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A Family-Friendly Study Room for Student-Parents and Their Children at Portland State University Library
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State Variation in Railroad Wheat Rates
Get PDFWheat shippers in the Central Plains states have no cost effective transportation alternative to railroads. Wheat produced in these areas moves long distances to domestic processing and consumption locations or to ports for export. Wheat shippers in the Great Plains don’t have direct access to barge loading locations and trucks provide no intermodal competition for these movements. Wheat shippers in Montana and North Dakota are highly dependent on rail transport because they are distant from barge loading locations and intra-railroad competition is limited. In North Dakota, the BNSF controls 78% of the Class I rail mileage, and in Montana, the BNSF controls 94%. Montana ships nearly 100% of its wheat by rail.Unlike Montana and North Dakota, the BNSF and UP have roughly equal track mileage in Kansas. The BNSF has 44% of the Class I rail mileage and the UP, 55%. Also, both railroads serve the major Kansas grain storage and market centers. A 2010 USDA study found that in 1988, Montana and North Dakota had the highest rail grain revenue per ton-mile of the 10 major grain producing states. By 2007 this was no longer the case. The overall objective of the paper is to investigate railroad pricing behavior for the shipment of North Dakota, Kansas, and Montana wheat. Specific objectives include (1) develop a model to measure the impacts of railroad costs and competition on rail wheat rates for North Dakota, Kansas, and Montana, (2) identify and measure the major cost determinants of rail wheat prices, and (3) measure intermodal competition by comparing rail wheat rates in captive markets (Montana and North Dakota) to one with more intermodal competition (Kansas). The results indicate that there is little difference in average Montana and Kansas rail wheat rates per ton-mile. However, North Dakota average railroad wheat prices per-ton mile are higher than average Kansas rates per ton-mile
Comprehensive Equity Analysis of Mileage-Based User Fees: Taxation and Expenditures for Roadways and Transit
Get PDFUsing National Household Travel Survey data and information collected from over 100 agencies, transportation-related taxation and expenditures were assigned to individual households in the Houston Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA). Using Gini Coefficients and Theil Indices, the research demonstrated that implementation of a Mileage Based User Fee (MBUF) would not have a pronounced effect on the current distribution of what households pay versus what they receive in transportation expenditures. The relative winners are rural and high income urban households, while the relative losers are all other urban households
Of Non-vital Interest: Art, Mimicry, and the Phenomenon of Life
Get PDFMy aim in this essay is to explore certain parallels—concerning anthropomorphism—in the work of Roger Caillois, Hans Jonas, Theodor Adorno and Sigmund Freud. Both Caillois (a thinker closely connected to French Surrealism and an important source for Jacques Lacan) and Jonas (philosopher and one-time student of Heidegger) take issue with the ban on anthropomorphism—an anathema that is the legacy of Western science. Part of the thesis in Jonas’ major work, The Phenomenon of Life, is that freedom is not exclusively a human quality but a potential within the simplest organic forms, even within inorganic matter. Anthropomorphism may be the legacy of a primitive stage in human development in which the whole of creation was endowed with a soul, but this attitude, Jonas argues, is the more natural one. Whereas in the early phases of humanity death was the stranger in a world that was fundamentally alive, modern thinking made life the riddle within a world of neutral matter and mechanistic principles. Freud’s own theory of the death-drive (“an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces”) seems quite consistent with the primacy of death over life instituted by modern thought. I have a general interest in comparing Freud’s theory of the death drive, the aim of which is the restoration of an original equilibrium, with music, whose traditional structure (via the cadence) is to relieve tonal tension through a restoration of the keynote (Grundton). This bears upon the problem of anthropomorphism in that “classical” music since the seventeenth century has cast expression in terms of simulated human emotions: we hear music and perceive love, longing or fear, not to mention (in the case of pastorale) the “cheer” of birdsong or the “rage” of a thunderstorm. Adorno’s critique of this tradition, in which true expression is replaced by mere images of expression, theorizes what he calls a “tendency of the material,” extolling the composer whose sheer mastery of technique enables the material to go where it “wants” to go. What Adorno means by “material” is not merely the inventory of sounds available to the musician but the historical experience sedimented within musical convention. Nonetheless, I would like to attempt an argument whose parameters are Adorno’s “tendency of the material” and Jonas’ idea that freedom must be conceived as a “genuine potency” within physical substance