Minard Run Oil Company v. United States Forest Service

In response to oil and gas development on the Allegheny National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service issued a statement suspending administrative consideration of new permits to drill into privately held mineral rights on the national forest. Owners of mineral rights sued the Forest Service, petitioning for a preliminary injunction against the policy on the basis that they had been denied access to their holdings. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Forest Service policy had the effect of causing severe economic hardship to the plaintiffs and, therefore, upheld a lower court’s grant of the injunction

Constraining the Anomalous Microwave Emission Mechanism in the S140 Star Forming Region with Spectroscopic Observations Between 4 and 8 GHz at the Green Bank Telescope

Anomalous microwave emission (AME) is a category of Galactic signals that cannot be explained by synchrotron radiation, thermal dust emission, or optically thin free-free radiation. Spinning dust is one variety of AME that could be partially polarized and therefore relevant for ongoing and future cosmic microwave background polarization studies. The Planck satellite mission identified candidate AME regions in approximately $1^\circ$ patches that were found to have spectra generally consistent with spinning dust grain models. The spectra for one of these regions, G107.2+5.2, was also consistent with optically thick free-free emission because of a lack of measurements between 2 and 20 GHz. Follow-up observations were needed. Therefore, we used the C-band receiver (4 to 8 GHz) and the VEGAS spectrometer at the Green Bank Telescope to constrain the AME mechanism. For the study described in this paper, we produced three band averaged maps at 4.575, 5.625, and 6.125 GHz and used aperture photometry to measure the spectral flux density in the region relative to the background. We found if the spinning dust description is correct, then the spinning dust signal peaks at $30.9 \pm 1.4$ GHz, and it explains the excess emission. The morphology and spectrum together suggest the spinning dust grains are concentrated near S140, which is a star forming region inside our chosen photometry aperture. If the AME is sourced by optically thick free-free radiation, then the region would have to contain HII with an emission measure of $5.27^{+2.5}_{-1.5}\times 10^8$ $\rm{cm^{-6}\,pc}$ and a physical extent of $1.01^{+0.21}_{-0.20} \times 10^{-2}\,\rm{pc}$. This result suggests the HII would have to be ultra or hyper compact to remain an AME candidate.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figures. Submitted to Ap

Using a fuzzy inference system to control a pumped storage hydro plant

The paper discusses the development of a fuzzy inference system (FIS) based governor control for a pumped storage hydroelectric plant. The First Hydro Company's plant at Dinorwig in North Wales is the largest of its kind in Europe and is mainly used for frequency control of the UK electrical grid. In previous investigations, a detailed model of the plant was developed using MATLAB(R)/SIMULINK(R) and this is now being used to compare FIS governor operation with the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller currently used. The paper describes the development of an FIS governor, and shows that its response to a step increase in load is superior to the PID under certain conditions of load. The paper proceeds to discuss the implications of these results in view of the possible practical application of an FIS governor at the Dinorwig plant

Anomaly Detection in Paleoclimate Records using Permutation Entropy

Permutation entropy techniques can be useful in identifying anomalies in paleoclimate data records, including noise, outliers, and post-processing issues. We demonstrate this using weighted and unweighted permutation entropy of water-isotope records in a deep polar ice core. In one region of these isotope records, our previous calculations revealed an abrupt change in the complexity of the traces: specifically, in the amount of new information that appeared at every time step. We conjectured that this effect was due to noise introduced by an older laboratory instrument. In this paper, we validate that conjecture by re-analyzing a section of the ice core using a more-advanced version of the laboratory instrument. The anomalous noise levels are absent from the permutation entropy traces of the new data. In other sections of the core, we show that permutation entropy techniques can be used to identify anomalies in the raw data that are not associated with climatic or glaciological processes, but rather effects occurring during field work, laboratory analysis, or data post-processing. These examples make it clear that permutation entropy is a useful forensic tool for identifying sections of data that require targeted re-analysis---and can even be useful in guiding that analysis.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure

Severe New Limits on the Host Galaxies of Gamma Ray Bursts

The nature of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) remains a complete mystery, despite the recent breakthrough discovery of low energy counterparts, although it is now generally believed that at least most GRBs are at cosmological distances. Virtually all proposed cosmological models require bursters to reside in ordinary galaxies. This can be tested by looking inside the smallest GRB error boxes to see if ordinary galaxies appear at the expected brightness levels. This letter reports on an analysis of the contents of 26 of the smallest regions, many from the brightest bursts. These events will have $z < 0.4$ and small uncertainties about luminosity functions, K corrections and galaxy evolutions; whereas the recent events with optical transients are much fainter and hence have high redshifts and grave difficulties in interpretation. This analysis strongly rejects the many models with peak luminosities of $10^{57} photons \cdot s^{-1}$ as deduced from the $LogN-LogP$ curve with no evolution. Indeed, the lower limit on acceptable luminosities is $6 \times 10^{58} photons \cdot s^{-1}$. The only possible solution is to either place GRBs at unexpectedly large distances (with $z > 5.9$ for the faint BATSE bursts) or to require bursters to be far outside any normal host galaxy.Comment: 17 pages, to be published by ApJ