Vulnerability : a view from different disciplines

Practitioners from different disciplines use different meanings and concepts of vulnerability, which, in turn, have led to diverse methods of measuring it. This paper presents a selective review of the literature from several disciplines to examine how they define and measure vulnerability. The disciplines include economics, sociology/anthropology, disaster management, environmental science, and health/nutrition. Differences between the disciplines can be explained by their tendency to focus on different components of risk, household responses to risk and welfare outcomes. In general, they focus either on the risks (at one extreme) or the underlying conditions (or outcomes) at the other. Trade-offs exist between simple measurement schemes and rich conceptual understanding.Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Economic Theory&Research,Rural Poverty Reduction

Positive representations of finite groups in Riesz spaces

In this paper, which is part of a study of positive representations of locally compact groups in Banach lattices, we initiate the theory of positive representations of finite groups in Riesz spaces. If such a representation has only the zero subspace and possibly the space itself as invariant principal bands, then the space is Archimedean and finite dimensional. Various notions of irreducibility of a positive representation are introduced and, for a finite group acting positively in a space with sufficiently many projections, these are shown to be equal. We describe the finite dimensional positive Archimedean representations of a finite group and establish that, up to order equivalence, these are order direct sums, with unique multiplicities, of the order indecomposable positive representations naturally associated with transitive $G$-spaces. Character theory is shown to break down for positive representations. Induction and systems of imprimitivity are introduced in an ordered context, where the multiplicity formulation of Frobenius reciprocity turns out not to hold.Comment: 23 pages. To appear in International Journal of Mathematic

Partial order and a T0T_0-topology in a set of finite quantum systems

A `whole-part' theory is developed for a set of finite quantum systems $\Sigma (n)$ with variables in ${\mathbb Z}(n)$. The partial order `subsystem' is defined, by embedding various attributes of the system $\Sigma (m)$ (quantum states, density matrices, etc) into their counterparts in the supersystem $\Sigma (n)$ (for $m|n$). The compatibility of these embeddings is studied. The concept of ubiquity is introduced for quantities which fit with this structure. It is shown that various entropic quantities are ubiquitous. The sets of various quantities become $T_0$-topological spaces with the divisor topology, which encapsulates fundamental physical properties. These sets can be converted into directed-complete partial orders (dcpo), by adding `top elements'. The continuity of various maps among these sets is studied

Feasibility Study of Economics and Performance of Solar PV at the Atlas Industrial Park in Duluth, Minnesota

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 5, in accordance with the RE-Powering America's Land initiative, selected the Atlas Industrial Park in Duluth, Minnesota, for a feasibility study of renewable energy production. The EPA provided funding to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to support a feasibility study of solar renewable energy generation at the Atlas Industrial Park. NREL provided technical assistance for this project but did not assess environmental conditions at the site beyond those related to the performance of a photovoltaic (PV) system. The purpose of this study is to assess the site for a possible PV installation and estimate the cost, performance, and site impacts of different PV configurations. In addition, the study evaluates financing options that could assist in the implementation of a PV system at the site