The Green Costs of Kelo: Economic Development Takings and Environmental Protection

This Article provides the first detailed analysis of the environmental effects of Kelo and economic development takings generally. It contends that environmentalist support for economic development takings is misguided, and that the rule embodied by the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision is bad for property owners and environmental protection alike. There is a strong environmental rationale for strictly limiting or prohibiting the use of eminent domain for economic development. Part I of this Article briefly explains the rationales of the Kelo and Hathcock decisions and shows why a Hathcock-like ban on economic development takings is highly unlikely to impede environmental regulation or threaten the use of eminent domain for legitimate conservation purposes. The doctrinal rules advocated by the Hathcock Court and the Kelo dissenters, and adopted by courts in the eleven states that ban economic development takings, leave ample room for the use of eminent domain to advance environmental goals. This doctrinal point is buttressed by empirical evidence indicating that none of the eleven states with Hathcock-like bans on economic development takings have ever used this rule to block condemnation of property for environmental or conservation purposes. Part II shows that economic development takings may cause environmental harm. Allowing the use of eminent domain for economic development poses a particular danger to private conservation lands, agricultural lands, and open space. Because land owned by conservation nonprofits produces few economic benefits and does not contribute to tax revenue, it is likely to be targeted by developers and local governments that use eminent domain to advance their development interests. Economic development takings can also harm the environment by promoting environmentally harmful development, undermining property rights, and furthering dubious development plans that sap community wealth and reduce resources available for environmental protection. In many situations, economic development takings end up giving us the worst of both worlds: they cause environmental harm and reduce economic growth by transferring land to inefficient development projects

On the detectability of quantum spacetime foam with gravitational-wave interferometers

We discuss a recent provocative suggestion by Amelino-Camelia and others that classical spacetime may break down into ``quantum foam'' on distance scales many orders of magnitude larger than the Planck length, leading to effects which could be detected using large gravitational wave interferometers. This suggestion is based on a quantum uncertainty limit obtained by Wigner using a quantum clock in a gedanken timing experiment. Wigner's limit, however, is based on two unrealistic and unneccessary assumptions: that the clock is free to move, and that it does not interact with the environment. Removing either of these assumptions makes the uncertainty limit invalid, and removes the basis for Amelino-Camelia's suggestion.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Lett.

Poisson-Lie group of pseudodifferential symbols

We introduce a Lie bialgebra structure on the central extension of the Lie algebra of differential operators on the line and the circle (with scalar or matrix coefficients). This defines a Poisson--Lie structure on the dual group of pseudodifferential symbols of an arbitrary real (or complex) order. We show that the usual (second) Benney, KdV (or GL_n--Adler--Gelfand--Dickey) and KP Poisson structures are naturally realized as restrictions of this Poisson structure to submanifolds of this ``universal'' Poisson--Lie group. Moreover, the reduced (=SL_n) versions of these manifolds (W_n-algebras in physical terminology) can be viewed as subspaces of the quotient (or Poisson reduction) of this Poisson--Lie group by the dressing action of the group of functions. Finally, we define an infinite set of functions in involution on the Poisson--Lie group that give the standard families of Hamiltonians when restricted to the submanifolds mentioned above. The Poisson structure and Hamiltonians on the whole group interpolate between the Poisson structures and Hamiltonians of Benney, KP and KdV flows. We also discuss the geometrical meaning of W_\infty as a limit of Poisson algebras W_\epsilon as \epsilon goes to 0.Comment: 64 pages, no figure

Forum on immune digital twins: a meeting report

Medical digital twins are computational models of human biology relevant to a given medical condition, which can be tailored to an individual patient, thereby predicting the course of disease and individualized treatments, an important goal of personalized medicine. The immune system, which has a central role in many diseases, is highly heterogeneous between individuals, and thus poses a major challenge for this technology. If medical digital twins are to faithfully capture the characteristics of a patient's immune system, we need to answer many questions, such as: What do we need to know about the immune system to build mathematical models that reflect features of an individual? What data do we need to collect across the different scales of immune system action? What are the right modeling paradigms to properly capture immune system complexity? In February 2023, an international group of experts convened in Lake Nona, FL for two days to discuss these and other questions related to digital twins of the immune system. The group consisted of clinicians, immunologists, biologists, and mathematical modelers, representative of the interdisciplinary nature of medical digital twin development. A video recording of the entire event is available. This paper presents a synopsis of the discussions, brief descriptions of ongoing digital twin projects at different stages of progress. It also proposes a 5-year action plan for further developing this technology. The main recommendations are to identify and pursue a small number of promising use cases, to develop stimulation-specific assays of immune function in a clinical setting, and to develop a database of existing computational immune models, as well as advanced modeling technology and infrastructure

