Comparative health and safety assessment of the SPS and alternative electrical generation systems

A comparative analysis of health and safety risks is presented for the Satellite Power System and five alternative baseload electrical generation systems: a low-Btu coal gasification system with an open-cycle gas turbine combined with a steam topping cycle; a light water fission reactor system without fuel reprocessing; a liquid metal fast breeder fission reactor system; a central station terrestrial photovoltaic system; and a first generation fusion system with magnetic confinement. For comparison, risk from a decentralized roof-top photovoltaic system with battery storage is also evaluated. Quantified estimates of public and occupational risks within ranges of uncertainty were developed for each phase of the energy system. The potential significance of related major health and safety issues that remain unquantitied are also discussed

Romania's accession process into the European Union: discourses at policy-, program-, and project-levels in the justice sector

Special arrangements were made by the European Union for decision-making on the possible accession of Romania and Bulgaria. A regime of extra procedures was added to the arrangements used for the Eastern European countries which joined the Union in 2004. This paper examines how the process worked out in the Romanian justice sector, which had been identified as a key area for reform to meet minimum EU requirements. We examine the discourses at policy and program levels and in three selected projects, including at design stage, interim report stage, and final report stage. Our discourse analysis of project documents pays special attention to the key structuring device used in the EU's project and program planning: the "logical framework" or "project matrix". Intended as a key discipline on project design, implementation and evaluation, its inherent limitations and typical biases in usage can lead to major divergences between project and design. A technocratic language of planning can then in various ways serve as a cover that justifies whatever happened. We examine the language use and associated behaviour, as a contribution to the understanding both of Romanian accession in the face of sceptical European public opinion and of a methodology in worldwide use

Retinal adaptation to spatial correlations

The classical center-surround retinal ganglion cell receptive field is thought to remove the strong spatial correlations in natural scenes, enabling efficient use of limited bandwidth. While early studies with drifting gratings reported robust surrounds (Enroth-Cugell and Robson, 1966), recent measurements with white noise reveal weak surrounds (Chichilnisky and Kalmar, 2002). This might be evidence for dynamical weakening of the retinal surround in response to decreased spatial correlations, which would be predicted by efficient coding theory. Such adaptation is reported in LGN (Lesica et al., 2007), but whether the retina also adapts to correlations is unknown. 

We tested for adaptation by recording simultaneously from ~40 ganglion cells on a multi-electrode array while presenting white and exponentially correlated checkerboards and strips. Measuring from ~200 cells responding to 90 minutes each of white and correlated stimuli, we were able to extract precise spatiotemporal receptive fields (STRFs). We found that a difference-of-Gaussians was not a good fit and the surround was generally displaced from the center. Thus, to assess surround strength we found the center and surround regions and the total weight on the pixels in each region. The relative surround strength was then defined as the ratio of surround weight to center weight. Surprisingly, we found that the majority of recorded cells have a stronger surround under white noise than under correlated noise (p<.05), contrary to naive expectation from theory. The conclusion was robust to different methods of extracting STRFs and persisted with checkerboard and strip stimuli.

To test, without assuming a model, whether the retina decorrelates stimuli, we also measured the pairwise correlations between spike trains of simultaneously recorded neurons under three conditions: white checkerboard, exponentially correlated noise, and scale-free noise. The typical amount of pairwise correlation increased with extent of input correlation, in line with our STRF measurements

Introductory Remarks

Driven by diverse forces – economic pressures and opportunities, climate change, war, conquest, and transformation of political regimes – human migration has been central to circulation of knowledge and values, goods and labour. Yet, it has been subject to mainly disciplinary inquiries and the existing body of studies has lacked a comprehensive perspective. This volume essays precisely such a more comprehensive historical and experiential perspective, and as a result leads us to reconsider the meanings of ‘human’, ‘movement’, and ‘borders’

Development ethics through the lenses of caring, gender, and human security.

Thinking about ethics of development and human development must both treat development in a global perspective and yet reflect on the content of human. This paper explores some faces of globalization by using a gender perspective, in order to consider reproduction (psychological and emotional as well as biological) and the activities and attitudes of care that give moral resources for response to systemic tragedy, not only for identifying and understanding it. There now exist globally interconnected systems of vulnerability and capability, for which matching systems of human security, care and responsibility are needed in order to protect human dignity. The discourse of human security helps here by better grounding an agenda of basic human needs, in an ethnography of ordinary lives rather than only an abstracted accounting of deficiencies or an elevated language of opportunities. It must be emotionally and existentially grounded too. The authors examine the potential contributions the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism; the work of philosopher-anthropologist Ananta Giri; and feminist care ethics

Movements of the ‘we’

We consider cross-border migration through the lens of the capabilities approach, with special reference to transnational migration and to implications for the approach itself. Cross-border migration has profound and diverse effects, not least because it accelerates change in the nature of political community. A capabilities approach can be helpful through its insistence on multi-dimensional, inter-personally disaggregated, reflective evaluation. At the same time, the realities of migration exercise pressure on capabilities thinking, to deepen its underlying social and political theory and nuance its efforts to counter communitarian tendencies. By extending its attention to migrants and the locality-spanning social and political spaces in which they live, the capabilities approach will be able to better concretize and situate the picture of the ‘we’ who ‘have (or seek) reason to value’ purported goods and rights