Hidden externalities: the globalization of hazardous waste

This article focuses on chemical retailers Jack and Charles Colbert to, first, show the externalization processes linked to the greening of U.S. industry through stricter consumer and environmental protection regulations and, second, illustrate the limitations of nationally framed environmentalism targeting businesses in a global market. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Colberts traded chemicals that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had banned for use in the United States. They exported them legally to countries where the material was still a permitted commodity — primarily in the global South. Rare interview material illustrates how the exporters justified their unequal business deals by misappropriating the meaning of recycling

"Cut holes and sink 'em": chemical weapons disposal and cold war history as a history of risk

Using the incident of the scuttling of the USS Le Baron Russell Briggs, loaded with roughly 22,000 tons of outdated chemical weapons in 1970, this contribution extrapolates how, why, and when in the United States chemical weapons that had been produced as the ultimate answer to the risk of nuclear war became reframed as a risk themselves. The analysis settles on how questions of knowing and not-knowing about potentialities of future events influenced these re-negotiation processes between the myriad actors involved such as the US military, politicians, environmentalists, Anti-Vietnam activists, and the American public. Beyond analyzing historic examples of risk assessment and management, this contribution also demonstrates how we can read the history of the Cold War as a history or risk. I argue that studying the controversy of operation CHASE 13, the sinking of the SS L. B. Briggs, from a risk perspective opens up new avenues into understanding the Cold War from a social and cultural perspective while integrating political and environmental history

Dressing the chopped-random-basis optimization: a bandwidth-limited access to the trap-free landscape

In quantum optimal control theory the success of an optimization algorithm is highly influenced by how the figure of merit to be optimized behaves as a function of the control field, i.e. by the control landscape. Constraints on the control field introduce local minima in the landscape --false traps-- which might prevent an efficient solution of the optimal control problem. Rabitz et al. [Science 303, 1998 (2004)] showed that local minima occur only rarely for unconstrained optimization. Here, we extend this result to the case of bandwidth-limited control pulses showing that in this case one can eliminate the false traps arising from the constraint. Based on this theoretical understanding, we modify the Chopped Random Basis (CRAB) optimal control algorithm and show that this development exploits the advantages of both (unconstrained) gradient algorithms and of truncated basis methods, allowing to always follow the gradient of the unconstrained landscape by bandwidth-limited control functions. We study the effects of additional constraints and show that for reasonable constraints the convergence properties are still maintained. Finally, we numerically show that this approach saturates the theoretical bound on the minimal bandwidth of the control needed to optimally drive the system.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Quantum optimal control within the rotating wave approximation

We study the interplay between rotating wave approximation and optimal control. In particular, we show that for a wide class of optimal control problems one can choose the control field such that the Hamiltonian becomes time-independent under the rotating wave approximation. Thus, we show how to recast the functional minimization defined by the optimal control problem into a simpler multi-variable function minimization. We provide the analytic solution to the state-to-state transfer of the paradigmatic two-level system and to the more general star configuration of an $N$-level system. We demonstrate numerically the usefulness of this approach in the more general class of connected acyclic $N$-level systems with random spectra. Finally, we use it to design a protocol to entangle Rydberg via constant laser pulses atoms in an experimentally relevant range of parameters.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Risk as a category of analysis for a social history of the twentieth century: an introduction

Risks are of particular relevance for the social history of the twentieth century. On the one hand, Western societies’ economic growth gave impetus to the rise of new technologies. Technology, we argue, brought with it new possibilities, but it was also loaded with new risks. On the other hand, societies discussed and explored new notions of responsibility for risks, their management and mitigation. Both aspects changed the meaning and perception of traditional risks, such as natural catastrophes, sickness or falling into poverty. In this introduction, we explore the use of risk as a category of analysis for a social history of the twentieth century. In a form of double-intervention on time and methodology, we, on the one hand, hold risks as a 'phenomenon' to be of particular relevance - even characteristic for - the twentieth century; on the other hand, we posit that risk as an analytical category offers us new avenues into understanding modern societies in three important ways: (1) the importance of time and future in human actions and debates, (2) the dual nature of risks as discursively constructed and simultaneously material, (3) the social justice implications of this dual nature that were often unequally shared, be it nationally or globally. In the end, we argue, by linking the materiality of challenges and risks with how these were perceived and discursively constructed, we are better able to understand the rules and the changes that underpin historical societies and which are - as our authors show in this HSR Special Issue - very often determined in reaction to risks..

Optimal Phonon-to-Spin Mapping in a system of a trapped ion

We propose a protocol for measurement of the phonon number distribution of a harmonic oscillator based on selective mapping to a discrete spin-1/2 degree of freedom. We consider a system of a harmonically trapped ion, where a transition between two long lived states can be driven with resolved motional sidebands. The required unitary transforms are generated by amplitude-modulated polychromatic radiation fields, where the time-domain ramps are obtained from numerical optimization by application of the Chopped RAndom Basis (CRAB) algorithm. We provide a detailed analysis of the scaling behavior of the attainable fidelities and required times for the mapping transform with respect to the size of the Hilbert space. As one application we show how the mapping can be employed as a building block for experiments which require measurement of the work distribution of a quantum process

Toxic Timescapes: Examining Toxicity across Time and Space

An interdisciplinary environmental humanities volume that explores human-environment relationships on our permanently polluted planet. While toxicity and pollution are ever present in modern daily life, politicians, juridical systems, media outlets, scholars, and the public alike show great difficulty in detecting, defining, monitoring, or generally coming to terms with them. This volume’s contributors argue that the source of this difficulty lies in the struggle to make sense of the intersecting temporal and spatial scales working on the human and more-than-human body, while continuing to acknowledge race, class, and gender in terms of global environmental justice and social inequality. The term toxic timescapes refers to this intricate intersectionality of time, space, and bodies in relation to toxic exposure. As a tool of analysis, it unpacks linear understandings of time and explores how harmful substances permeate temporal and physical space as both event and process. It equips scholars with new ways of creating data and conceptualizing the past, present, and future presence and possible effects of harmful substances and provides a theoretical framework for new environmental narratives. To think in terms of toxic timescapes is to radically shift our understanding of toxicants in the complex web of life. Toxicity, pollution, and modes of exposure are never static; therefore, dose, timing, velocity, mixture, frequency, and chronology matter as much as the geographic location and societal position of those exposed. Together, these factors create a specific toxic timescape that lies at the heart of each contributor’s narrative. Contributors from the disciplines of history, human geography, science and technology studies, philosophy, and political ecology come together to demonstrate the complex reality of a toxic existence. Their case studies span the globe as they observe the intersection of multiple times and spaces at such diverse locations as former battlefields in Vietnam, aging nuclear-weapon storage facilities in Greenland, waste deposits in southern Italy, chemical facilities along the Gulf of Mexico, and coral-breeding laboratories across the world.https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/1014/thumbnail.jp