Implications of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard for State and National Ethanol Use

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Minimizing Corporate Liability Exposure When the Whistle Blows in the Post Sarbanes-Oxley Era

Over the past few years, numerous newspapers and magazines have featured stories discussing whistleblowers. From Sherron Watkins at Enron to Cynthia Cooper at Worldcom, employees who reported perceived corporate fraud have received widespread attention. With this increased public focus, Congress chose to provide statutory protection in the whistleblower corporate or securities law context through enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). Prior to SOX, federal and state statutes (as well as common law) existed to protect whistleblowers in specific settings. For example, the False Claims Act provides protection to individuals who report fraudulent activities committed against the federal government. States likewise provide some degree of whistleblower protection, but each state\u27s laws can vary regarding the persons protected, the procedural requirements for establishing the existence of retaliation, the type of evidence required to prove retaliation, and the available remedies. In part to eliminate the patchwork and vagaries of current state [whistleblower] laws, Congress enacted SOX. For attorneys who provide legal counsel to corporations, the contours of the SOX whistleblower provisions merit exploration. In-house as well as outside lawyers must understand the complexities implicated to advise their clients to minimize potentially massive liability exposure

Implications of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard for State and National Ethanol Use

This is a partial analysis of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) setting out carbon emission reduction targets for California. Emission estimates of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) are explored in a two-step analysis that (1) sets out various fuel mixes that could satisfy the LCFS targets based on fixed fuel costs and (2) test the implications of these fuel mixes for national markets relative to existing national mandates. Also explored are the implications if the LCFS is applied in California alone or if it is adopted more widely

The future of biofuel (panel discussion)

Biomass energy - United States ; Environmental policy

MemTable: An integrated system for capture and recall of shared histories in group workspaces

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an interactive tabletop system that supports co-located meeting capture and asynchronous search and review of past meetings. The goal of the project is to evaluate the design of a conference table that augments the everyday work patterns of small collaborative groups by incorporating an integrated annotation system. We present a holistic design that values hardware ergonomics, supports heterogeneous input modalities, generates a memory of all user interactions, and provides access to historical data on and off the table. We present a user evaluation that assesses the usefulness of the input modalities and software features, and validates the effectiveness of the MemTable system as a tool for assisting memory recall

Tracing the base of protostellar wind(s) towards the high-mass star forming region AFGL 5142: VLA continuum and VLBA water maser observations

We have conducted phase-reference multi-epoch observations of the 22.2 GHz water masers using the VLBA and multi-frequency study of the continuum emission using the VLA towards the high-mass SFR AFGL 5142. The water maser emission comes from two elongated structures (indicated as Group I and Group II), with the measured proper motions aligned along the structures' elongation axes. Each group consists of two (blue- and red-shifted) clusters of features separated by a few hundreds and thousands of AU respectively for Group I and Group II. The maser features of Group II have both positions and velocities aligned along a direction close to the axis of the outflow traced by HCO+ and SiO emission on angular scales of tens of arcsec. We predict that the maser emission arises from dense, shocked molecular clumps displaced along the axis of the molecular outflow. The two maser clusters of Group I are oriented on the sky along a direction forming a large angle (> 60 degrees) with the axis of the jet/outflow traced by Group II maser features. We have detected a compact (8.4 and 22 GHz) continuum source that falls close to the centroid of Group I masers, indicating that the source ionizing the gas is also responsible for the excitation of the water masers. The kinematic analysis indicates that the Group I masers trace outflowing rather than rotating gas, discarding the Keplerian disk scenario proposed in a previous paper for Group I. Since the axis joining the two maser clusters of Group II does not cross the position of the continuum source, Group II masers might be excited by an (undetected) massive YSO, distinct from the one (pinpointed by the VLA continuum emission) responsible for the excitation of the Group I masers.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in A&

First results from a VLBA proper motion survey of H2O masers in low-mass YSOs: the Serpens core and RNO15-FIR

This article reports first results of a long-term observational program aimed to study the earliest evolution of jet/disk systems in low-mass YSOs by means of VLBI observations of the 22.2 GHz water masers. We report here data for the cluster of low-mass YSOs in the Serpens molecular core and for the single object RNO~15-FIR. Towards Serpens SMM1, the most luminous sub-mm source of the Serpens cluster, the water maser emission comes from two small (< 5 AU in size) clusters of features separated by ~25 AU, having line of sight velocities strongly red-shifted (by more than 10 km/s) with respect to the LSR velocity of the molecular cloud. The two maser clusters are oriented on the sky along a direction that is approximately perpendicular to the axis of the radio continuum jet observed with the VLA towards SMM1. The spatial and velocity distribution of the maser features lead us to favor the interpretation that the maser emission is excited by interaction of the receding lobe of the jet with dense gas in the accretion disk surrounding the YSO in SMM1. Towards RNO~15-FIR, the few detected maser features have both positions and (absolute) velocities aligned along a direction that is parallel to the axis of the molecular outflow observed on much larger angular scales. In this case the maser emission likely emerges from dense, shocked molecular clumps displaced along the axis of the jet emerging from the YSO. The protostar in Serpens SMM1 is more massive than the one in RNO~15-FIR. We discuss the case where a high mass ejection rate can generate jets sufficiently powerful to sweep away from their course the densest portions of circumstellar gas. In this case, the excitation conditions for water masers might preferably occur at the interface between the jet and the accretion disk, rather than along the jet axis.Comment: 18 pages (postscript format); 9 figures; to be published into Astronomy & Astrophysics, Main Journa

Report from the “What is Open?” Workgroup

The scholarly community’s current definition of “open” captures only some of the attributes of openness that exist across different publishing models and content types. Open is not an end in itself, but a means for achieving the most effective dissemination of scholarship and research. We suggest that the different attributes of open exist along a broad spectrum and propose an alternative way of describing and evaluating openness based on four attributes: discoverable, accessible, reusable, and transparent. These four attributes of openness, taken together, form the draft “DART Framework for Open Access.” This framework can be applied to both research artifacts as well as research processes. We welcome input from the broader scholarly community about this framework

Access to shops: The views of low-income shoppers

Concern is mounting as the retail stranglehold upon access to food grows. Research on the implications of restructuring retailing and health inequality has failed to involve low-income consumers in this debate. This paper reports on an exercise conducted for the UK Government's, Social Exclusion Unit's Policy Action Team on Access to Shops. The survey provides a useful baseline of the views of low-income groups in England. The choices that people on low income can make were found to be dominated by certain factors such as income and, most importantly, transport. Consumers reported varying levels of satisfaction with retail provision. The findings suggest gaps between what people have, what they want and what the planning process does and does not offer them. Better policy and processes are needed to include and represent the interests of low-income groups

A Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems: Computational Creativity Evaluation Based on What it is to be Creative

Computational creativity is a flourishing research area, with a variety of creative systems being produced and developed. Creativity evaluation has not kept pace with system development with an evident lack of systematic evaluation of the creativity of these systems in the literature. This is partially due to difficulties in defining what it means for a computer to be creative; indeed, there is no consensus on this for human creativity, let alone its computational equivalent. This paper proposes a Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems (SPECS). SPECS is a three-step process: stating what it means for a particular computational system to be creative, deriving and performing tests based on these statements. To assist this process, the paper offers a collection of key components of creativity, identified empirically from discussions of human and computational creativity. Using this approach, the SPECS methodology is demonstrated through a comparative case study evaluating computational creativity systems that improvise music