Environmental and aesthetic impacts of small docks and piers, workshop report: Developing a science-based decision support tool for small dock management, phase 1: Status of the science

Few issues confronting coastal resource managers are as divisive or difficult to manage as regulating the construction of private recreational docks and piers associated with residential development. State resource managers face a growing population intent on living on or near the coast, coupled with an increasing desire to have immediate access to the water by private docks or piers. (PDF contains 69 pages

Phil Anderson's Magnetic Ideas in Science

In Philip W. Anderson's research, magnetism has always played a special role, providing a prism through which other more complex forms of collective behavior and broken symmetry could be examined. I discuss his work on magnetism from the 1950s, where his early work on antiferromagnetism led to the pseudospin treatment of superconductivity - to the 70s and 80s, highlighting his contribution to the physics of local magnetic moments. Phil's interest in the mechanism of moment formation, and screening evolved into the modern theory of the Kondo effect and heavy fermions.Comment: References fully hypertexed with live links to historic papers. "PWA90: A Lifetime of Emergence", editors P. Chandra, P. Coleman, G. Kotliar, P. Ong, D. Stein and C. Yu, pp 187-213, World Scientific (2016

Optimizing the Drude-Lorentz model for material permittivity: Examples for semiconductors

Approximating the frequency dispersion of the permittivity of materials with simple analytical functions is of fundamental importance for understanding and modeling their optical properties. Quite generally, the permittivity can be treated in the complex frequency plane as an analytic function having a countable number of simple poles which determine the dispersion of the permittivity, with the pole weights corresponding to generalized conductivities of the medium at these resonances. The resulting Drude-Lorentz model separates the poles at frequencies with zero real part (Ohm's law and Drude poles) from poles with finite real part (Lorentz poles). To find the parameters of such an analytic function, we minimize the error weighted deviation between the model and measured values of the permittivity. We show examples of such optimizations for various semiconductors (Si, GaAs and Ge), for different frequency ranges and up to five pairs of Lorentz poles accounted for in the model.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1612.0692

Social Morality in Mill

A leading classical utilitarian, John Stuart Mill is an unlikely contributor to the public reason tradition in political philosophy. To hold that social rules or political institutions are justified by their contribution to overall happiness is to deny that they are justified by their being the object of consensus or convergence among all those holding qualified moral or political viewpoints. In this chapter, I explore the surprising ways in which Mill nevertheless works to accommodate the problems and insights of the public reason tradition, and the extent to which he makes arguments that can help those working within that tradition. Mill’s utilitarian theory incorporates the claim that the demands of social life require a publicly accepted set of normative expectations to govern judgments about when one has met one’s obligations and, relatedly, about the appropriateness of blame or punishment

Mill, John Stuart

This draft entry is an overview of John Stuart Mill's moral and political philosophy, with an emphasis on his views on religion, for the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion (Wiley-Blackwell)

John Stuart Mill on Luck and Distributive Justice

My aim in this chapter is to place John Stuart Mill’s distinctive utilitarian political philosophy in the context of the debate about luck, responsibility, and equality. I hope it will reveal the extent to which his utilitarianism provides a helpful framework for synthesizing the competing claims of luck and relational egalitarianism. I attempt to show that when Mill’s distributive justice commitments are not decided by direct appeal to overall happiness, they are guided by three main public principles: an impartiality principle, a sufficiency principle, and a merit principle. The question then becomes how luck and relational considerations figure into his articulation of these public principles. I argue that relational egalitarianism is more fundamental than considerations of luck and responsibility in Mill’s thought, but I also hope to show that any fleshed out picture of Mill’s reform proposals must recognize his condemnation of the role luck plays in determining the distribution of opportunities and outcomes

The Rise of Liberal Utilitarianism: Bentham and Mill

My aim in this chapter is to push back against the tendency to emphasize Mill’s break from Bentham rather than his debt to him. Mill made important advances on Bentham’s views, but I believe there remains a shared core to their thinking—over and above their commitment to the principle of utility itself—that has been underappreciated. Essentially, I believe that the structure of Mill’s utilitarian thought owes a great debt to Bentham even if he filled in that structure with a richer conception of human nature and developed it in more liberal directions. This commonality is revealed, in particular, in Mill’s own institutional designs and practical reform proposals in Considerations on Representative Government and related writings. If this is right, then the tendency of interpreters to highlight their differences rather than their similarities has been to the detriment of both Mill and Bentham scholarship, and so to our understanding of the rise of liberal utilitarianism

More Democracy Is Not Better Democracy: Cain's Case for Reform Pluralism

This article is part of a symposium on Bruce Cain's "Democracy More or Less: America’s Political Reform Quandary." It identifies the basic normative framework of Cain's skeptical "reform pluralism" as a form of democratic instrumentalism rather than political realism, and then argues that a more optimistic instrumentalist alternative is available. The instrumentalist can accept that more democracy need not entail better democracy. But the instrumentalist account of better democracy also gives us reason to believe that significant reform efforts remain worth pursuing, for the simple reason that some of them have worked in the past