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- Kristopher Contreras Miami, FL THE COUNT I read the entire October 2021 new-cars issue while waiting in line at the county treasurer's office to pick up personalized plates for my car. Sure, there have been times when I've "slacked off" and had a car that did the work for me, as is the case now in the name of matrimonial peace and happiness, but I'll take a DIY version of any car out there. Since BMW long ago made the transition from "the Ultimate Driving Machine" to the ultimate money machine, it shouldn't be long before a credit-card slot becomes standard for functions such as sunroof and windshield wipers (in Torrance, we don't need wipers much anyway). In those days in Poland, there were essentially three cars to choose from: the small Fiat 126p, the big Fiat 125p, and the sporty-looking Polonez, which the ballers got. [Extracted from the article]

Most Americans support correctional institutions, but few want them in their backyards. Most Americans also support economic growth, but it has to be the right kind of growth or it [...]

abstract:This article values the environmental benefits of historic, navigable canals using property values. We improve on standard methods by controlling for microgeographic fixed effects and applying a difference-in-differences method to canal restoration. We find a localized price premium within 100 m, around 5% before the 2008 recession, dropping to 3.4% by 2016. These effects are driven by urban canal-side properties with a direct outlook on the canals or immediate access. These locations are also attractive for developers, with a higher proportion of new-build sales. Our estimates suggest that canals generate land value uplift of £0.8–£0.9 billion in England. (JEL Q51, R21)

BackgroundThe National Health Service (NHS) scores well internationally on access to healthcare. But access has been measured on methods likely to undersample the more disadvantaged. Social landlords have access to more disadvantaged groups and may be able to improve health outcomes for their tenants and reduce their NHS usage by simple interventions.MethodsThis is a randomised controlled trial of 547 London social housing ‘general needs’ tenants over 50 years of age. Participants were given a health assessment, then split into a control group or one of two treated groups. Following early assessment 25 participants had to be withdrawn to receive intensive treatment because of currently untreated major health problems. Participants were followed up over 18 months and changes in health outcomes and NHS usage measured.ResultsCompared with the control the most intensively treated group showed non-significant improvements on health outcomes but a significant reduction in NHS resource use, on conventional costings worth some £760 per person. All 25 participants transferred to the most intensively treated group after their early health assessments showed improvement on all health outcomes at final assessment, but these improvements were not statistically significant.ConclusionsDrawing a sample from disadvantaged but not the most seriously disadvantaged groups in London revealed 4.5% of the population to have very serious untreated health problems. The reason for lack of treatment was mainly non-registration with a general practitioner or psychiatric issues. Simple interventions to a targeted group were found to produce significant reductions in NHS usage and other, although non-significant, health benefits.Trial registration numberID ISRCTN96259142.

Factors and situations associated with alcohol use in a sample of rural junior and senior high school students are examined. Much research has shown that age, gender, grade in school, religiosity, socioeconomic status, and involvement in extracurricular activities are all related to adolescent alcohol use. The present paper looks at the relationship between these factors and situations which might be conducive to drinking (e.g., driving around in a car, before going to a party, etc.) to determine whether the factors make it more likely that an adolescent will drink in such situations. The amount of time spent in social activities was positively related to alcohol use in all situations examined except drinking at home or at dinner. The amount of time spent studying and the frequency of attending religious services were negatively related

This paper will present a global definition for menu systems and propose a domain structure in support of this definition. A literature review was conducted to provide broad, integrated coverage and critical assessment of past and present research trends. This effort provides the background necessary to present our definition of menu dialogues by outlining the present state of domain knowledge. The proffered definition divides the domain into three areas: allowable menu system structures; identifiable menu system objects; and menu system sequence control aspects. These three areas are expanded in the paper to support the definition and function as an organizational framework for the domain.

The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate the demands placed on the short term memory system by synthetic speech. We compared performance in a typical auditory short term memory task as a function of whether the items were presented by a human voice or by a text-to-speech computer voice generator. Immediate serial recall of digit strings was significantly poorer when presented by synthetic speech than when presented by natural speech. The results are consistent with the idea that comprehension of synthetic speech imposes increased resource demands on the short term memory system.

This paper is concerned with the Wider Economic Impacts (WEIs) of transport improvements that arise via scale economies of agglomeration. It reviews the background theory and empirical evidence on agglomeration, explains the link between transport and agglomeration, and describes a three step procedure to appraise agglomeration impacts in a number of different settings. It includes new analytical work on measures of agglomeration and reports agglomeration-productivity elasticity estimates for the UK not previously published in the academic literature. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for future empirical work on agglomeration and transport appraisal.

Newly developed cost and training effectiveness models are being used by training developers to control costs and to insure systematic training device design. The problem for the user is how to select the appropriate design aid. Unfortunatly, there are no quick objective methods on which to base this selection. The selection decision for a particular application can be made based on three issues. The first issue is how the design aid addresses device instructional and fidelity features. The second issue is how the design aid formalizes the device design decision process. The third issue is to compare the systems on their ease of implementation. Two decision aids are analytically evaluated on their approach to training device design: OSBATS (Optimization of Simulation Based Training Systems), which is in prototype development, and ASTAR (Automated Simulator Test and Assessment Routine), which is ready to be fielded. These decision aids are based on differing theoretical approaches to formalizing training device design. OSBATS's taxonomy of fidelity features relates instructional features to individual tasks. OSBATS contains a tradeoff function which uses historical cost and benefit values for individual features. It uses large amounts of detailed information to drive its algorithms. ASTAR is a management tool which organizes the diverse interests of a design group to address design issues. ASTAR obtains judgments about instructional approach and device similarity for each training objective. ASTAR facilitates communication between members of a design team and insures a consensus on the issues.