Single European skies: functional airspace blocks - delays and responses

This article considers the ‘Functional Airspace Blocks’ (FAB’s) – which are part of the European initiative for a Single European Sky (SES). The primary objective of the transport policy has been to complete the internal market for transport and facilitate the free movement of persons, good and services. Yet the significance of the transport policy to the wider objectives of the EU is often overlooked. Whilst deregulation of the air transport sector in the EU has created the world's largest and most successful example of regional market integration and liberalization in air transport – the industry remains hampered by disjointed skies, which standard to compromise safety and impact upon economic development. And, whilst the FAB should have been completed – ‘by’ December 2012 - it is still not a reality. The research identifies the aims and advantages of a common European airspace and reviews the delays and consequences of implementation, specifically commenting on the use of the infringement process (or non-use) against Member States regarding the implementation of the FAB’s

DYNAMICS OF METABOLIC GASES IN GROUNDWATER AND THE VADOSE ZONE OF SOILS ON DELMARVA

Denitrification removes nitrogen from watersheds under reducing conditions, but N2O and CH4, both greenhouse gases, can also be produced. The overarching hypothesis of my thesis was that hydric environments accumulate N2O and CH4 in groundwater and the vadose zone. To test the hypothesis, groundwater samples were taken monthly during 2007-2009 at 64 piezometers in 10 wetlands for analysis of excess N2, N2O, CH4, and CO2. Vadose zone gas and groundwater samples were taken during 2008-2010 at two riparian buffers and a hydrologically restored wetland. The hydrology of the 10 locations was complex. A hydrologic connection across a transect was determined at one location where NO3- significantly decreased, excess N2 significantly increased, and moderate concentrations of N2O and CH4 accumulated. Within these 10 locations, three N2O and four CH4 hot spots were identified, and hot moments accounted for a large percentage of total accumulated N2O and CH4. I found evidence of CH4 ebullition, the production of CH4 bubbles in the vadose zone that strip other dissolved gases. The locations that accumulated the most dissolved CH4 and N2O were natural wetlands and riparian areas, respectively. I measured both positive and negative excess N2 concentrations in the vadose zone. Flux estimates ranged from -600 to 880 kg N ha-1 yr-1, which brackets missing N estimates at the watershed scale. These concentrations were calculated using N2/Ar, and both gases are affected by physical processes. These calculated excess N2 profiles could have been produced through either biological and/or physical mechanisms, and these processes currently cannot be distinguished. Less than 1% of the missing N on the transect scale, measured as the difference in N concentration between two piezometers, was accounted for by calculated diffusional fluxes from groundwater to the vadose zone. The primary mechanism transporting gases from the vadose zone to the atmosphere was diffusion, but convection transported 20% of the calculated median CO2 yearly flux. Increased production of N2O and CO2 was observed in the vadose zone after rainfall events. Overall, large concentrations of N2O, CH4, CO2, and excess N2 accumulated in the groundwater and vadose zone of these locations, supporting the overarching hypothesis

The U.K.’s ‘Appetite’ for Space: An Increased Craving!

Launching into space was once the pursuit of super-power nations, who, during a period of international tensions, competed to be the first—the first into space and the first to the Moon. While the United Kingdom (U.K.) had a similar appetite it never achieved a space launch from its national soils, often thwarted by political and economic constraints. This said, the U.K. has played a key role, working alongside other nations in technological advancements related to space. This paper revisits the historical legacy of the U.K.’s space ventures and its space policies before comment is made to the current strategy and future vision. The approach is interdisciplinary and factors in semi-quasi case studies, particularly factoring in the European Space Agency. The findings are that the U.K. is returning to its original goal, with a renewed appetite to be a global leader in space launches, while also aiming to protect national interests which have necessitated closer alignment of the civil and defense space strategies

Designing for Economic Success: A 50-State Analysis of the Genuine Progress Indicator

