Substantial Current Interest Research Articles

Monetary forestry accounting including environmental goods and services

There is substantial current interest in expanding accounting systems, such that they include services appropriated from the ecological systems. Much of this activity has focused upon forest resources; there are currently more than 100 «green» forest accounting studies, covering many different countries. This paper provides a view of some theoretical and empirical issues on «green» forest accounting. It discusses some issues in calculating «true» income from forests, as well as the measurement problems that arise when valuing non-priced services. It also reviews recent efforts at EUROSTAT and includes a detailed illustration of a comprehensive official Swedish application on «green» forest accounting. The paper concludes by arguing that future work on green forest accounting should be directed towards tying together theory and practice to a even larger extent than what is currently the case.

Solid-phase synthesis of carbocyclic nucleosides.

[formula: see text] An efficient solid-phase synthesis of carbocyclic nucleosides has been developed. The key step is the palladium-catalyzed coupling of a purine derivative to a resin-bound allylic benzoate. The resulting products may be further functionalized on the solid phase. Acidic cleavage affords carbocyclic nucleosides, a class of compounds with demonstrated biological activity and substantial current interest.

Simulating remotely sensed images of shoaling waves

There is substantial current interest in the use of remotely sensed images to study littoral processes. Of particular interest is using the interaction of the ocean waves with the bottom to infer the water depth in coastal areas. Testing the accuracy of processing and analysis methods requires a known set of bottom depths at many points in the images to compare with depths extracted. Such knowledge is not available for most near-shore areas. Consequently, we have developed a simulator which produces a time series of images showing sea surface elevation for waves moving over a specified piecewise linear bottom of moderate slope. It provides a good approximation to the real sea surface for a wide range of conditions. Hence it can produce controlled datasets for many purposes in shallow-water research. The program uses linear wave theory to model a statistical realization of a deep-water wave field, with a realistic frequency spectrum and directional spreading, and applies the appropriate modifications for shoaling. Several examples show that the program produces reasonable results, indicating it should be a useful analytical tool in a range of problems.

Health Care and the Labor Market

Health insurance and the labor market are inextricably entwined in the United States. Yet, few studies to date have examined the uniquely American links between employees' demand for and employers' ability to provide health care insurance. This topic is of substantial current interest because employer-provided health insurance plays a central role in the national health insurance reform planning process.

Hearing protector attenuation: A perspective view

The design, performance and evaluation of hearing protectors are matters of substantial current interest. The specific scientific questions which command attention include the accuracy of the shift in free field hearing threshold as a measure of protection, the relationship between physical measurements of sound attenuation with real heads and psycho-physical methods of measurement, the relationship between physical measurements with real and artificial heads, the acoustical behaviour of hearing protectors and the factors which limit their performance, and the relationship between hearing protector attenuation and speech intelligibility. These questions have received considerable attention during the past twenty years but are not yet fully answered.