Note on a Micropolar Gas-Kinetic Theory

The micropolar fluid mechanics and its transport coefficients are derived from the linearized Boltzmann equation of rotating particles. In the dilute limit, as expected, transport coefficients relating to microrotation are not important, but the results are useful for the description of collisional granular flow on an inclined slope. (This paper will be published in Traffic and Granular Flow 2001 edited by Y.Sugiyama and D. E. Wolf (Springer))Comment: 15 pages, 0 figure. To be published in Traffic and Granular Flow 2001 edited by Y.Sugiyama and D. E. Wolf (Springer

The politicisation of evaluation: constructing and contesting EU policy performance

Although systematic policy evaluation has been conducted for decades and has been growing strongly within the European Union (EU) institutions and in the member states, it remains largely underexplored in political science literatures. Extant work in political science and public policy typically focuses on elements such as agenda setting, policy shaping, decision making, or implementation rather than evaluation. Although individual pieces of research on evaluation in the EU have started to emerge, most often regarding policy “effectiveness” (one criterion among many in evaluation), a more structured approach is currently missing. This special issue aims to address this gap in political science by focusing on four key focal points: evaluation institutions (including rules and cultures), evaluation actors and interests (including competencies, power, roles and tasks), evaluation design (including research methods and theories, and their impact on policy design and legislation), and finally, evaluation purpose and use (including the relationships between discourse and scientific evidence, political attitudes and strategic use). The special issue considers how each of these elements contributes to an evolving governance system in the EU, where evaluation is playing an increasingly important role in decision making

Forecasting water temperature in lakes and reservoirs using seasonal climate prediction

ABSTRACT: Seasonal climate forecasts produce probabilistic predictions of meteorological variables for subsequent months. This provides a potential resource to predict the influence of seasonal climate anomalies on surface water balance in catchments and hydro-thermodynamics in related water bodies (e.g., lakes or reservoirs). Obtaining seasonal forecasts for impact variables (e.g., discharge and water temperature) requires a link between seasonal climate forecasts and impact models simulating hydrology and lake hydrodynamics and thermal regimes. However, this link remains challenging for stakeholders and the water scientific community, mainly due to the probabilistic nature of these predictions. In this paper, we introduce a feasible, robust, and open-source workflow integrating seasonal climate forecasts with hydrologic and lake models to generate seasonal forecasts of discharge and water temperature profiles. The workflow has been designed to be applicable to any catchment and associated lake or reservoir, and is optimized in this study for four catchment-lake systems to help in their proactive management. We assessed the performance of the resulting seasonal forecasts of discharge and water temperature by comparing them with hydrologic and lake (pseudo)observations (reanalysis). Precisely, we analysed the historical performance using a data sample of past forecasts and reanalysis to obtain information about the skill (performance or quality) of the seasonal forecast system to predict particular events. We used the current seasonal climate forecast system (SEAS5) and reanalysis (ERA5) of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). We found that due to the limited predictability at seasonal time-scales over the locations of the four case studies (Europe and South of Australia), seasonal forecasts exhibited none to low performance (skill) for the atmospheric variables considered. Nevertheless, seasonal forecasts for discharge present some skill in all but one case study. Moreover, seasonal forecasts for water temperature had higher performance in natural lakes than in reservoirs, which means human water control is a relevant factor affecting predictability, and the performance increases with water depth in all four case studies. Further investigation into the skillful water temperature predictions should aim to identify the extent to which performance is a consequence of thermal inertia (i.e., lead-in conditions).This is a contribution of the WATExR project (watexr.eu/), which is part of ERA4CS, an ERA-NET initiated by JPI Climate, and funded by MINECO-AEI (ES), FORMAS (SE), BMBF (DE), EPA (IE), RCN (NO), and IFD (DK), with co-funding by the European Union (Grant 690462 ). MINECO-AEI funded this research through projects PCIN- 2017-062 and PCIN-2017-092. We thank all water quality and quantity data providers: Ens d’Abastament d’Aigua Ter-Llobregat (ATL, https://www.atl.cat/es ), SA Water ( https://www.sawater.com. au/ ), Ruhrverband ( www.ruhrverband.de ), NIVA ( www.niva.no ) and NVE ( https://www.nve.no/english/ ). We acknowledge the contribution of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) in the production of SEAS5. C3S provided the computer time for the generation of the re-forecasts for SEAS5 and for the production of the ocean reanalysis (ORAS5), used as initial conditions for the SEAS5 re-forecasts

Research on nonlinear optical materials: an assessment

The seven papers making up this assessment are based on the Workshop on Nonlinear Optical Materials held in April 1986

