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A computationally efficient high-order solver is developed to compute the wall distances by solving the relevant partial differential equations, namely: Eikonal, Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) and Poisson equations. In contrast to the upwind schemes widely used in the literature, we explore the suitability of high-order central difference schemes (explicit/compact) for the wall-distance computation. While solving the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, the high-order central difference schemes performed approximately $1.4-2.8$ times faster than the upwind schemes with a marginal improvement in the solution accuracy. A new pseudo HJ formulation based on the localized artificial diffusivity (LAD) approach has been proposed. It is demonstrated to predict results with an accuracy comparable to that of the Eikonal equation and the simulations are $\approx$ 1.5 times faster than the baseline HJ solver using upwind schemes. A curvature correction is also incorporated in the HJ equation to correct for the near-wall errors due to concave/convex wall curvatures. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods on both the steady and unsteady test cases and exploit the unsteady wall-distance solver to estimate the instantaneous shape and burning surface area of a dendrite propellant grain in a solid propellant rocket motor.

This article makes a simple but heretofore unappreciated point: In urban areas, voter movement will cause equalizing intergovernmental aid (such as state education aid) to be capitalized into the value of housing. Because poor voters are likely to be renters, they will have to pay for better schools created by state aid through higher housing costs. To establish this point, the article describes a very simple model of an urban area with two communities and three income groups. In the case of an urban area in which the central city is not large relative to the metropolitan region, the welfare effect of intergovernmental aid on poor voters is completely offset by higher housing costs. Rather than increasing the total resources available to poor people, intergovernmental aid amounts to a Hicksian price adjustment that leaves the poor no better off than before. The article then discusses real-world complications to the model, including alternative decision-making mechanisms and preferences, and concludes that capitalization is an important overlooked feature in education grant systems.

Traditional slickline work usually encompasses basic mechanical manipulation for downhole intervention work. In the recent past, a variety of battery-powered downhole tools have emerged in the market, providing additional deepwater solutions for the industry. These tools include the extended-reach downhole power unit and the smart release tool. The downhole electrical power unit is an electro-mechanical setting tool that uses a timer activation switch to begin the setting process for a variety of downhole tools. The smart release tool provides a timer-based mechanism to release the deployment wire from the downhole toolstring, eliminating the exposures associated with dropping a cutter in the event of a stuck tool. These tools can be conveyed on slickline for a variety of intervention solutions, including setting tubing plugs and packers, pulling subsea tree plugs, setting pressure gauges in tubing profiles, and providing a mechanical release in highly-deviated, extended-reach wellbores. This paper discusses specific well-intervention case histories using the downhole electrical power unit and the smart release tool. In the first case history, the downhole electrical power unit was used to set a packer assembly during a safety- valve repair. The smart release tool was used to soft set memory pressure gauges in wells without functioning, permanent downhole gauges, eliminating the need for jar action that could damage the gauges. Adaptations were made to the existing tool designs to respond to the well-specific challenges. These case histories demonstrate applications in which the electro-mechanical timer-activated tools have provided solutions for deepwater Gulf of Mexico well-intervention projects. The discussion includes lessons learned from previous project designs, development of operational best practices, and possible future applications to extend the role of slickline in deepwater operations. Applications may include the use of the downhole power unit to set packers and bridge plugs in conjunction with memory logging tools to correlate depth, as well as continued use of the smart release tool to minimize risks associated with downhole mechanical evaluation and memory data acquisition.

The flypaper effect is the common empirical result that lump-sum intergovernmental grants stimulate more local government spending than increases in private income which are theoretically equivalent. In this paper, four of the best-known explanations of the flypaper effect are tested, using data from Michigan school districts. None of these explanations are confirmed by the data. The cause of the flypaper effect is likely to be much more deeply rooted in the nature of local decision-making than is currently recognized.

This paper examines the bureaucrat's choice between devoting resources to economic rents (organizational slack) and maximizing the budget of the agency. A new model of bureaucracy is developed using utility rather than a demand function as its foundation. It is shown that increases in income alter the slack-budget constraint to favor organizational slack over budget-maximization. Modern federal bureaucracies in the U.S. are predicted to be slack-maximizing and X-inefficient.

Using a utility-based graphical model of bureaucratic choice, this paper develops four empirical predictions from the theory of slack-maximizing bureaucracy. These predictions are compared to those resulting from the Niskanen budget-maximizing model of bureaucracy. Slack-maximizing and budget-maximizing bureaucracies are similar in their response to changes in cost and in their generation of “flypaper effects”, but they differ in their responses to matching and lump-sum grants.

