Mitigation and screening for environmental assessment

This article considers how, as a matter of law and policy, mitigation measures should be taken into account in determining whether a project will have significant environmental effects and therefore be subject to assessment under the EU Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive. This is not straightforward: it is problematic to distinguish clearly between an activity and the measures proposed to minimise or mitigate for the adverse consequences of the activity. The issue is a salient one in impact assessment law, but under-explored in the literature and handled with some difficulty by the courts. I argue that there is an unnecessarily and undesirably narrow approach currently taken under the EIA Directive, which could be improved upon by taking a more adaptive approach; alternatively a heightened standard of review of ‘significance’, and within this of the scope for mitigation measures to bring projects beneath the significance threshold, may also be desirable

Metastability of persistent currents in trapped gases of atoms

We examine the conditions that give rise to metastable, persistent currents in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate. A necessary condition for the stability of persistent currents is that the trapping potential is not a monotonically increasing function of the distance from the trap center. Persistent currents also require that the interatomic interactions are sufficiently strong and repulsive. Finally, any off-center vortex state is shown to be unstable, while a driven gas shows hysteresis.Comment: 7 pages, RevTex, 5 figure

Root uptake of lipophilic zinc-rhamnolipid complexes

This study investigated the formation and plant uptake of lipophilic metal-rhamnolipid complexes. Monorhamnosyl and dirhamnosyl rhamnolipids formed lipophilic complexes with copper (Cu), manganese (Mn), and zinc (Zn). Rhamnolipids significantly increased Zn absorption by Brassica napus var. Pinnacle roots in 65Zn-spiked ice-cold solutions, compared with ZnSO4 alone. Therefore, rhamnolipid appeared to facilitate Zn absorption via a nonmetabolically mediated pathway. Synchrotron XRF and XAS showed that Zn was present in roots as Zn-phytate-like compounds when roots were treated with Zn-free solutions, ZnSO4, or Zn-EDTA. With rhamnolipid application, Zn was predominantly found in roots as the Zn-rhamnolipid complex. When applied to a calcareous soil, rhamnolipids increased dry matter production and Zn concentrations in durum (Triticum durum L. cv. Balcali-2000) and bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L. cv. BDME-10) shoots. Rhamnolipids either increased total plant uptake of Zn from the soil or increased Zn translocation by reducing the prevalence of insoluble Zn-phytate-like compounds in roots

Constraining the nonstandard interaction parameters in long baseline neutrino experiments

In this article we investigate the prospects for probing the strength of the possible nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSI) in long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. We find that these experiments are sensitive to NSI couplings down to the level of 0.01-0.1 depending on the oscillation channel and the baseline length, as well as on the detector's fiducial mass. We also investigate the interference of the leptonic CP angle delta(CP) with the constraining of the NSI couplings. It is found that the interference is strong in the case of the nu(e) nu(mu) and nu(e) nu(tau) transitions but not significant in other transitions. In our numerical analysis we apply the GLoBES software and use the LBNO setup as our benchmark.Peer reviewe

Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity

The book is organized by themes that the editors concluded to be the most important and critical themes for Pentecostal mission, past and future.https://scholar.csl.edu/edinburghcentenary/1019/thumbnail.jp

Run compressed rank/select for large alphabets

Given a string of length n that is composed of r runs of letters from the alphabet 0,1,..,σ-1 such that 2 ≤ σ ≤ r, we describe a data structure that, provided r ≤ n/log ω(1) n, stores the string in rlog nσ/r + o(r log nσ/r) bits and supports select and access queries in O(log log(n/r)/loglogn) time and rank queries in O(log log(nσ/r)/log time. We show that r log n(σ-1)/r-O(log n/r) bits are necessary for any such data structure and, thus, our solution is succinct. We also describe a data structure that uses (1 + ϵ)r log nσ/r + O(r) bits, where ϵ > 0 is an arbitrary constant, with the same query times but without the restriction r ≤ n/log ω(1) n. By simple reductions to the colored predecessor problem, we show that the query times are optimal in the important case r ≥ 2logδ n, for an arbitrary constant δ > 0. We implement our solution and compare it with the state of the art, showing that the closest competitors consume 31-46% more space. © 2018 IEEE.Peer reviewe

The effect of age and font size on reading text on handheld computers

Though there have been many studies of computer based text reading, only a few have considered the small screens of handheld computers. This paper presents an investigation into the effect of varying font size between 2 and 16 point on reading text on a handheld computer. By using both older and younger participants the possible effects of age were examined. Reading speed and accuracy were measured and subjective views of participants recorded. Objective results showed that there was little difference in reading performance above 6 point, but subjective comments from participants showed a preference for sizes in the middle range. We therefore suggest, for reading tasks, that designers of interfaces for mobile computers provide fonts in the range of 8-12 point to maximize readability for the widest range of users