Problematisations of Complexity: On the Notion and Production of Diverse Complexities in Healthcare Interventions and Evaluations

Within the literature on the evaluation of health (policy) interventions, complexity is a much-debated issue. In particular, many claim that so-called ‘complex interventions’ pose different challenges to evaluation studies than apparently ‘simple interventions’ do. Distinct ways of doing evaluation entail particular ontologies and epistemologies of complexity. They differ in terms of whether they define complexity as a quantitative trait of interventions, whether they see evaluation as part of or outside the intervention, and whether complexity can be regarded as an emergent property of the intervention and its evaluation. In practice, evaluators and commissioners of large health care improvement programmes rely on different, sometimes contradictory, repertoires about what it means to conduct a ‘good’ evaluation. This is an ongoing matter negotiated between and among commissioners, researchers, and—sometimes—programme managers. In particular, notions of evaluability, usefulness and distance/independence are problematised in different ways and with diverse consequences, which, in turn, produce other notions and layers of complexity such as temporal, institutional and affective complexities. When (social science) researchers claim that one method or another is better able to grasp complexity, they elide the issue that any methodological choice emphasises some complexities and lets others fade into the background. Analysing the practicalities and emotions involved in evaluation studies opens up the notion of complexity to analytical scrutiny, and suggests a basis for co-theorising between biomedical, public health and social scientists (including Science and Technology Studies scholars)

On modified simple reacting spheres kinetic model for chemically reactive gases

Versão dos autores para esta publicação.We consider the modiffed simple reacting spheres (MSRS) kinetic model that, in addition to the conservation of energy and momentum, also preserves the angular momentum in the collisional processes. In contrast to the line-of-center models or chemical reactive models considered in [1], in the MSRS (SRS) kinetic models, the microscopic reversibility (detailed balance) can be easily shown to be satisfied, and thus all mathematical aspects of the model can be fully justi ed. In the MSRS model, the molecules behave as if they were single mass points with two internal states. Collisions may alter the internal states of the molecules, and this occurs when the kinetic energy associated with the reactive motion exceeds the activation energy. Reactive and non-reactive collision events are considered to be hard spheres-like. We consider a four component mixture A, B, A*, B*, in which the chemical reactions are of the type A + B = A* + B*, with A* and B* being distinct species from A and B. We provide fundamental physical and mathematical properties of the MSRS model, concerning the consistency of the model, the entropy inequality for the reactive system, the characterization of the equilibrium solutions, the macroscopic setting of the model and the spatially homogeneous evolution. Moreover, we show that the MSRS kinetic model reduces to the previously considered SRS model (e.g., [2], [3]) if the reduced masses of the reacting pairs are the same before and after collisions, and state in the Appendix the more important properties of the SRS system.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologi

Policy monitoring in the EU: The impact of institutions, implementation, and quality

Policy monitoring is often seen as a crucial ingredient of policy evaluation, but theoretically informed empirical analyses of real-world policy monitoring practices are still rare. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on climate policy monitoring in the European Union, which has a relatively stringent system of greenhouse gas monitoring but a much less demanding approach to monitoring policies. It explores how institutional settings, policy implementation, and the quality of information may impact the practices and politics of policy monitoring. Drawing on quantitative regression models and qualitative interviews, it demonstrates that policy monitoring has evolved over time and is itself subject to implementation pressures, but also exhibits learning effects that improve its quality. In further developing both everyday policy monitoring practices and academic understanding of them, there is a need to pay attention to their design—specifically, the impact of any overarching rules, the institutional support for implementation, and the criteria governing the quality of the information they deliver. In short, policy monitoring should be treated as a governance activity in its own right, raising many different design challenges

Neoliberalism and the origins of public management

There is a rich literature on the emergence of new public management in the 1980s yet surprisingly little about the historical and social lineages of this movement. The scholarship on public management generally suggests that it was born out of the neoliberal critique of the state. The public sector would have thus borrowed corporate practices concerned with performance in order to instil market-like competition and make efficiency gains. This article challenges this reading by showing that concerns with performance management emerged instead from new planning technologies developed in the US military sector. I argue that these planning practices, initially developed at the RAND corporation, would radically transform governance by changing the way in which decision makers consider data about performance and use it to develop strategies or policies. I then explore the impact of this new approach on both corporate and public governance. I show how these ideas were translated for business studies and public administration in order to radically transform both fields and ‘make them more scientific’. As I show, this process contributed directly to the rise of what became called public management and provided new planning tools that radically transformed how we think about governance