Research in Public Tort Liability

In the last years, the increase of the fuel price and the need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions have triggered the research on lowering the fuel consumption within the transport sector. The research not only involves the development of more efficient engines but also the exploration of new transportation paradigms. One promising approach is to create vehicle platoons, i.e. convoys of vehicles driving close to each other. Vehicles driving close behind benefit from the reduction of the air drag and hence their overall fuel consumptions are reduced. This work focuses on studying platoons of heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs). More specifically, the work analyzes real position data of an HDV fleet from one manufacturer. The objective is to determine the potentials to reduce the fuel consumption of the fleet through platoon formations, using low sampled GPS traces obtained from the fleet management system. Map matching and path inference algorithms have been developed to reconstruct the path of the vehicles on a given road network. The reconstructed paths are used to analyze the vehicles’ positions and inter-vehicle distances. Results show that the vehicles are widely spread. The average distance to the closest vehicle is greater than 20km, which limits the platoon opportunities. Although with limited platoon opportunities, potential fuel savings up to 0.14% of the whole fleet’s consumption have been obtained. Results suggest that fuel savings can be largely improved if the density of vehicles in the road network is increased

The plasma radiation shield - Concept, and applications to space vehicles

Plasma radiation shield - concept and applications to space vehicle

“… a great hurt to many, and of advantage to very few“. Urban Common Lands, Civic Government, and the Problem of Resource Management in English Towns, 1500–1840

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Studien Verlag via the link in this recordThis article will consider the relationship between the agrarian use-rights and political governance of urban common lands in English towns, in the period c. 1600–1840, and assess how far these common rights correspond to Elinor Ostrom’s model of “Common Pool Resource” (CPR) management. It will review the most frequent varieties of common land and common rights held by the residents of English towns and argue that systems of commons management in English towns were always connected closely to urban political structures. Freemen, who were commons users in one context, were urban electors, defenders of corporate monopolies, or rent-seekers in other contexts. The governance, and the very survival, of urban commons could be affected by these additional imperatives. The defence of common rights often involved the assertion of a minority privilege, even if this was usually expressed in terms of a collective, or universal, civic right. Ironically, this defence was undermined fatally by the expansion of parliamentary and corporate electorates in the 1830s. When civic politics began to take account of the interests of a wider middle-class majority, the access privileges of borough freemen were swiftly abolished. These features mean that the longevity and eventual abolition of English urban commons conforms more closely to research by Sheilagh Ogilvie and Maïka De Keyzer about the “distributional effects” of unequal power relationships and external influences on economic institutions than to Ostrom’s assumption that the survival of CPR management structures was determined ultimately by their economic efficienc

Bastardy in Butleigh: illegitimacy, genealogies and the old Poor Law in Somerset, 1762-1834

This is the final version. Available on open access from MDPI via the DOI in this recordEarly academic histories of non-marital motherhood often focused on the minority of mothers who had several illegitimate children. Peter Laslett coined the phrase 'the bastardy prone sub-society' to describe them. More recent qualitative research has questioned the gendered perspectives underlying this label, and emphasized the complex, highly personal processes behind illegitimacy. By locating the social experience of illegitimacy, particularly multiple illegitimacy, within a broader genealogical and parochial context, this study tries to set the behaviour of particular individuals within a ‘community’ context in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It places illegitimacy alongside pre-nuptial pregnancy within the sample parish, but also focuses on the majority of illegitimate births that fell under the administration of the parish and became ‘bastardy’ cases. It examines the parish’s administrative responses, particularly its vigour in identifying and recovering money from putative fathers, and discusses the social circumstances of these fathers and mothers. It then goes on to reconstruct the inter-generational genealogy of a dense family network that linked several mothers and fathers of multiple illegitimate children. It highlights some significant and recurrent disparities of age and status within these family concentrations which lay beyond the limits of the courtship-centred model of illegitimacy

Loschmidt echoes in two-body random matrix ensembles

Fidelity decay is studied for quantum many-body systems with a dominant independent particle Hamiltonian resulting e.g. from a mean field theory with a weak two-body interaction. The diagonal terms of the interaction are included in the unperturbed Hamiltonian, while the off-diagonal terms constitute the perturbation that distorts the echo. We give the linear response solution for this problem in a random matrix framework. While the ensemble average shows no surprising behavior, we find that the typical ensemble member as represented by the median displays a very slow fidelity decay known as ``freeze''. Numerical calculations confirm this result and show, that the ground state even on average displays the freeze. This may contribute to explanation of the ``unreasonable'' success of mean field theories.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures (6 eps files), RevTex; v2: slight modifications following referees' suggestion

Duality Between the Weak and Strong Interaction Limits for Randomly Interacting Fermions

We establish the existence of a duality transformation for generic models of interacting fermions with two-body interactions. The eigenstates at weak and strong interaction U possess similar statistical properties when expressed in the U=0 and U=infinity eigenstates bases respectively. This implies the existence of a duality point U_d where the eigenstates have the same spreading in both bases. U_d is surrounded by an interval of finite width which is characterized by a non Lorentzian spreading of the strength function in both bases. Scaling arguments predict the survival of this intermediate regime as the number of particles is increased.Comment: RevTex4, 4 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication at Phys. Rev. Let