Taylor v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore: Baltimore Sewerage and the City’s Agenda in the Early Twentieth Century

Taylor v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore was decided by the Court of Appeals in 1917. Nettie Taylor sued the city in 1914 because of the disagreeable smell coming from the newly constructed Back River Sewage Treatment Plant. She sued for damages done to her hotel property by the odor. Taylor’s hotel was situated on a tract of land on Back River, in the Essex area. The hotel Taylor owned was partly a brothel as well as a saloon, which was a common establishment in the surrounding area. The Court of Appeals ruled in Taylor’s favor, ordering the city to pay damages for the substantial interference with her property rights. This paper will begin by analyzing the historical context and trends in which this case arose and how the trends came together in the Taylor case. Following that analysis will be several biographies of the players in the case and their relationships. Finally, the paper will discuss the various stages of the case, including the trial in Howard County, the arguments of each side before the Court of Appeals, and the court’s ruling

Campaign Agones: Towards a Classification of Greek Athletic Competitions

At several occasions during his campaigns, Alexander the Great staged gymnic, hippic and musical competitions. Until now scholars have assumed that the king founded new festivals, but the ancient evidence makes it quite clear that it were singular, non-recurrent events. Competitions like that, for which I suggest the term “campaign agones”, are also known from other Greek armies. “Campaign agones” should be added to the well-known categories (competitions at recurrent festivals, funeral contests, gymnasium agones) as a distinct, although less important, category in the Greek agonistic world

Offdiagonal Complexity: A computationally quick complexity measure for graphs and networks

A vast variety of biological, social, and economical networks shows topologies drastically differing from random graphs; yet the quantitative characterization remains unsatisfactory from a conceptual point of view. Motivated from the discussion of small scale-free networks, a biased link distribution entropy is defined, which takes an extremum for a power law distribution. This approach is extended to the node-node link cross-distribution, whose nondiagonal elements characterize the graph structure beyond link distribution, cluster coefficient and average path length. From here a simple (and computationally cheap) complexity measure can be defined. This Offdiagonal Complexity (OdC) is proposed as a novel measure to characterize the complexity of an undirected graph, or network. While both for regular lattices and fully connected networks OdC is zero, it takes a moderately low value for a random graph and shows high values for apparently complex structures as scale-free networks and hierarchical trees. The Offdiagonal Complexity apporach is applied to the Helicobacter pylori protein interaction network and randomly rewired surrogates.Comment: 12 pages, revised version, to appear in Physica

Are predictive saccades linked to the processing of peripheral information?

High-level athletes can predict the actions of an opposing player. Interestingly, such predictions are also reflected by the athlete's gaze behavior. In cricket, for example, players first pursue the ball with their eyes before they very often initiate two predictive saccades: one to the predicted ball-bounce point and a second to the predicted ball-bat-contact point. That means, they move their eyes ahead of the ball and "wait" for the ball at the new fixation location, potentially using their peripheral vision to update information about the ball's trajectory. In this study, we investigated whether predictive saccades are linked to the processing of information in peripheral vision and if predictive saccades are superior to continuously following the ball with foveal vision using smooth-pursuit eye-movements (SPEMs). In the first two experiments, we evoked the typical eye-movements observed in cricket and showed that the information gathered during SPEMs is sufficient to predict when the moving object will hit the target location and that (additional) peripheral monitoring of the object does not help to improve performance. In a third experiment, we show that it could actually be beneficial to use SPEMs rather than predictive saccades to improve performance. Thus, predictive saccades ahead of a target are unlikely to be performed to enhance the peripheral monitoring of target

Application of the Procedure for Institutional Compatibility Assessment (PICA) to the implementation of the EU Nitrate Directive in Midi-Pyrenees. Evaluation and suggestions for further improvement and integration into the final version of SEAMLESS-IF

Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

A note on dilaton gravity with non-smooth potentials

Recent interest in brane world models motivates the investigation of generic first order dilaton gravity actions, with potentials having some non-smoothness. We consider two different types of \delta-like contributions in the action and analyse their effects on the solutions. Furthermore a second source of non-smoothness arises due to the remaining ambiguities in the solutions in the separated smooth patches, after fixing all other constants by matching and asymptotic conditions. If moreover staticity is assumed, we explicitly construct exact solutions. With the methods described, for example models with point like sources or brane world models (where the second source of non-smoothness becomes crucial), can now be treated as non-smooth dilaton gravity theories.Comment: 10 pages, 1 table; two new references, some typos corrected, Dedicated to Wolfgang Kummer at the occasion of his Emeritierun

Campaign agones: Towards a classification of Greek athletic competitions

At several occasions during his campaigns, Alexander the Great staged gymnic, hippic and musical competitions. Until now scholars have assumed that the king founded new festivals, but the ancient evidence makes it quite clear that it were singu-lar, non-recurrent events. Competitions like that, for which I suggest the term “cam-paign agones”, are also known from other Greek armies. “Campaign agones” should be added to the well-known categories (competitions at recurrent festivals, funeral con-tests, gymnasium agones) as a distinct, although less important, category in the Greek agonistic world