Potential Design, Implementation, and Benefits of a Feebate Program for New Passenger Vehicles in California: Interim Statement of Research Findings

A comprehensive study was undertaken to assess the potential design, implementation, and benefits of a feebate program in California as well as possible stakeholder responses. A feebate is a market- based policy for encouraging greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions from new passenger vehicles by levying fees on relatively high-emitting vehicles and providing rebates to lower-emitting vehicles. This study finds that feebate policies can be used in California to achieve additional reductions in greenhouse gases from new passenger vehicles beyond those projected from emission standards alone. Specifically, feebate policies affect the average emissions levels for the new vehicle fleet sold in each model year. The amount will depend on the design features of the feebate policy and other modeling assumptions. For the period 2011-2025, a moderate feebate program based on a footprint system with average rebates of $600 and average fees of$700 yields a 3 percent improvement, or about 2 percent of the reductions needed to achieve the AB 32 target

The inflationary prediction for primordial non-gaussianity

We extend the \delta N formalism so that it gives all of the stochastic properties of the primordial curvature perturbation \zeta if the initial field perturbations are gaussian. The calculation requires only the knowledge of some family of unperturbed universes. A formula is given for the normalisation \fnl of the bispectrum of \zeta, which is the main signal of non-gaussianity. Examples of the use of the formula are given, and its relation to cosmological perturbation theory is explained.Comment: Revtex Latex file. 4 pages, no figures. v4: minor changes, typos corrected, references added and updated. Version published in Physical Review Letter

Antiepileptic drugs’ tolerability and safety – a systematic review and meta-analysis of adverse effects in dogs

<p>Various anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) are used for the management of idiopathic epilepsy (IE) in dogs. Their safety profile is an important consideration for regulatory bodies, owners and prescribing clinicians. However, information on their adverse effects still remains limited with most of it derived from non-blinded non-randomized uncontrolled trials and case reports.</p><p><span>This poster won third place, which was presented at the Veterinary Evidence Today conference, Edinburgh November 1-3, 2016. </span></p><br /> <img src="https://www.veterinaryevidence.org/rcvskmod/icons/oa-icon.jpg" alt="Open Access" /

Bose-Einstein condensation for interacting scalar fields in curved spacetime

We consider the model of self-interacting complex scalar fields with a rigid gauge invariance under an arbitrary gauge group $G$. In order to analyze the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation finite temperature and the possibility of a finite background charge is included. Different approaches to derive the relevant high-temperature behaviour of the theory are presented.Comment: 28 pages, LaTe

Quantum gravitational contributions to quantum electrodynamics

Quantum electrodynamics describes the interactions of electrons and photons. Electric charge (the gauge coupling constant) is energy dependent, and there is a previous claim that charge is affected by gravity (described by general relativity) with the implication that the charge is reduced at high energies. But that claim has been very controversial with the situation inconclusive. Here I report an analysis (free from earlier controversies) demonstrating that that quantum gravity corrections to quantum electrodynamics have a quadratic energy dependence that result in the reduction of the electric charge at high energies, a result known as asymptotic freedom.Comment: To be published in Nature. 19 pages LaTeX, no figure

Cell Phone Detection Techniques

A team composed of Rick Pratt, Dave Puczyki, Kyle Bunch, Ryan Slaugh, Morris Good, and Doug McMakin teamed together to attempt to exploit cellular telephone features and detect if a person was carrying a cellular telephone into a Limited Area. The cell phone’s electromagnetic properties were measured, analyzed, and tested in over 10 different ways to determine if an exploitable signature exists. The method that appears to have the most potential for success without adding an external tag is to measure the RF spectrum, not in the cell phone band, but between 240 and 400MHz. Figures 1- 7 show the detected signal levels from cell phones from three different manufacturers

Twenty Years of the Weyl Anomaly

In 1973 two Salam prot\'{e}g\'{e}s (Derek Capper and the author) discovered that the conformal invariance under Weyl rescalings of the metric tensor $g_{\mu\nu}(x)\rightarrow\Omega^2(x)g_{\mu\nu}(x)$ displayed by classical massless field systems in interaction with gravity no longer survives in the quantum theory. Since then these Weyl anomalies have found a variety of applications in black hole physics, cosmology, string theory and statistical mechanics. We give a nostalgic review. (Talk given at the {\it Salamfest}, ICTP, Trieste, March 1993.)Comment: 43 page

Bankruptcy Reform

Presentation materials from the Bankruptcy Reform Course held by UK/CLE in December 1994