2,740 research outputs found
Where the Twain Shall Meet: Standing and Remedy in Alaska Center for the Environment v. Browner
In 1994, the Ninth Circuit affirmed standing for citizens to sue to compel the EPA Administrator to undertake a statewide TMDL program. Although the citizens had standing for only some of the water-quality-limited waters in Alaska, the court held that the underlying cause of action was the EPA\u27s failure to initiate the TMDL process for Alaska. This Note proposes that the court improperly reasoned its way to the correct holding. Like the EPA, the court confused standing to sue with the ultimate scope of the remedy. This Note proposes a three-step analysis to consider issues of standing and remedy. The first step is to determine the scope of the underlying action by analyzing the legal duty that forms the basis for the claim. This scoping action is critical since it serves as the referent for the next two steps. The second step is to determine whether the plaintiff has standing with respect to the underlying action. If the court decides on the merits of the case that the plaintiff should prevail, the third step is to determine the appropriate remedy. In this step, the court starts with the underlying cause of action and incorporates other factors as appropriate. This three-step analysis decouples the standing and remedy analyses and should lead to better reasoned opinions. I. INTRODUCTION In Alaska Center for the Environment v. Browner (ACE III), 1 the Ninth Circuit distinguished between standing to sue and the ultimate scope of the remedy. The court affirmed standing for a group ..
Surface term for the capillary condensation transitions in a slit geometry
It is shown that a bare simple fluid model (SFM) proposed some years ago for
studying adsorption between two semi-infinite solid walls can be improved by
modifying the surface term in the grand potential for the film phase. Such a
correction substantially improves the agreement between the predictions for
phase transitions provided by that SFM and results obtained from calculations
carried out for He with the density-functional method at zero temperature.
The corrective term depends on the strength of the adsorption potential and
observables of bulk helium.Comment: 4 pages, 1 table and 5 figure
Minimal Flavor Violation and the Scale of Supersymmetry Breaking
In this paper we explore the constraints from B-physics observables in SUSY
models of Minimal Flavor Violation, in the large tan beta regime, for both low
and high scale supersymmetry breaking scenarios. We find that the rare B-decays
b -> s gamma and B_s -> mu+ mu- can be quite sensitive to the scale M at which
supersymmetry breaking is communicated to the visible sector. In the case of
high scale supersymmetry breaking, we show that the additional gluino
contribution to the b -> s gamma and B_s -> mu+ mu- rare decay rates can be
significant for large tan beta, mu and M_3. The constraints on B_u -> tau nu
are relatively insensitive to the precise scale of M. We also consider the
additional constraints from the present direct Higgs searches at the Tevatron
in the inclusive H/A -> tau tau channel, and the latest CDMS direct dark matter
detection experiments. We find that altogether the constraints from B-physics,
Higgs physics and direct dark matter searches can be extremely powerful in
probing regions of SUSY parameter space for low M_A and large tan beta, leading
to a preference for models with a lightest CP-even Higgs mass close to the
current experimental limit. We find interesting regions of parameter space that
satisfy all constraints and can be probed by Higgs searches at the Tevatron and
the LHC and by direct dark matter searches in the near future.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures. Added citations. Published in PR
Adsorption of rare-gas atoms on Cu(111) and Pb(111) surfaces by van der Waals-corrected Density Functional Theory
The DFT/vdW-WF method, recently developed to include the Van der Waals
interactions in Density Functional Theory (DFT) using the Maximally Localized
Wannier functions, is applied to the study of the adsorption of rare-gas atoms
(Ne, Ar, Kr, and Xe) on the Cu(111) and Pb(111) surfaces, at three
high-symmetry sites. We evaluate the equilibrium binding energies and
distances, and the induced work-function changes and dipole moments. We find
that, for Ne, Ar, and Kr on the Cu(111) surface the different adsorption
configurations are characterized by very similar binding energies, while the
favored adsorption site for Xe on Cu(111) is on top of a Cu atom, in agreement
with previous theoretical calculations and experimental findings, and in common
with other close-packed metal surfaces. Instead, the favored site is always the
hollow one on the Pb(111) surface, which therefore represents an interesting
system where the investigation of high-coordination sites is possible.
Moreover, the Pb(111) substrate is subject, upon rare-gas adsorption, to a
significantly smaller change in the work function (and to a correspondingly
smaller induced dipole moment) than Cu(111). The role of the chosen reference
DFT functional and of different Van der Waals corrections, and their dependence
on different rare-gas adatoms, are also discussed
Structure of Online Dating Markets in U.S. Cities
We study the structure of heterosexual dating markets in the United States through an analysis of the interactions of several million users of a large online dating website, applying recently developed network analysis methods to the pattern of messages exchanged among users. Our analysis shows that the strongest driver of romantic interaction at the national level is simple geographic proximity, but at the local level, other demographic factors come into play. We find that dating markets in each city are partitioned into submarkets along lines of age and ethnicity. Sex ratio varies widely between submarkets, with younger submarkets having more men and fewer women than older ones. There is also a noticeable tendency for minorities, especially women, to be younger than the average in older submarkets, and our analysis reveals how this kind of racial stratification arises through the messaging decisions of both men and women. Our study illustrates how network techniques applied to online interactions can reveal the aggregate effects of individual behavior on social structure
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