Environmental Federalism in the European Union and the United States

The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) are federal systems in which the responsibility for environmental policy-making is divided or shared between the central government and the (member) states. The attribution of decision-making power has important policy implications. This chapter compares the role of central and local authorities in the US and the EU in formulating environmental regulations in three areas: automotive emissions for health related (criteria) pollutants, packaging waste, and global climate change. Automotive emissions are relatively centralised in both political systems. In the cases of packaging waste and global climate change, regulatory policy-making is shared in the EU, but is primarily the responsibility of local governments in the US. Thus, in some important areas, regulatory policy-making is more centralised in the EU. The most important role local governments play in the regulatory process is to help diffuse stringent local standards through more centralised regulations, a dynamic which has become recently become more important in the EU than in the US.

The Constitutive Relations and the Magnetoelectric Effect for Moving Media

In this paper the constitutive relations for moving media with homogeneous and isotropic electric and magnetic properties are presented as the connections between the generalized magnetization-polarization bivector $$ and the electromagnetic field F. Using the decompositions of F and $\mathcal{M}$, it is shown how the polarization vector P(x) and the magnetization vector M(x) depend on E, B and two different velocity vectors, u - the bulk velocity vector of the medium, and v - the velocity vector of the observers who measure E and B fields. These constitutive relations with four-dimensional geometric quantities, which correctly transform under the Lorentz transformations (LT), are compared with Minkowski's constitutive relations with the 3-vectors and several essential differences are pointed out. They are caused by the fact that, contrary to the general opinion, the usual transformations of the 3-vectors $$, $\mathbf{B}$, $\mathbf{P}$, $\mathbf{M}$, etc. are not the LT. The physical explanation is presented for the existence of the magnetoelectric effect in moving media that essentially differs from the traditional one.Comment: 18 pages, In Ref. [10] here, which corresponds to Ref. [18] in the published paper in IJMPB, Z. Oziewicz's published paper is added. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1101.329

Verification of PCP-Related Computational Reductions in Coq

We formally verify several computational reductions concerning the Post correspondence problem (PCP) using the proof assistant Coq. Our verifications include a reduction of a string rewriting problem generalising the halting problem for Turing machines to PCP, and reductions of PCP to the intersection problem and the palindrome problem for context-free grammars. Interestingly, rigorous correctness proofs for some of the reductions are missing in the literature

The morphological discrimination of microfilariae of Onchocerca volvulus from Mansonella ozzardi.

There is no published account which allows the morphological discrimination of microfilariae of Onchocerca volvulus and M. ozzardi from each other. However, they occur together in parts of Brazil and Venezuela, and presumably there is always the possibility that migration could establish new sympatric populations in the future. The objective of this study was to evaluate simple morphological characters that might be used for species-diagnosis of microfilariae. The conclusions were that the location of microfilariae in the blood or skin, the body size and the nucleation of the nerve ring are expected to be useful first indications of species identity, but cannot be used for confident diagnosis. The structure of the cephalic armature (stained with alcian blue) seems to be species specific, but is of limited application because it is often difficult to see. However, the pattern of nucleation of the tail (as expressed by the ratio of the length of the terminal nucleus compared with the length of the tail space) is distinctive and is expected to be diagnostic

Restricted Diffusion of Pus in the Subarachnoid Space: MRSA Meningo-Vasculitis and Progressive Brainstem Ischemic Strokes – A Case Report

Extra-axial restriction on diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) is an unusual finding on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Intra-axial restriction on DWI, however, is common, and can represent brain parenchymal infarction, tumor, abscess, or toxic-metabolic process. The infrequency of extra-axial DWI restriction and the paucity of clinico-pathological correlation in the literature limit its differential diagnosis. Scant case reports suggest that extra-axial DWI restriction could be a lymphoma, neurenteric cyst, or, in one patient, subdural empyema [1,2,3]. We postulate that pus formation must be excluded first, because it can provoke an aggressive meningo-vasculitis with rapidly fatal, intra-axial infarctions. Our patient was a 45-year-old man, presenting to our hospital with left facial droop and right (contralateral) arm and leg weakness. Initial MRI revealed DWI restriction in the left lateral pons, consistent with a classic Millard-Gubler stroke. Also noted was a subtle, extra-axial area of curvilinear diffusion restriction in the left cerebellar-pontine angle's subarachnoid space. Days later, the patient had a headache, and repeat MRI revealed extension of the two DWI lesions – both the intra-axial pontine infarction and the extra-axial area of restricted diffusion in the subarachnoid space. The patient became comatose, a third MRI revealed more extensive DWI restrictions, and he expired despite aggressive care. Autopsy revealed massive brainstem infarcts, a thick lymphoplasmacytic infiltrate, copious Gram-Positive cocci (likely MRSA) and arteries partially occluded with fibrointimal proliferation. This emphasizes the concept that extra-axial DWI restriction can represent pus development in the subarachnoid space – a radiographic marker to identify a patient at risk for demise due to septic, meningo-vasculitic infarctions

Temporal Stream Logic: Synthesis beyond the Bools

Reactive systems that operate in environments with complex data, such as mobile apps or embedded controllers with many sensors, are difficult to synthesize. Synthesis tools usually fail for such systems because the state space resulting from the discretization of the data is too large. We introduce TSL, a new temporal logic that separates control and data. We provide a CEGAR-based synthesis approach for the construction of implementations that are guaranteed to satisfy a TSL specification for all possible instantiations of the data processing functions. TSL provides an attractive trade-off for synthesis. On the one hand, synthesis from TSL, unlike synthesis from standard temporal logics, is undecidable in general. On the other hand, however, synthesis from TSL is scalable, because it is independent of the complexity of the handled data. Among other benchmarks, we have successfully synthesized a music player Android app and a controller for an autonomous vehicle in the Open Race Car Simulator (TORCS.