The use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the primary measure of economic progress has arguably led to unintended consequences of environmental degradation and socially skewed outcomes. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was designed to reveal the trade offs associated with conventional economic growth and to assess the broader impact of economic benefits and costs on sustainable human welfare. Although originally designed for use at the national scale, an interest has developed in the United States in a state-level uptake of the GPI to inform and guide policy. However, questions exist about the quality and legitimacy of the GPI as a composite indicator. These questions include concerns about the underlying assumptions, the monetary weights and variables used, statistical rigor, magnitude of data collection required, and lack of a transparent governance mechanism for the metric. This study aims to address these issues and explore the GPI through a design-thinking lens as both a design artifact and intervention. The leading paper in this dissertation offers the first GPI accounting for all 50 U.S. states. State GPI results are introduced and compared to Gross State Product (GSP). Then an analysis of the components to GPI reveals which drive the differences in outcomes, including examining the sustainability aspects of the state-level results. The second paper investigates the quality of the GPI as a composite indicator by testing its sensitivity to numerical assumptions and relative magnitudes of components, with particular attention to the possible unintended policy consequences of the design. The third paper seeks to answer the question of both efficiency (data parsimony) and effectiveness (comparatively to other indicators) by analysis of correlations between GPI components and with other state-level indicators such as the Gallup Well-Being Indicator, Ecological Footprint, and UN Human Development Index. To garner insight about possible GPI improvements, goals, and governance gaps in the informal U.S GPI network, the final paper dives into processes, outputs, and outcomes from the community of practice as revealed through a facilitated U.S. GPI workshop

Analysis of EUV Dayglow Spectra of Triton, Titan and Earth

We have constructed a coupled ion and neutral chemical model of the ionosphere and thermosphere of Titan. Along with density profiles of ions and minor neutrals, we have computed the heating rates and heating efficiencies for the neutrals and chemical heating rates and efficiencies for the ions. We find that the neutral heating efficiency in our standard model varies from about 30% near 800 km to 22% near 2000 km. The most important heating processes are neutral-neutral reactions and photodissociation. The ion chemical heating rates maximize at about 10 eV cm(sup -3) s(sup -1), and the corresponding ion heating efficiencies peak near 1000 km at about 0.6%

Time for Children: Trends in the Employment Patterns of Parents, 1967-2009

Utilizing data from the 1967-2009 years of the March Current Population Surveys, we examine two important resources for children's well-being: time and money. We document trends in parental employment, from the perspective of children, and show what underlies these trends. We find that increases in family work hours mainly reflect movements into jobs by parents who, in prior decades, would have remained at home. This increase in market work has raised incomes for children in the typical two-parent family but not for those in lone-parent households. Time use data from 1975 and 2003-2008 reveal that working parents spend less time engaged in primary childcare than their counterparts without jobs but more than employed peers in previous cohorts. Analysis of 2004 work schedule data suggests that non-daytime work provides an alternative method of coordinating employment schedules for some dual-earner families.parental employment, child care time, work family balance, coordinated work schedules

Public Service Loan Forgiveness? How Improvements to a Student Debt Cancellation Program Can Help to Deliver Gideon\u27s Promise

Student debt is a generational crisis facing forty-five million Americans today. Among those with the highest rates of student loan debt are attorneys and among attorneys, those working in public interest have been hit particularly hard as they carry these same high debt rates yet earn low salaries. While student debt has run roughshod over Americans seeking higher education for almost forty years, another crisis has ravaged Americans who are swept up in the criminal legal system. Mass incarceration and mass policing have sent millions to prisons and jails and separated millions of parents and children through family courts. Often the only ones standing in the way of those destructive forces have been the attorneys who work in public defense in our criminal and family courts. Carrying high rates of student debt while still receiving stagnant wages has made a public defense career unsustainable for many attorneys, particularly those working as assigned counsel attorneys in rural communities. Those rural communities are facing a crisis within a crisis, as public defense attorney shortages exacerbate legal deserts leaving our most vulnerable citizens without advocates. Public Service Loan Forgiveness (“PSLF”) was created to deliver student debt cancellation to public sector workers. While the PSLF program had a rocky start, the Department of Education (“ED”) currently implements PSLF in a way that unnecessarily excludes entire sectors of workers, including assigned counsel attorneys. ED’s administration of PSLF fails to address the full breadth of the student debt crisis for public service workers, and is a missed opportunity to leverage PSLF to support access to justice through public defense attorneys. This Article proposes a modest, immediate solution to ease the crunch of the much larger structural dilemma of providing public defense to rural areas through a targeted use of the PSLF program. Here, we examine other categories of public sector workers, namely non-tenured adjunct higher education faculty and certain healthcare workers, who have been excluded from PSLF and how recent regulatory changes gave them access to this crucial debt cancellation. We recommend enacting a change to the PSLF program regulations that would allow assigned counsel attorneys to access PSLF cancellation, thereby encouraging current practitioners to continue to serve rural communities while working to discharge their student debt and attracting newer attorneys with high student debt loads to these areas where lawyers are desperately needed and current practitioners are aging out. Our proposed minor amendments to ED’s PSLF regulations does not solve many of the program’s other shortcomings, but would make a simple but profound contribution to both the student debt crisis and public defender shortage