The Use of Transferable Permits in Transport Policy

This paper considers potential use of domestic transferable, or tradable, permit systems for the purposes of travel management, especially reducing environmental nuisances. The main arguments for and against the use of permits are analyzed. Secondly two case studies of existing permit systems are examined. The main conclusions are that tradable permits can address greenhouse gas and regional atmospheric pollutant emissions, and are suitable for congestion on a restricted time–space basis. Permits applied to mobile sources are technically feasible at acceptable financial cost for protecting sensitive geographical areas, and schemes applied to automakers for unitary vehicle emissions are also viable.Domestic transferable permits ; tradable permits ; transport ; environment ; nuisances ; case studies ; Mobile sources

Moral Nuisances

Nuisance law provides a remedy for activities that substantially interfere with the use and enjoyment of one\u27s land. Most nuisance cases today involve environmental pollution or unwanted noises, sights, or smells. Historically, though, nuisance law had a much broader application that regulated brothels, saloons, and gambling parlors - what I call moral nuisances. I articulate a theory of moral nuisances that applies when (1) a substantial and legally cognizable interference with a landowner\u27s use or enjoyment of his or her land is caused by (2) an action that is regarded as immoral by a reasonable person within the community (3) whose harm outweighs the benefit of the offending conduct, and (4) which is not protected by the law. A moral nuisance claims is even stronger when (5) the activity is not only immoral, but illegal as well. This article illustrates the application of this test by using the example of Mark v. Powers, a 1999 Oregon state court case which held that a state wildlife area that was used as a nude beach constituted a nuisance to the neighboring landowners. This article also considers the harms that may be remedied by nuisance law. A nuisance case can be premised on the sight of an offensive activity, the inability to use one\u27s property because of the embarrassment caused by the activity, reasonable fears, or any more general interferences - such as excessive noises or physical harassment - with the plaintiff\u27s use of his or her property. The mere awareness of the activity, any improper temptation produced by the activity, and reduced property values are not sufficient to establish a nuisance

Zoning and the Law of Nuisance

We calculate density and current spatial distributions of a 2D model junction between a normal QAH contact and a superconducting QAH region hosting propagating (chiral) Majorana modes. We use a simplified Hamiltonian describing the spatial coupling of the modes on each side of the junction, as well as the related junction conductance. We study how this coupling is affected by orbital effects caused by an external magnetic field.This work was funded by MINEICO-Spain, grant MAT2017-82639

A group-theoretic approach to formalizing bootstrapping problems

The bootstrapping problem consists in designing agents that learn a model of themselves and the world, and utilize it to achieve useful tasks. It is different from other learning problems as the agent starts with uninterpreted observations and commands, and with minimal prior information about the world. In this paper, we give a mathematical formalization of this aspect of the problem. We argue that the vague constraint of having "no prior information" can be recast as a precise algebraic condition on the agent: that its behavior is invariant to particular classes of nuisances on the world, which we show can be well represented by actions of groups (diffeomorphisms, permutations, linear transformations) on observations and commands. We then introduce the class of bilinear gradient dynamics sensors (BGDS) as a candidate for learning generic robotic sensorimotor cascades. We show how framing the problem as rejection of group nuisances allows a compact and modular analysis of typical preprocessing stages, such as learning the topology of the sensors. We demonstrate learning and using such models on real-world range-finder and camera data from publicly available datasets

The Advent of Zoning

This essay looks at some of the lawyers and judges who were instrumental in the enactment and judicial approval of American zoning laws