Mitigation and screening for environmental assessment

This article considers how, as a matter of law and policy, mitigation measures should be taken into account in determining whether a project will have significant environmental effects and therefore be subject to assessment under the EU Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive. This is not straightforward: it is problematic to distinguish clearly between an activity and the measures proposed to minimise or mitigate for the adverse consequences of the activity. The issue is a salient one in impact assessment law, but under-explored in the literature and handled with some difficulty by the courts. I argue that there is an unnecessarily and undesirably narrow approach currently taken under the EIA Directive, which could be improved upon by taking a more adaptive approach; alternatively a heightened standard of review of ‘significance’, and within this of the scope for mitigation measures to bring projects beneath the significance threshold, may also be desirable

Thermal Diffusivity and Conductivity Measurements in Diamond Anvil Cells

We have undertaken a study of the feasibility of an innovative method for the determination of thermal properties of materials at extreme conditions. Our approach is essentiality an extension of the flash method to the geometry of the diamond-anvil cell and our ultimate goal is to greatly enlarge the pressure and temperature range over which thermal properties can be investigated. More specifically, we have performed test experiments to establish a technique for probing thermal diffusivity on samples of dimensions compatible with the physical constraints of the diamond anvil cell

A comparison of arbitration procedures for risk averse disputants

We propose an arbitration model framework that generalizes many previous quantitative models of final offer arbitration, conventional arbitration, and some proposed alternatives to them. Our model allows the two disputants to be risk averse and assumes that the issue(s) in dispute can be summarized by a single quantifiable value. We compare the performance of the different arbitration procedures by analyzing the gap between the disputants' equilibrium offers and the width of the contract zone that these offers imply. Our results suggest that final offer arbitration should give results superior to those of conventional arbitration.Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Gran

An Integrated Method for Accurate Determination of Melting in High-Pressure Laser Heating Experiments

We present an integrated approach for melting determination by monitoring several criteria simultaneously. In particular we combine x-ray diffraction observations with the detection of discontinuities in the optical properties by spectroradiometric measurements. This approach significantly increases the confidence of melt identification, especially with low-Z samples. We demonstrate the method with observations of melt in oxygen at 47 and 55 gigapascals

Effects of pressure on diffusion and vacancy formation in MgO from non-empirical free-energy integrations

The free energies of vacancy pair formation and migration in MgO were computed via molecular dynamics using free-energy integrations and a non-empirical ionic model with no adjustable parameters. The intrinsic diffusion constant for MgO was obtained at pressures from 0 to 140 GPa and temperatures from 1000 to 5000 K. Excellent agreement was found with the zero pressure diffusion data within experimental error. The homologous temperature model which relates diffusion to the melting curve describes well our high pressure results within our theoretical framework.Comment: 4 pages, latex, 1 figure, revtex, submitted to PR

On strongly chordal graphs that are not leaf powers

A common task in phylogenetics is to find an evolutionary tree representing proximity relationships between species. This motivates the notion of leaf powers: a graph G = (V, E) is a leaf power if there exist a tree T on leafset V and a threshold k such that uv is an edge if and only if the distance between u and v in T is at most k. Characterizing leaf powers is a challenging open problem, along with determining the complexity of their recognition. This is in part due to the fact that few graphs are known to not be leaf powers, as such graphs are difficult to construct. Recently, Nevries and Rosenke asked if leaf powers could be characterized by strong chordality and a finite set of forbidden subgraphs. In this paper, we provide a negative answer to this question, by exhibiting an infinite family \G of (minimal) strongly chordal graphs that are not leaf powers. During the process, we establish a connection between leaf powers, alternating cycles and quartet compatibility. We also show that deciding if a chordal graph is \G-free is NP-complete, which may provide insight on the complexity of the leaf power recognition problem

Module sectional category of products

Adapting a result of Félix–Halperin–Lemaire concerning the Lusternik–Schnirelmann category of products, we prove the additivity of a rational approximation for Schwarz’s sectional category with respect to products of certain fibrations.J.C. is supported by the Polish National Science Centre Grant 2016/21/ P/ST1/03460 within the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 665778 and by the Belgian Interuniversity Attraction Pole (IAP) within the framework “Dynamics, Geometry and Statistical Physics” (DYGEST P7/18). L.V. is partially supported by Portuguese Funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within the Project UID/MAT/00013/2013

An Overview of the AURORA Gigabit Testbed

AURORA is one of five U.S. testbeds charged with exploring applications of, and technologies necessary for, networks operating at gigabit per second or higher bandwidths. AURORA is also an experiment in collaboration, where government support (through the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, which is in turn funded by DARPA and the NSF) has spurred interaction among centers of excellence in industry, academia, and government. The emphasis of the AURORA testbed, distinct from the other four testbeds, is research into the supporting technologies for gigabit networking. Our targets include new software architectures, network abstractions, hardware technologies, and applications. This paper provides an overview of the goals and methodologies employed in AURORA, and reports preliminary results from our first year of research