Penilaian Kinerja Keuangan Koperasi di Kabupaten Pelalawan

This paper describe development and financial performance of cooperative in District Pelalawan among 2007 - 2008. Studies on primary and secondary cooperative in 12 sub-districts. Method in this stady use performance measuring of productivity, efficiency, growth, liquidity, and solvability of cooperative. Productivity of cooperative in Pelalawan was highly but efficiency still low. Profit and income were highly, even liquidity of cooperative very high, and solvability was good

Search for stop and higgsino production using diphoton Higgs boson decays

Results are presented of a search for a "natural" supersymmetry scenario with gauge mediated symmetry breaking. It is assumed that only the supersymmetric partners of the top-quark (stop) and the Higgs boson (higgsino) are accessible. Events are examined in which there are two photons forming a Higgs boson candidate, and at least two b-quark jets. In 19.7 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collision data at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV, recorded in the CMS experiment, no evidence of a signal is found and lower limits at the 95% confidence level are set, excluding the stop mass below 360 to 410 GeV, depending on the higgsino mass

Impacts of the Tropical Pacific/Indian Oceans on the Seasonal Cycle of the West African Monsoon

The current consensus is that drought has developed in the Sahel during the second half of the twentieth century as a result of remote effects of oceanic anomalies amplified by local land–atmosphere interactions. This paper focuses on the impacts of oceanic anomalies upon West African climate and specifically aims to identify those from SST anomalies in the Pacific/Indian Oceans during spring and summer seasons, when they were significant. Idealized sensitivity experiments are performed with four atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs). The prescribed SST patterns used in the AGCMs are based on the leading mode of covariability between SST anomalies over the Pacific/Indian Oceans and summer rainfall over West Africa. The results show that such oceanic anomalies in the Pacific/Indian Ocean lead to a northward shift of an anomalous dry belt from the Gulf of Guinea to the Sahel as the season advances. In the Sahel, the magnitude of rainfall anomalies is comparable to that obtained by other authors using SST anomalies confined to the proximity of the Atlantic Ocean. The mechanism connecting the Pacific/Indian SST anomalies with West African rainfall has a strong seasonal cycle. In spring (May and June), anomalous subsidence develops over both the Maritime Continent and the equatorial Atlantic in response to the enhanced equatorial heating. Precipitation increases over continental West Africa in association with stronger zonal convergence of moisture. In addition, precipitation decreases over the Gulf of Guinea. During the monsoon peak (July and August), the SST anomalies move westward over the equatorial Pacific and the two regions where subsidence occurred earlier in the seasons merge over West Africa. The monsoon weakens and rainfall decreases over the Sahel, especially in August.Peer reviewe

Severe early onset preeclampsia: short and long term clinical, psychosocial and biochemical aspects

Preeclampsia is a pregnancy specific disorder commonly defined as de novo hypertension and proteinuria after 20 weeks gestational age. It occurs in approximately 3-5% of pregnancies and it is still a major cause of both foetal and maternal morbidity and mortality worldwide1. As extensive research has not yet elucidated the aetiology of preeclampsia, there are no rational preventive or therapeutic interventions available. The only rational treatment is delivery, which benefits the mother but is not in the interest of the foetus, if remote from term. Early onset preeclampsia (<32 weeks’ gestational age) occurs in less than 1% of pregnancies. It is, however often associated with maternal morbidity as the risk of progression to severe maternal disease is inversely related with gestational age at onset2. Resulting prematurity is therefore the main cause of neonatal mortality and morbidity in patients with severe preeclampsia3. Although the discussion is ongoing, perinatal survival is suggested to be increased in patients with preterm preeclampsia by expectant, non-interventional management. This temporising treatment option to lengthen pregnancy includes the use of antihypertensive medication to control hypertension, magnesium sulphate to prevent eclampsia and corticosteroids to enhance foetal lung maturity4. With optimal maternal haemodynamic status and reassuring foetal condition this results on average in an extension of 2 weeks. Prolongation of these pregnancies is a great challenge for clinicians to balance between potential maternal risks on one the eve hand and possible foetal benefits on the other. Clinical controversies regarding prolongation of preterm preeclamptic pregnancies still exist – also taking into account that preeclampsia is the leading cause of maternal mortality in the Netherlands5 - a debate which is even more pronounced in very preterm pregnancies with questionable foetal viability6-9. Do maternal risks of prolongation of these very early pregnancies outweigh the chances of neonatal survival? Counselling of women with very early onset preeclampsia not only comprises of knowledge of the outcome of those particular pregnancies, but also knowledge of outcomes of future pregnancies of these women is of major clinical importance. This thesis opens with a review of the literature on identifiable risk factors of preeclampsia