Can the U.S. Get There from Here?

Climate change impacts in the United States are increasingly evident and come with steep economic and social costs. The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events has increased in recent years, bringing record-breaking heat, heavy precipitation, coastal flooding, severe droughts, and damaging wildfires.According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), weather-related damages in the United States were $60 billion in 2011, and are expected to be significantly greater in 2012.The mounting costs convey an unmistakable urgency to address climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). This report examines pathways for GHG reductions in the United States through actions taken at the federal and state levels without the need for new legislation from the U.S. Congress

How can power discourses be changed?

Social policy impact is partly determined by how policy is articulated and advocated, including which values are highlighted and how. We examine the influence of policy framing and reframing on outcomes, with particular reference to policies of the Delhi state government in India that target the practices of female feticide, infanticide and neglect that underlie the ‘daughter deficit’. Using Snow and Benford’s categories for understanding reframing processes, the paper outlines and applies a ‘model’ of reframing disputed issues, derived from looking at two famous campaigns – Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March in the struggle for Indian freedom from British rule and the African- American civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s. It argues that ‘carrot and stick’ policy measures, such as financial incentives and legal prohibitions, to counteract the ‘daughter deficit’ must be complemented by well crafted discursive interventions

Aggregation of Capital and Its Substitution with Energy

Controversy continues over the question of whether capital and energy are substitutes or complements. The authors find that the answer to the question partly depends on the aggregation of building capital and machinery capital into an aggregate input called capital. The authors' empirical results reject this aggregation. When building and machinery capital are treated as separate inputs, they find that machinery capital and energy are substitutes, while building capital and energy are complements. For policy purposes, this result implies that a rise in the price of energy will reduce building capital formation, while it will increase machinery capital formation.

A cooking pot lit by fire

Recent research into the records of eclipses in the Chronicle of the English monk, Gervase of Canterbury, has indicated that an entry for the year 1187 C.E. may contain a description of solar prominences being visible during the total eclipse of that year. As such it is not only the earliest report of the phenomenon from England, but also reveals that a British Library manuscript contains the earliest surviving contemporary record of such an observation

Two parameter Deformed Multimode Oscillators and q-Symmetric States

Two types of the coherent states for two parameter deformed multimode oscillator system are investigated. Moreover, two parameter deformed $gl(n)$ algebra and deformed symmetric states are constructed.Comment: LaTeX v1.2, 14 pages with no figure