Integrating Storm Surge and Sea Level Rise Vulnerability Assessments and Criticality Analyses into Asset Management at MaineDOT

This report presents the results of a Climate Resilience Pilot Project conducted by the Maine Department of Transportation and sponsored in part by the Federal Highway Administration. The project developed and implemented tools to prioritize vulnerable transportation assets in the face of rising sea levels and increasing frequency and intensity of coastal storm surge events. State-owned roads, bridges, and culverts were selected and ranked according to criticality and sensitivity metrics developed in reference to agency maintenance records, flooding histories, and the prioritization efforts of agencies in other states. For the highest priority assets in the towns of Scarborough, Bath, and Bowdoinham, alternative engineering designs were created that would be expected to be resilient to 3.3\u2019 and 6\u2019 of sea level rise. Depth damage functions were created for these designs and for the existing structures. The T-COAST software was then used to evaluate relative cost-efficiency of the designs in each location under a range of sea level rise and storm surge scenarios, and compare it to replacing each asset in-kind. Cost efficiency inputs included initial construction costs and cumulative expected repair costs over time given agency maintenance records, the depth damage functions created, and the sea level rise curves and storm surge scenarios selected. Results show which candidate designs would be the most cost efficient in each location and demonstrate there is no one correct design for the 3.3\u2019 or 6\u2019 sea level rise scenarios, even for similar asset types in adjacent towns. Local hydrology, topography, and tidal and storm surge regimes demand a site-specific approach to benefit-cost analysis of alternative engineering structures, at the conceptual design phase. Results also help identify relative contributions of risk from sea level rise and storm surge for each candidate design in each location, and provide insights about how to evaluate agency planning, budgeting, scheduling, and design procedures in an era of both rising sea levels and changing storm surge intensities and probabilities

Scientific publishing and the reading of science in nineteenth-century Britain: a historiographical survey and guide to sources

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] It is now generally accepted that both the conception and practices of natural enquiry in the Western tradition underwent a series of profound developments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—developments which have been variously characterized as a ‘second scientific revolution’ and, much more tellingly, as the ‘invention of science’. As several authors have argued, moreover, a crucial aspect of this change consisted in the distinctive audience relations of the new sciences. While eighteenth-century natural philosophy was distinguished by an audience relation in which, as William Whewell put it, ‘a large and popular circle of spectators and amateurs [felt] themselves nearly upon a level, in the value of their trials and speculations, with more profound thinkers’, the science which was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was, as Simon Schaffer has argued, marked by the ‘emergence of disciplined, trained cadres of research scientists’ clearly distinguished from a wider, exoteric public. Similarly, Jan Golinski argues that the ‘emergence of new instrumentation and a more consolidated social structure for the specialist community’ for early nineteenth-century chemistry was intimately connected with the transformation in the role of its public audience to a condition of relative passivity. These moves were underpinned by crucial epistemological and rhetorical shifts—from a logic of discovery, theoretically open to all, to a more restrictive notion of discovery as the preserve of scientific ‘genius’, and from an open-ended philosophy of ‘experience’ to a far more restrictive notion of disciplined ‘expertise’. Both of these moves were intended to do boundary work, restricting the community active in creating and validating scientific knowledge, and producing a passive public

Lawson criterion for ignition exceeded in an inertial fusion experiment

For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been engaged in attempts to achieve fusion ignition as a proof of principle of various fusion concepts. Following the Lawson criterion, an ignited plasma is one where the fusion heating power is high enough to overcome all the physical processes that cool the fusion plasma, creating a positive thermodynamic feedback loop with rapidly increasing temperature. In inertially confined fusion, ignition is a state where the fusion plasma can begin "burn propagation" into surrounding cold fuel, enabling the possibility of high energy gain. While "scientific breakeven" (i.e., unity target gain) has not yet been achieved (here target gain is 0.72, 1.37 MJ of fusion for 1.92 MJ of laser energy), this Letter reports the first controlled fusion experiment, using laser indirect drive, on the National Ignition Facility to produce capsule gain (here 5.8) and reach ignition by nine different formulations of the Lawson criterion

The story of the three dolls /

"Press of Braunworth & Co., Bookbinders and Printers, Brooklyn, N.Y."--Title page verso.Mode of access: Internet.SPEC: Gift of Marsha Vinson Rotman. Bound in red cloth; color illustration affixed to central front cover; cover lettered in white; corners slightly bumped; binding soiled and worn; text block cracking at gutter