every peer is an equal participant, there is no central authority governing the actions of the single peers; - Cost of ownership: P2P computing implies shared ownership reducing the cost of owing the systems and the content, and the cost of maintaining them; - Self-Organization: it refers to the process in a system leading to the emergence of global order within the system without the presence of another system dictating this order. These characteristics are present also in the kind of firm that we try to address and that’ why we have shifted the techniques we adopted for studies in computer science (Marcozzi et al., 2005; Hales et al., 2007 [39]) to management science.

La città che cambia: la diffusione urbana. Mobilità residenziale e stili di vita emergenti nel Comune di Argelato (Bologna)

Il presente lavoro di ricerca ha per oggetto il tema della diffusione urbana. Dopo una breve ricostruzione delle varie definizioni presenti in letteratura sul fenomeno - sia qualitative che quantitative - e una descrizione dei limiti di volta in volta presenti all’interno di tali definizioni, si procede con la descrizione dell’evoluzione storica dello sprawl urbano all’interno del mondo occidentale. Una volta definito e contestualizzato storicamente l’oggetto della ricerca, ne vengono analizzate le cause e il complesso sistema di conseguenze che tale fenomeno urbano porta con sé. Successivamente vengono presentate le principali teorie sociologiche attraverso le quali può essere interpretato il fenomeno dello sprawl urbano e vengono descritte le varie forme con cui si può esprimere lo sprawl urbano: non esiste infatti uniformità tra i vari paesaggi suburbani, ma una grande diversità interna alle varie forme in cui si manifesta il fenomeno della dispersione insediativa. Se quanto finora esaminato, soprattutto a livello bibliografico, è riconducibile alla letteratura nordamericana, arrivati a questo punto del lavoro, l’attenzione viene spostata sul continente europeo, prendendo in esame l’emergere del periurbano all’interno del nostro continente e tentando di descrivere sia le contiguità che le differenze tra il fenomeno dell’urban sprawl e quello del periurbano. Infine, adottando un procedimento “ad imbuto”, il lavoro si sofferma sulla situazione del nostro paese in merito alla tematica in questione. L’ultima sezione della ricerca prevede una parte di lavoro empirico. Se, come è emerso nel quadro teorico, molti sono gli elementi che caratterizzano il tema dello sprawl urbano e del periurbano, si è voluto andare a verificare se, ed eventualmente quali, degli elementi descritti, sono presenti in un’area ben delimitata del territorio bolognese, per cercare di capire se si possa parlare di un “periurbano bolognese” e quali caratteristiche esso presenti.

Europa e Catasto

We study first the different cadastral systems in the EU countries and their perspective in the European Law context, especially in their tax law aspect and about the different building tax system. We talk about the most important aspect, taxation, and the European Unionʼs influence, particularly the European Court. But not only speak about the influence in the Member stateʼs building tax, also find another influences ways, with some European policies. All these aspects and another show a tendency to the cadastral integration, not direct, but existent in the indirect way. About other aspects, the study holds the dual nature of the cadastre, social (like social science), and their tax aspect, and technic nature. The Inspire information net can generate a new way to the tax information exchange between European countries. The investigation end with a comparison of the different cadastral systems in EU countries, and about the edification tax law too. This report holds the tax nature of the cadastre, the need to be considered like social-technic complex. Diverse international organization consider that is a multipurpose instrument and institution, but seem to forget their original purpose, their tax purpose, that was the central aspect in their origin and that don can`t be forget in the new world that raises after the world financial crisis.