Phase II Compliance & Illicit Discharge Ordinances

How municipalities can implement illicit discharge ordinances in compliance with Phase II of the NPDES program of the Clean Water Act

"Convince us'': an argument for the morality of persuasion

This paper explores the dierence between 'persuasion' and 'manipulation', both of which are instantiated in persuasive technologies to date. We present a case study of the system we are currently developing to foster local spending behavior by a community group | with sensitive implications for the community's sense of identity | and contrast our approach with what we would understand to be a manipulative approach. Our intention is to a) respond to anticipated critique that such a system could be interpreted as manipulative, b) present our argument for how persuasive technologies can be persuasive without being manipulative, and c) explain why, for this case study, its important that our approach be persuasive

Gibbs measures of nonlinear Schrödinger equations as limits of quantum many-body states in dimensions d <=3

We prove that Gibbs measures of nonlinear Schr¨odinger equations arise as high-temperature limits of thermal states in many-body quantum mechanics. Our results hold for defocusing interactions in dimensions d = 1, 2, 3. The many-body quantum thermal states that we consider are the grand canonical ensemble for d = 1 and an appropriate modification of the grand canonical ensemble for d = 2, 3. In dimensions d = 2, 3, the Gibbs measures are supported on singular distributions, and a renormalization of the chemical potential is necessary. On the many-body quantum side, the need for renormalization is manifested by a rapid growth of the number of particles. We relate the original many-body quantum problem to a renormalized version obtained by solving a counterterm problem. Our proof is based on ideas from field theory, using a perturbative expansion in the interaction, organized by using a diagrammatic representation, and on Borel resummation of the resulting series

Interacting loop ensembles and Bose gases

We study interacting Bose gases in thermal equilibrium on a lattice. We establish convergence of the grand canonical Gibbs states of such gases to their mean-field (classical field) and large-mass (classical particle) limits. The former is a classical field theory for a complex scalar field with quartic self-interaction. The latter is a classical theory of point particles with two-body interactions. Our analysis is based on representations in terms of ensembles of interacting random loops, the Ginibre loop ensemble for Bose gases and the Symanzik loop ensemble for classical scalar field theories. For small enough interactions, our results also hold in infinite volume

Fifty years of pulsar candidate selection: from simple filters to a new principled real-time classification approach

Improving survey specifications are causing an exponential rise in pulsar candidate numbers and data volumes. We study the candidate filters used to mitigate these problems during the past fifty years. We find that some existing methods such as applying constraints on the total number of candidates collected per observation, may have detrimental effects on the success of pulsar searches. Those methods immune to such effects are found to be ill-equipped to deal with the problems associated with increasing data volumes and candidate numbers, motivating the development of new approaches. We therefore present a new method designed for on-line operation. It selects promising candidates using a purpose-built tree-based machine learning classifier, the Gaussian Hellinger Very Fast Decision Tree (GH-VFDT), and a new set of features for describing candidates. The features have been chosen so as to i) maximise the separation between candidates arising from noise and those of probable astrophysical origin, and ii) be as survey-independent as possible. Using these features our new approach can process millions of candidates in seconds (~1 million every 15 seconds), with high levels of pulsar recall (90%+). This technique is therefore applicable to the large volumes of data expected to be produced by the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Use of this approach has assisted in the discovery of 20 new pulsars in data obtained during the LOFAR Tied-Array All-Sky Survey (LOTAAS).Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 20 pages, 8 figures. See http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/pulsar/Surveys.html for survey data, and https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3080389.v1 for our dat

A Research-Based Model for Digital Mapping and Art History: Notes from the Field

Most digital mapping in art history today divides the research process from the visualization aspects of the project. This problem became the focus of a summer institute that Paul Jaskot and Anne Kelly Knowles ran at Middlebury College with the support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Our article both reports on the institute and suggests how research questions can complement digital mapping methods. We conclude with three case studies of spatial questions in art history and discuss the Fellows’ use of GIS to explore examples from Qing Dynasty China, medieval Gotland, and contemporary New York City