Putting Law and Politics in the Right Places — Reforming the Independent Counsel Statute

The fundamental flaw in the independent counsel statute consists of its attempt to convert a political decision, the decision whether to refer to a case of public corruption to an investigator outside normal prosecutorial offices, into a legal one. When the Independent Counsel Reauthorization Act of 1994 expires on Jun 30, 1999, it should not be reenacted unless this flaw is eliminated

Observations of diffuse fluxes of cosmic neutrinos

In this contribution the current observational results for the diffuse flux of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos are reviewed. In order to understand the science implications, the measurements in different detection channels are discussed and results are compared. The discussion focuses is the energy spectrum, the flavor ratio and large scale anisotropy.Comment: Prepared for "Neutrino Astronomy - Current Status, Future Prospects" (World Scientific) Edited by: Thomas Gaisser (University of Delaware, USA), Albrecht Karle (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Quasi-isometry Invariants from Decorated Trees of Cylinders of Two-Ended JSJ Decompositions

We construct quasi-isometry invariants of a one-ended finitely presented group by considering the tree of cylinders of a two-ended JSJ decomposition of the group. When the group satisfies additional quasi-isometric rigidity hypotheses we construct finer invariants by also considering relative amounts of stretching across edges of the tree of cylinders.Comment: arXiv:1601.07147 now contains all of these results and much, much mor

Conifer-angiosperm interactions: Physiological ecology and life history.

Worldwide, conifers are most successful on sites subject to chronic stresses that limit productivity (low temperatures, nutrient poverty, poor drainage). They are poorly represented in the lowland tropics but are often important in Montane tropical forests. Here I explore some functional differences between leaf and xylem traits of conifer and angiosperm trees and their implications for the distributions of these two groups on environmental gradients. Analysis of a global data set shows that compared with angiosperm trees, conifers tend to have longer-lived leaves with greater mass per area (LMA) and lower mass-based photosynthetic capacity. As leaf life span is thought to be the main determinant of nutrient retention time, the prominence of conifers on infertile soils worldwide is at least partly attributable to thrifty use of nutrients through long leaf life spans. Furthermore, because leaf life span correlates with litter decomposition rates, these leaf trait differences could potentially influence the competitive balance between conifers and angiosperms via positive feedbacks on nutrient cycling. Although scaling of leaf life span with LMA is similar in the two groups, angiosperms achieve slightly longer leaf life spans than conifers of similar photosynthetic capacity. This might be caused by less-efficient leaf display in conifers, resulting in the useful life span of leaves being curtailed by self-shading. Representatives of both lineages have narrower conduits in the temperate zone than in the lowland tropics/subtropics, reflecting selection for resistance to freeze-thaw embolism in cold climates. However, conduit diameters of conifers and angiosperm trees differ more in tropical and subtropical forests than at higher latitudes. This probably reflects mechanical constraints on maximum tracheid diameters in the homoxylous wood of conifers, preventing this group from producing the highly conductive wood typical of fast-growing angiosperm pioneers in tropical forests. This pattern might explain why coexistence of conifers and angiosperms is more common in temperate forests and on tropical mountains than in the lowland tropics. Impairment of angiosperm carbon gain by freeze-thaw embolism during cold weather may further narrow performance differences between the two lineages on temperate sites. Differences in canopy residence time probably deserve more attention as a determinant of conifer-angiosperm coexistence in many temperate forests, the longer life span of conifers compensating for infrequent recruitment

Public procurement in the EU: jurisprudence and conceptual directions

The present article reviews the emerging conceptual themes from the case law of the European Court of Justice which have triggered the revision of the public procurement Directives, and the alignment of the public procurement acquis with the Europe 2020 Growth Strategy. The Court's jurisprudence has instrumentally influenced the interpretation of public procurement legal concepts such as contracting authorities, the remit of selection and qualification criteria, the parameters for contracting authorities to use environmental and social considerations as award criteria and the principles which underpin the remedies in the award of public contracts.However, the exhaustive harmonization which is inherent in the public procurement directives has caused significant porosity and limitations in the effectiveness of the public procurement acquis. Service concessions, contracts awarded by a contracting authority to another contracting authority on the basis of exclusive rights, public-public partnerships and in-house contractual relations, and contracts which fall below the stipulated value thresholds all reflect upon the forthcoming reforms of the public procurement regime

Computing the Maximum Slope Invariant in Tubular Groups

We show that the maximum slope invariant for tubular groups is easy to calculate, and give an example of two tubular groups that are distinguishable by their maximum slopes but not by edge pattern considerations or isoperimetric function.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Global Warming and the Problem of Policy Innovation: Lessons From the Early Environmental Movement

When it comes to influencing government decisions, special interests have some built-in advantages over the general public interest. When the individual members of special interest groups have a good deal to gain or lose as a result of government action, special interests can organize more effectively, and generate benefits for elected officials, such as campaign contributions and other forms of political support. They will seek to use those advantages to influence government decisions favorable to them. The public choice theory of government decision making sometimes comes close to elevating this point into a universal law, suggesting that the general public interest can never prevail over powerful special interests. In the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, Congress enacted numerous significant environmental laws, laws that continue to form the backbone of federal policies toward environmental problems. These laws were truly innovative in their policies and their designs, and they pitted the general public interest in improving environmental quality against powerful, special interests. In each case, the general public interest was able to prevail. This policy “window” did not stay open for long. It was quickly succeeded by an extended period in which enacting additional innovative statutes has proven nearly impossible, which continues to this day. Yet we need innovative approaches to address continuing and emerging environmental problems more than ever. This is self-evidently true with respect to the problem of global warming and climate change. The questions worth asking are whether we can identify the factors that once made policy innovation possible in the late 1960s and early 1970s and if those factors can be produced once again. For the public’s David to be able to stand up against the special interest Goliaths, a broad base of the public must first be mobilized, and then that mobilization must be sustained, which typically occurs when the public embraces a sense of great urgency. Urgency can be generated when the public appreciates that failure to address a problem threatens them or their loved ones with significant harm. Media attention plays a key role in creating the public’s awareness of any urgent problem. These factors can succeed in putting general concerns of the public on the public agenda, at which time acceptable proposals for workable solutions need to be available. When the first window for policy innovation opened up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, each of these favorable factors was present for many of our conventional pollution problems. At the same time, the strength of the special interests was at a low ebb. This Essay argues that under current circumstances, the conditions for policy innovation are not yet as favorable as they were in this earlier period. Strong presidential leadership may be capable of altering those conditions, but as yet the public’s concern about the adverse effects of climate change does not appear to have achieved the same strength or intensity as comparable concerns over conventional pollution problems had earlier

Quasi-isometries need not induce homeomorphisms of contracting boundaries with the Gromov product topology

We consider a `contracting boundary' of a proper geodesic metric space consisting of equivalence classes of geodesic rays that behave like geodesics in a hyperbolic space. We topologize this set via the Gromov product, in analogy to the topology of the boundary of a hyperbolic space. We show that when the space is not hyperbolic, quasi-isometries do not necessarily give homeomorphisms of this boundary. Continuity can fail even when the spaces are required to be CAT(0). We show this by constructing an explicit example.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in Analysis and Geometry in Metric Space