The Hunt for Privacy Harms After \u3ci\u3eSpokeo\u3c/i\u3e

In recent years, due both to hacks that have leaked the personal information of hundreds of millions of people and to concerns about government surveillance, Americans have become more aware of the harms that can accompany the widespread collection of personal data. However, the law has not yet fully developed to recognize the concrete privacy harms that can result from what otherwise seems like ordinary economic activity involving the widespread aggregation and compilation of data. This Note examines cases in which lower federal courts have applied the Supreme Court’s directions for testing the concreteness of alleged intangible privacy injuries, and in particular how that inquiry has affected plaintiffs’ suits under statutes that implicate privacy concerns. This Note proposes that, in probing the concreteness of these alleged privacy harms, the courts, through the doctrine of standing, are engaging in work that could serve to revitalize the judiciary’s long-dormant analysis of the nature of privacy harms. It suggests that courts should look beyond the four traditional privacy torts to find standing for plaintiffs who bring claims against entities that collect and misuse personal information. This Note urges courts to make use of a nexus approach to identify overlapping privacy concerns sufficient for standing, which would allow the federal judiciary to more adequately address emerging privacy harms

A Seventeenth-Century Air History in Conversation with Antony and Cleopatra

This article works to unpack the recurrences of air-related language utilized in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Throughout this play, the notions of breath, wind, air, and vapor are consistently referenced, demonstrating the way in which atmospheric intangibility was a key point of exploration for contemporary scientists and philosophers. Through this analysis, it is clear that Shakespeare employs breath in three ways: the breath of (public) life, a lack of breath, and, most importantly, breath as a symbol of power and autonomy, which at times overlaps with the breath of life in ways that demonstrate contemporary conceptualizations of living beings. The relation of breath and power is shown to exist in other seventeenth-century texts, which often thought about breath and power in relation to God, spirits, and nature. Ultimately, Shakespeare treats air as transformative, wind as a whimsical means of transportation, and vapor as contagious. These ideas coincide with seventeenth-century understandings of these meteorological concepts found in complex scientific theories, natural philosophy ideas, and cultural constructions accepted by the general public

Nonlinear Force-Free Field Modeling of the Solar Magnetic Carpet and Comparison with SDO/HMI and Sunrise/IMaX Observations

In the quiet solar photosphere, the mixed polarity fields form a magnetic carpet, which continuously evolves due to dynamical interaction between the convective motions and magnetic field. This interplay is a viable source to heat the solar atmosphere. In this work, we used the line-of-sight (LOS) magnetograms obtained from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on the \textit{Solar Dynamics Observatory} (\textit{SDO}), and the Imaging Magnetograph eXperiment (IMaX) instrument on the \textit{Sunrise} balloon-borne observatory, as time dependent lower boundary conditions, to study the evolution of the coronal magnetic field. We use a magneto-frictional relaxation method, including hyperdiffusion, to produce time series of three-dimensional (3D) nonlinear force-free fields from a sequence of photospheric LOS magnetograms. Vertical flows are added up to a height of 0.7 Mm in the modeling to simulate the non-force-freeness at the photosphere-chromosphere layers. Among the derived quantities, we study the spatial and temporal variations of the energy dissipation rate, and energy flux. Our results show that the energy deposited in the solar atmosphere is concentrated within 2 Mm of the photosphere and there is not sufficient energy flux at the base of the corona to cover radiative and conductive losses. Possible reasons and implications are discussed. Better observational constraints of the magnetic field in the chromosphere are crucial to understand the role of the magnetic carpet in coronal heating.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal (13 pages, 10 figures

The Relation between Solar Eruption Topologies and Observed Flare Features I: Flare Ribbons

In this paper we present a topological magnetic field investigation of seven two-ribbon flares in sigmoidal active regions observed with Hinode, STEREO, and SDO. We first derive the 3D coronal magnetic field structure of all regions using marginally unstable 3D coronal magnetic field models created with the flux rope insertion method. The unstable models have been shown to be a good model of the flaring magnetic field configurations. Regions are selected based on their pre-flare configurations along with the appearance and observational coverage of flare ribbons, and the model is constrained using pre-flare features observed in extreme ultraviolet and X-ray passbands. We perform a topology analysis of the models by computing the squashing factor, Q, in order to determine the locations of prominent quasi-separatrix layers (QSLs). QSLs from these maps are compared to flare ribbons at their full extents. We show that in all cases the straight segments of the two J-shaped ribbons are matched very well by the flux-rope-related QSLs, and the matches to the hooked segments are less consistent but still good for most cases. In addition, we show that these QSLs overlay ridges in the electric current density maps. This study is the largest sample of regions with QSLs derived from 3D coronal magnetic field models, and it shows that the magnetofrictional modeling technique that we employ gives a very good representation of flaring regions, with the power to predict flare ribbon locations in the event of a flare following the time of the model

development of a bem cfd tool for vertical axis wind turbines based on the actuator disk model

Abstract The present work focuses on the numerical simulation of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines by means of an "in-house" BEM-based User Defined Function to be used 39ith the CFD code ANSYS Fluent. Typical VAWT unsteady and 3D phenomena, such as dynamic stall, flow curvature and tip losses, are taken into account by original and literature-based sub-models. The presence of the blades is mimicked by replacing them with suitable momentum sources. For the present work, the Actuator Cylinder Model has been employed. 3D analysis, of a SANDIA rotor, are carried out in order to assess the accuracy of our model against numerical simulations and experimental data. The current User Defined Function is able to give a satisfactory agreement with the reference cases especially from a qualitative point of view, with a significant computational time reduction to a factor of 10 compared to the case with the moving bodies. A typical wake behavior can be noticed in our simulations even though its recovery is strongly influenced by the lack of turbulence inherent to the chosen actuator model. The torque and the power coefficient of the turbines are also analyzed and compared against the reference cases, finding a remarkable agreement. The model has been successfully applied to predict the transient aerodynamic loads of an offshore 5 MW troposkein turbine subjected to the pitching motion of its platform. The operating conditions have been chosen in order to allow a qualitative comparison with a floating 5 MW horizontal axis turbine which performance under pitching motion is available in literature

Data-Optimized Coronal Field Model: I. Proof of Concept

Deriving the strength and direction of the three-dimensional (3D) magnetic field in the solar atmosphere is fundamental for understanding its dynamics. Volume information on the magnetic field mostly relies on coupling 3D reconstruction methods with photospheric and/or chromospheric surface vector magnetic fields. Infrared coronal polarimetry could provide additional information to better constrain magnetic field reconstructions. However, combining such data with reconstruction methods is challenging, e.g., because of the optical-thinness of the solar corona and the lack and limitations of stereoscopic polarimetry. To address these issues, we introduce the Data-Optimized Coronal Field Model (DOCFM) framework, a model-data fitting approach that combines a parametrized 3D generative model, e.g., a magnetic field extrapolation or a magnetohydrodynamic model, with forward modeling of coronal data. We test it with a parametrized flux rope insertion method and infrared coronal polarimetry where synthetic observations are created from a known "ground truth" physical state. We show that this framework allows us to accurately retrieve the ground truth 3D magnetic field of a set of force-free field solutions from the flux rope insertion method. In observational studies, the DOCFM will provide a means to force the solutions derived with different reconstruction methods to satisfy additional, common, coronal constraints. The DOCFM framework therefore opens new perspectives for the exploitation of coronal polarimetry in magnetic field reconstructions and for developing new techniques to more reliably infer the 3D magnetic fields that trigger solar flares and coronal mass ejections.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures; Accepted for publication in Ap