The Peaks of Eternal Light: a Near-term Property Issue on the Moon

The Outer Space Treaty makes it clear that the Moon is the province of all mankind, with the latter ordinarily understood to exclude state or private appropriation of any portion of its surface. However, there are indeterminacies in the Treaty and in space law generally over the issue of appropriation. These indeterminacies might permit a close approximation to a property claim or some manner of quasi-property. The recently revealed highly inhomogeneous distribution of lunar resources changes the context of these issues. We illustrate this altered situation by considering the Peaks of Eternal Light. They occupy about one square kilometer of the lunar surface. We consider a thought experiment in which a Solar telescope is placed on one of the Peaks of Eternal Light at the lunar South pole for scientific research. Its operation would require nondisturbance, and hence that the Peak remain unvisited by others, effectively establishing a claim of protective exclusion and de facto appropriation. Such a telescope would be relatively easy to emplace with todays technology and so poses a near-term property issue on the Moon. While effective appropriation of a Peak might proceed without raising some of the familiar problems associated with commercial development (especially lunar mining), the possibility of such appropriation nonetheless raises some significant issues concerning justice and the safeguarding of scientific practice on the lunar surface. We consider this issue from scientific, technical, ethical and policy viewpoints.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures (color). Space Policy in pres

How uncertain are the welfare costs of inflation?

This paper quantifies some of the general equilibrium costs of inflation for the UK using a shopping-time model. It tests whether money balances tend to a finite number as nominal interest rates tend to zero, and explores how uncertainties about the shape of the money demand curve translate into uncertainties about these welfare costs of inflation. A key uncertainty is the existence of a satiation point for money balances. We show that without observations at nominal interest rates close to zero, the power of satiation tests can be low.

Dynamic serviceability design of attic room floors in modern timber frame houses

In this paper, the vibrational performance of roof trusses for constructing the attic room floors with various geometric configurations was investigated using commercial finite element software – SAP2000. Vibrational parameters included the mid-span deflections of the bottom chord under dead loads and unit point load, and modal frequencies up to 40 Hz and modal shapes. This study confirmed that increasing the bottom chord size and including composite bottom chord and fully composite roof truss members could largely enhance the dynamic serviceability performance of the attic room floors in timber frame houses

Natural gauge mediation with a bino NLSP at the LHC

Natural models of supersymmetry with a gravitino LSP provide distinctive signatures at the LHC. For a neutralino NLSP, sparticles can decay to two high energy photons plus missing energy. We use the ATLAS diphoton search with 4.8 fb^{-1} of data to place limits in both the stop-gluino and neutralino-chargino mass planes for this scenario. If the neutralino is heavier than 50 GeV, the lightest stop must be heavier than 580 GeV, the gluino heavier than 1100 GeV and charginos must be heavier than approximately 300-470 GeV. This provides the first nontrivial constraints in natural gauge mediation models with a neutralino NLSP decaying to photons, and implies a fine tuning of at least a few percent in such models.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures; v2: updated figure 3, version published in PR

Owen Rye: An Interview by Tony Martin

An interview by Tony Martin with Owen Rye exploring the motivations, inspirations and personal narratives associated with the piece of work that was so important that he kept it for himself

Greg Daly: An Interview by Tony Martin

An interview by Tony Martin with Greg Daly exploring the motivations, inspirations and personal narratives associated with the piece of work that was so important that he kept it for himself

Harumi Nakashima

An interview by Tony Martin with Harumi Nakashima exploring the motivations, inspirations and personal narratives associated with the piece of work that was so important that he kept it for herself