Non Conforming Uses: Socio-Geographic Study

"Non Conforming Use" is a term used generally by local and governmental planning agencies to describe uses of land and buildings which do not accord with their planning policies. It appears to have differing quasi-legal overtones as between authorities. The object of this study is to determine the origins of land use designation and those circumstances which give rise to non conformity as interpreted by the planning authorities in England and Wales. An England/Wales survey and a control area survey were conducted and the incidence of conflict use examined from available local authority recorded enforcement decisions to establish any derived order of use conflict. The established prime conflict was then studied in a more accessible local area by reference to selected case studies. Possible causes of conflict were illustrated from both the view of County and District implemented planning policy and that of the user. The surveys reveal a widespread order and incidence of "conflict uses" throughout the country. This widespread order and incidence may arise from a common ethos of interpretation. Suddenly increased levels of served enforcement notices show a more efficient system of detection and public participation because of recent changes in the law which give the public more legal opportunity to complain against "pollution". Within these increasing levels, the order of conflict uses stays constant but an increasing number of the "offenders" are being declared innocent by the appeal process (which is in effect an internal process because the Secretary of State, Department of the Environment, is also the Minister for planning authorities and planning policies). There is a distinction between law and local planning policy, but where land uses are concerned, enforcement notices are served primarily on the basis of legal interpretation of the expression "material change in use". In other words, the law is to some extent able to be interpreted, or used, to suit the local planning authorities' view of their policy. They are also the prosecutors. Whilst the study does involve examination of quasi-legal issues, it is not intended to be a purely planning critique, although the conclusions may involve such a critique because the study has been made against the assumptions that processes in the planning system, including the element of public participation, are direct causal factors of non-conformity and its apparent increase measured as a use conflict

Dual Supermassive Black Hole Candidates in the AGN and Galaxy Evolution Survey

Dual supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with kiloparsec scale separations in merger-remnant galaxies are informative tracers of galaxy evolution, but the avenue for identifying them in large numbers for such studies is not yet clear. One promising approach is to target spectroscopic signatures of systems where both SMBHs are fueled as dual active galactic nuclei (AGNs), or where one SMBH is fueled as an offset AGN. Dual AGNs may produce double-peaked narrow AGN emission lines, while offset AGNs may produce single-peaked narrow AGN emission lines with line-of-sight velocity offsets relative to the host galaxy. We search for such dual and offset systems among 173 Type 2 AGNs at z<0.37 in the AGN and Galaxy Evolution Survey (AGES), and we find two double-peaked AGNs and five offset AGN candidates. When we compare these results to a similar search of the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey and match the two samples in color, absolute magnitude, and minimum velocity offset, we find that the fraction of AGNs that are dual SMBH candidates increases from z=0.25 to z=0.7 by a factor of ~6 (from 2/70 to 16/91, or 2.9% to 18%). This may be associated with the rise in the galaxy merger fraction over the same cosmic time. As further evidence for a link with galaxy mergers, the AGES offset and dual AGN candidates are tentatively ~3 times more likely than the overall AGN population to reside in a host galaxy that has a companion galaxy (from 16/173 to 2/7, or 9% to 29%). Follow-up observations of the seven offset and dual AGN candidates in AGES will definitively distinguish velocity offsets produced by dual SMBHs from those produced by narrow-line region kinematics, and will help sharpen our observational approach to detecting dual SMBHs.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Mass Distributions of HST Galaxy Clusters from Gravitational Arcs

Although N-body simulations of cosmic structure formation suggest that dark matter halos have density profiles shallower than isothermal at small radii and steeper at large radii, whether observed galaxy clusters follow this profile is still ambiguous. We use one such density profile, the asymmetric NFW profile, to model the mass distributions of 11 galaxy clusters with gravitational arcs observed by HST. We characterize the galaxy lenses in each cluster as NFW ellipsoids, each defined by an unknown scale convergence, scale radius, ellipticity, and position angle. For a given set of values of these parameters, we compute the arcs that would be produced by such a lens system. To define the goodness of fit to the observed arc system, we define a chi^2 function encompassing the overlap between the observed and reproduced arcs as well as the agreement between the predicted arc sources and the observational constraints on the source system. We minimize this chi^2 to find the values of the lens parameters that best reproduce the observed arc system in a given cluster. Here we report our best-fit lens parameters and corresponding mass estimates for each of the 11 lensing clusters. We find that cluster mass models based on lensing galaxies defined as NFW ellipsoids can accurately reproduce the observed arcs, and that the best-fit parameters to such a model fall within the reasonable ranges defined by simulations. These results assert NFW profiles as an effective model for the mass distributions of observed clusters.Comment: Submitted to ApJ, 14 figures include

Accounting for decarbonisation and reducing capital at risk in the S&P500

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Colin Haslam, Nick Tsitsianis, Glen Lehman, Tord Andersson, and John Malamatenios, ‘Accounting for decarbonisation and reducing capital at risk in the S&P500’, Accounting Forum, Vol. 42 91): 119-129, March 2018. Under embargo until 7 August 2019. The final, definitive version is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.accfor.2018.01.004.This article accounts for carbon emissions in the S&P 500 and explores the extent to which capital is at risk from decarbonising value chains. At a global level it is proving difficult to decouple carbon emissions from GDP growth. Top-down legal and regulatory arrangements envisaged by the Kyoto Protocol are practically redundant given inconsistent political commitment to mitigating global climate change and promoting sustainability. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and European Commission (EC) are promoting the role of financial markets and financial institutions as drivers of behavioural change mobilising capital allocations to decarbonise corporate activity.Peer reviewe

Meritocracy and the inheritance of advantage

We present a model where more accurate information on the background of individuals facilitates statistical discrimination, increasing inequality and intergenerational persistence in income. Surprisingly, more accurate information on the actual capabilities of workers leads to the same result - firms give increased weight to the more accurate information, increasing inequality, which itself fosters discrimination. The rich take advantage of this through educational investments in their children, and mobility decreases as a consequence of an increase in the ability to reward talent. Using our model to interpret the data suggests that a country like the US might indeed be a land of opportunity for the sufficiently able, as conditional on ability background may have relatively little effect. Nevertheless the US has a relatively low degree of intergenerational mobility precisely because meritocracy facilitates a high correlation of ability with background

The Stellar Halos of Massive Elliptical Galaxies II: Detailed Abundance Ratios at Large Radius

We study the radial dependence in stellar populations of 33 nearby early-type galaxies with central stellar velocity dispersions sigma* > 150 km/s. We measure stellar population properties in composite spectra, and use ratios of these composites to highlight the largest spectral changes as a function of radius. Based on stellar population modeling, the typical star at 2 R_e is old (~10 Gyr), relatively metal poor ([Fe/H] -0.5), and alpha-enhanced ([Mg/Fe]~0.3). The stars were made rapidly at z~1.5-2 in shallow potential wells. Declining radial gradients in [C/Fe], which follow [Fe/H], also arise from rapid star formation timescales due to declining carbon yields from low-metallicity massive stars. In contrast, [N/Fe] remains high at large radius. Stars at large radius have different abundance ratio patterns from stars in the center of any present-day galaxy, but are similar to Milky Way thick disk stars. Our observations are thus consistent with a picture in which the stellar outskirts are built up through minor mergers with disky galaxies whose star formation is truncated early (z~1.5-2).Comment: ApJ in press, 12 pages, 6 figure