In two seminal papers in the early 1970s, Borcherding and Deacon (1972) and Bergstrom and Goodman (1973) (hereafter referred to as BDBG) attempted for the first time to estimate the exhaustibility (or rivalness) characteristics of local public goods. Their method was based upon the examination of the effects of population change on the expenditure patterns of cities. The use of this method, however, has almost uniformly resulted in the counterintuitive conclusion that local public goods are actually pure private goods with respect to their crowding behavior. Gonzalez and Mehay (1985), for example, note that in addition to the original two articles, at least six subsequent studies have come to this conclusion. Borcherding, Bush, and Spann (1977) have argued that bureaucracy is to blame for these results. Specifically, they suggest that, in order to increase their budgets, bureaucrats may use their power to alter the composition of local government spending in favor of goods and services toward the private good end of the local public good spectrum. In addition, BBS argue that if bureaucratic power is correlated with population across cities, the BDBG methodology will be biased in the direction of pure private goods. Under such a correlation, part of the extra spending in larger cities which is erroneously attributed to greater population by the BDBG approach is actually due to greater bureaucratic power in those larger cities. In a more recent paper, Gonzalez and Mehay (1985) have suggested that the presence of bureaucracy completely invalidates the BDBG approach, necessitating an alternative and less precise methodology to estimate the publicness of local public goods. In this paper I use a new, more exact model of bureaucratic influence to argue that bureaucracy cannot be responsible for the anomalous results found in the empirical literature. The paper demonstrates that: (1) if bureaucracies can alter the composition of spending in a community, they will push for local public goods which are close to the pure public good, rather than pure private good, extreme; and (2) if bureaucratic power is correlated with population, the estimated results will be biased toward the pure public good extreme. The purpose of the paper, then, is to divert study on the question of these empirical results away from bureaucracy into more fruitful lines of research. Section 1 details the model of bureaucracy used to examine these questions. Sections 2 and 3 contain proofs of the propositions listed above. Section 4 dis

J. B. S. Haldane and Sir Julian Huxley were undoubtedly the best-known British biologists during the first half of this century. Whether or not their reputations will survive intact into the next millennium is a tantalizing question. For their fame rested only in part-and, in Huxley's case, only in small part -upon their scientific achievements. Otherwise, they were recognized and respected for their popularizations of science, the breadth of their intellects, and, not unimportantly, the luster of their family names. Such sources of renown are, however, peculiarly perishable. Popular scientific writings age quickly. Only the most original of social philosophers can survive periodic redefinitions of what is socially relevant. And even dynasties so formidable as those of the Haldanes and the Huxleys have a way of losing their vigor over tine. Given such considerations, the books under review here are welcome first appraisals of the life and work of Haldane and Huxley, respectively. The volume edited by Dronamraju attempts to estimate the significance of Haldane's contribution to the development of modem biology. Apart from an occasional tendency to overstate the debt of postwar molecular

Much has been written in recent years about the political activities of natural scientists in Great Britain during the I930s.1 For the most part, such literature has concerned itself with certain ideological affinities which encouraged an alliance between 'moderate' and 'left-wing' elements within the scientific community. In this paper, however, emphasis will be placed on important ideological divisions between the leaders of the Science and Society Movement. The fact that a scientists' 'popular front' was achieved will be explained in terms both of the low status accorded their profession by the nation's political and intellectual elites up until I939, and of the subsequent demand for scientific expertise during the Second World War. As political 'outsiders', it was therefore natural that at least some British scientists attempted to influence public policy through the formation of pressure groups independent of both the Government and party politics.2 After discussing the development and decline of the alliance of socially conscious researchers, the paper will conclude with a brief comparison between the scientists' movements of the Thirties and those of the present day.

“… Science on the scale it is pursued today is an integral part of the social organization of the State. Wherever he works, the man of science is a part of the machinery of State, and there is no real immunity of science from its political environment.” Nature had much to say on the organization of science between the two world wars.

