Responding to Agency Avoidance of OIRA

Concerns have recently been raised that US federal agencies may sometimes avoid regulatory review by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). In this article, we assess the seriousness of such potential avoidance, and we recommend a framework for evaluating potential responses. After summarizing the system of presidential regulatory oversight through OIRA review, we analyze the incentives for agencies to cooperate with or avoid OIRA. We identify a wider array of agency avoidance tactics than has past scholarship, and a wider array of corresponding response options available to OIRA, the President, Congress, and the courts. We argue that, because the relationship between agencies and OIRA involves ongoing repeat player interactions, some of these avoidance tactics are less likely to occur (or to succeed) than has previously been alleged, and others are more likely; the difference depends significantly on how easy it is for OIRA to detect avoidance, and for OIRA, the courts, and others to respond. Further, we note that in this repeat player relationship, responses to agency avoidance tactics may induce further strategic moves and countermoves. Thus we further argue that the optimal response may not always be to try to eliminate the avoidance behavior; some avoidance may be worth tolerating where the benefits of trying to reduce agency avoidance would not justify the costs of response options and countermoves. We therefore conclude that responses to agency avoidance should be evaluated in a way similar to what OIRA asks of agencies evaluating proposed regulations: by weighing the pros and cons of alternative response options (including no action)

Invariant submanifold for series arrays of Josephson junctions

We study the nonlinear dynamics of series arrays of Josephson junctions in the large-N limit, where N is the number of junctions in the array. The junctions are assumed to be identical, overdamped, driven by a constant bias current and globally coupled through a common load. Previous simulations of such arrays revealed that their dynamics are remarkably simple, hinting at the presence of some hidden symmetry or other structure. These observations were later explained by the discovery of (N - 3) constants of motion, each choice of which confines the resulting flow in phase space to a low-dimensional invariant manifold. Here we show that the dimensionality can be reduced further by restricting attention to a special family of states recently identified by Ott and Antonsen. In geometric terms, the Ott-Antonsen ansatz corresponds to an invariant submanifold of dimension one less than that found earlier. We derive and analyze the flow on this submanifold for two special cases: an array with purely resistive loading and another with resistive-inductive-capacitive loading. Our results recover (and in some instances improve) earlier findings based on linearization arguments.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Implications of Public Opinion for Space Program Planning, 1980 - 2000

The effect of public opinion on future space programs is discussed in terms of direct support, apathy, or opposition, and concern about the tax burden, budgetary pressures, and national priorities. Factors considered include: the salience and visibility of NASA as compared with other issues, the sources of general pressure on the federal budget which could affect NASA, the public's opinions regarding the size and priority of NASA'S budget, the degree to which the executive can exercise leverage over NASA's budget through influencing or disregarding public opinion, the effects of linkages to other issues on space programs, and the public's general attitudes toward the progress of science

Contextual planning for NASA - A second workbook of alternative future environments for mission analysis, volume 1 Interim report

Contextural planning for selecting alternate NASA program

Denver Union Station Multimodal Public Transportation Facility & Mixed-Use Development

Denver is quickly becoming the ?Grand Central Station? for transportation for the Western United States. Since the turn of the century Union Station, located on the edge of downtown Denver, has been used as the railroad gateway to the Rocky Mountains. More recently, with the addition of the Denver International Airport (DIA), Denver is being recognized as a major hub for air transportation servicing the Western United States. The city is projecting a population growth of almost one million people within the next 20 to 25 years. With this in mind, Denver?s public transportation provider, Regional Transportation District (RTD), needs to expand their current system in order to meet future demand. For years Union Station has been the main railway station servicing the Rocky Mountains and the west coast. It was recently placed on the National Historic Register and purchased by RTD. It sits on a 19.5-acre parcel of land in the historic district adjacent to downtown Denver making it a prime location for a regional transit facility. This facility will seamlessly accommodate rail, bus, auto, pedestrian and bicycle movement throughout the area and provide space for transit-oriented retail. The focus of this thesis project is to respectfully incorporate the historic Union Station building into the design of a state-of-the-art mixed transit facility that would accommodate the growing needs of Denver and the surrounding area. The main intentions for this facility are to provide easier access to various means of public transportation for residents, commuters and tourists and create a positive awareness for more efficient means of transportation. The underlying premise for this design is that transportation is an essential part of urban life and allows for growth and development within a city. Without a well-planned transportation system, a city would not be able to function on its own

Easing the Learning Curve: The Creation of Digital Learning Objects for Use in Special Collections Student Training

Low-staffed and often under-funded, academic libraries have traditionally relied upon student labor to maintain library services and to complete a seemingly unending workload. The use of students within the archival or special collections setting is no different. Special Collections departments often use students to complete tasks that could be reserved to the realm of professional staff. These include processing collections, preservation and conservation work, digitizing, and providing reference assistance

The large core limit of spiral waves in excitable media: A numerical approach

We modify the freezing method introduced by Beyn & Thuemmler, 2004, for analyzing rigidly rotating spiral waves in excitable media. The proposed method is designed to stably determine the rotation frequency and the core radius of rotating spirals, as well as the approximate shape of spiral waves in unbounded domains. In particular, we introduce spiral wave boundary conditions based on geometric approximations of spiral wave solutions by Archimedean spirals and by involutes of circles. We further propose a simple implementation of boundary conditions for the case when the inhibitor is non-diffusive, a case which had previously caused spurious oscillations. We then utilize the method to numerically analyze the large core limit. The proposed method allows us to investigate the case close to criticality where spiral waves acquire infinite core radius and zero rotation frequency, before they begin to develop into retracting fingers. We confirm the linear scaling regime of a drift bifurcation for the rotation frequency and the core radius of spiral wave solutions close to criticality. This regime is unattainable with conventional numerical methods.Comment: 32 pages, 17 figures, as accepted by SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems on 20/03/1