Taking Away the Tightrope: Fixing the National Flood Insurance Program Circus via Eminent Domain

As Harvey, Irma, Maria and other major 2017 storms washed upon the shores of the United States, millions of people across the nation in major cities and rural areas alike found their possessions, their homes, and sadly in many cases their lives, washed away with the storms. The destructive hurricane season came just as Congress began to consider the reauthorization of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), a federal system of subsidized flood insurance created to fill a void left by private insurers in the 1960s. Extreme weather events such as these illustrate the need for such a program and pressure politicians to continue providing coverage in high-risk area; yet, the growing number and intensity of storms as a result of climate change also underscores the need for NFIP reform. The continued provision of coverage at subsidized premium rates under the NFIP have not only contributed to the program’s long-term insolvency, but also have created perverse incentives to develop in high-risk areas that will only grow riskier over time. The most egregious example of this comes in the form of severe repetitive loss properties—homes that flood dozens of times, yet continue to receive insurance benefits many times the value of the underlying property. Rather than maintaining the status quo, this note proposes the institution of a system of “involuntary buyouts,” whereby federal, state, and local governmental actors can exercise their existing authority under the Takings Clause. This approach would improve the solvency of the NFIP, prevent redevelopment in high-risk areas, and create natural barriers to safeguard communities against future disasters

Effect of centrifugal force on critical flutter speed on a uniform cantilever beam

Semirigid flutter theory is used. Calculations are made on airfoils with fundamental bending frequencies up to 2000 radian per second. Centrifugal force can under certain conditions reduce the critical flutter speed

Analytical determination of coupled bending-torsion vibrations of cantilever beams by means of station functions

A method based on the concept of station functions is presented for calculating the modes and the frequencies of nonuniform cantilever beams vibrating in torsion, bending, and coupled bending-torsion motion. The method combines some of the advantages of the Rayleigh-Ritz and Stodola methods, in that a continuous loading function for the beam is used, with the advantages of the influence-coefficient method, in that the continuous loading function is obtained in terms of the displacements of a finite number of stations along the beam

Fast metric embedding into the Hamming cube

We consider the problem of embedding a subset of $\mathbb{R}^n$ into a low-dimensional Hamming cube in an almost isometric way. We construct a simple and computationally efficient map that achieves this task with high probability: we first apply a specific structured random matrix, which we call the double circulant matrix; using that matrix requires little storage and matrix-vector multiplication can be performed in near-linear time. We then binarize each vector by comparing each of its entries to a random threshold, selected uniformly at random from a well-chosen interval. We estimate the number of bits required for this encoding scheme in terms of two natural geometric complexity parameters of the set -- its Euclidean covering numbers and its localized Gaussian complexity. The estimate we derive turns out to be the best that one can hope for -- up to logarithmic terms. The key to the proof is a phenomenon of independent interest: we show that the double circulant matrix mimics the behavior of a Gaussian matrix in two important ways. First, it yields an almost isometric embedding of any subset of $\ell_2^n$ into $\ell_1^m$ and, second, it maps an arbitrary set in $\mathbb{R}^n$ into a set of well-spread vectors