One well-documented pattern in local public finance is that, in comparison with what is spent out of residents' private income, a disproportionate amount of lump-sum intergovernmental aid is used to increase expenditures rather than to reduce local taxes. This paper shows how a bureaucratic model of the type suggested by Niskanen [“Bureaucracy and Representative Government,” Aldine-Atherton, Chicago, 1971 ] can be used to explain this behavior. An empirical test of the model using 115 small governments in Michigan suggests that this bureaucratic model explains capital expenditures well, while operating expenditures appear to be better explained by the standard median voter model.

An examination of the history of small-issue industrial development bonds, with an analysis of the efficiency and effectiveness of this financing method.

An outline of the development and provisions of the Medicaid program and an analysis of the Reagan administration's proposals to change its funding.

An examination of the economic rationale behind soil conservation programs, an assessment of the magnitude of the soil erosion problem, and an evaluation of the effectiveness of U.S. soil conservation policies.

This paper criticizes commonly employed measures of capital-spending needs and offers an alternative method for constructing needs estimates. The usual technical estimate of needs compares an inventory of current conditions with some "ideal" level of capital stock, and is inadequate because of the arbitrary (and sometimes unrealistic) benchmarks that are employed in its construction. The a1ternative economic measure proposed here is based on a model of city spending decisions. Using these estimated parameters, this method provides a measure of the typical or average spending patterns of policymakers, and controls for the particular circumstances faced by each city. It is suggested that this standard for capital - spending needs wi11 be more re1evant to administrators and decision-makers who must reconcile capital-stock deterioration with tight budgets.

Readers of the literature on bureaucracy will recall that three years ago Gonzalez and Mehay,(1985) published an empirical piece utilizing a slack-maximizing model of bureaucratic behavior which concluded that local public goods are really private goods. My own article (Wyckoff, 1988a) reached the same conclusion using theoretical means. The effect of bureaucracy, I argued, is to bias our results toward the conclusion that local public goods are public in nature, so the empirical results showing the opposite cannot be blamed on bureaucracy. Now, in a surprising comment on my paper, Gonzalez, Folsom and Mehay (1988) (GFM) assert that I made methodological errors in the process of establishing my result. Not content with my agreement with their conclusions, GFM demand that I reach these results using their methodology. GFM insist that I ignore four special cases in my paper. Each one of these special cases is discussed below. In general, I find little merit in their arguments. Each special case is either obviously unrealistic or relates to a question completely different from those discussed in my paper. First of all, GFM argue that I fail to note that the voter's tax share t is likely to vary with city population N. When this correlation is incorporated into my model, they say, the reverse of my results could occur. But there is a fundamental error in allowing t to vary with N. The issue in this paper is not whether large cities spend more than small cities - nobody disputes this - but whether local public goods are public goods or not. What we want to know is whether two people can enjoy a public service just as easily as one. By including tax considerations in the calculations as they have done, GFM confuse crowding effects with changes in spending caused by changes in tax burdens. When t is allowed to vary with N, we no longer have a measure of the crowding parameter, but a composite which cannot answer the question we originally asked. An analogy may help clarify GFM's error. GFM's approach is equivalent to suggesting that, since wealthy people have larger homes and hence larger tax

The Challenge of War Scientific and Engineering Contributions to World War Two. By Guy Hartcup. Pp. 295 + 30 plates. (David and Charles: Newton Abbot, March 1970.) 65s.

Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West Lectures and Addresses on the History of Science and Technology. By Joseph Needham. Based largely on collaborative work with Wang Ling, Lu Gwei-Djen and Ho Ping-Yu. Pp. xix + 470 + 40 plates. (Cambridge University Press: London, March 1970.) 150s; $22.50.

Nature and Man : Essays Scientific and Philosophical. By William B. Carpenter. Pp. vi + 483. (Gregg International: Farnborough, Hants, 1970. First published 1888.) $20.20; £8.40. Social Statics: or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed. By Herbert Spencer. Pp. viii + 476. (Gregg International: Farnborough, Hants, 1970. First published 1851.) $18.75; £7.80. The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures. By Alfred Russel Wallace. Pp. xii + 400 + 12 diagrams. (Gregg International: Farnborough, Hants, 1970. First published 1898.) $12.95; £5.40. The Biographical History of Philosophy from Its Origin in Greece Down to the Present Day. By George Henry Lewes. Pp. xxxvi + 675. (Gregg International: Farnborough, Hants, 1970. First published 1857.) $24.50; £10.20. The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects. By George Combe. Eighth edition, revised, corrected and enlarged. Pp. xx + 507. (Gregg International: Farnborough, Hants, 1970. First published 1847.)