Promoting sustainable construction: European and British networks at the knowledge-policy interface

The responsibility of builders, developers, planners, architects and policy-makers to promote more sustainable urban environments and buildings is consistently prioritized in nascent European, national and local planning strategies. Yet what counts as ‘sustainable construction’ varies by issue, sector and policy mandate. Proponents of sustainable construction might promote technological shifts in terms of materials, energy use and waste reduction, or they might encourage cultural and behavioural adaptations to how society views, uses and plans its built environment. This paper examines this problematic bifurcation of sustainable construction into two exclusive agendas: the construction technology agenda and the urban sustainability planning agenda, each constituted by distinct policy and sector-based networks. It is argued that the orientation to detail in the construction technology agenda operates at odds with the holistic process orientation of the broader urban sustainability agenda, thus complicating the effective translation or co-generation of sustainable construction knowledge between the two networks. The lack of integration between these two sets of networks should be cause for concern, yet appears to be largely overlooked in mainstream policy processes

An unconventional magnetically-coupled multivibrator

Multivibrator circuit provides a low-frequency sine wave output without using a low-frequency power transformer or filter components. This circuit, utilizing two transistors and a magnetic core, represents a reduction in complexity, size, and weight over similar units

Optimized Double-well quantum interferometry with Gaussian squeezed-states

A Mach-Zender interferometer with a gaussian number-difference squeezed input state can exhibit sub-shot-noise phase resolution over a large phase-interval. We obtain the optimal level of squeezing for a given phase-interval $\Delta\theta_0$ and particle number $N$, with the resulting phase-estimation uncertainty smoothly approaching $3.5/N$ as $\Delta\theta_0$ approaches 10/N, achieved with highly squeezed states near the Fock regime. We then analyze an adaptive measurement scheme which allows any phase on $(-\pi/2,\pi/2)$ to be measured with a precision of $3.5/N$ requiring only a few measurements, even for very large $N$. We obtain an asymptotic scaling law of $\Delta\theta\approx (2.1+3.2\ln(\ln(N_{tot}\tan\Delta\theta_0)))/N_{tot}$, resulting in a final precision of $\approx 10/N_{tot}$. This scheme can be readily implemented in a double-well Bose-Einstein condensate system, as the optimal input states can be obtained by adiabatic manipulation of the double-well ground state.Comment: updated versio

A Continuous-Discontinuous Second-Order Transition in the Satisfiability of Random Horn-SAT Formulas

We compute the probability of satisfiability of a class of random Horn-SAT formulae, motivated by a connection with the nonemptiness problem of finite tree automata. In particular, when the maximum clause length is 3, this model displays a curve in its parameter space along which the probability of satisfiability is discontinuous, ending in a second-order phase transition where it becomes continuous. This is the first case in which a phase transition of this type has been rigorously established for a random constraint satisfaction problem

The Distribution of Rents in Supply Chain Industries: The Case of High Oil Corn

Value-enhanced crops (VEC's) have been the focus of "second-generation" genetically modified (GM) crops. The market power granted by intellectual property rights (IPR) and the use of contractual arrangements in VEC gene and seed production have fostered a move toward tightly-aligned supply chain industries. This paper suggests and tests an analytical methodology for examining a number of issues in tightly-aligned supply chain industries: (1) the distributions of potential monopolistic and monopsonistic rents, (2) choices of licensing intellectual property versus in-house seed production and distribution (3) implications of alternative marketing strategies and elasticities of demand on the magnitudes of rents, and (4) determining impacts on different stages within the supply chain and on substitute commodities. The high-oil corn industry is used as a case study.equilibrium displacement, high-oil corn, mathematical programming, value-enhanced crops, Crop Production/Industries, Industrial Organization,

Bounded Refinement Types

We present a notion of bounded quantification for refinement types and show how it expands the expressiveness of refinement typing by using it to develop typed combinators for: (1) relational algebra and safe database access, (2) Floyd-Hoare logic within a state transformer monad equipped with combinators for branching and looping, and (3) using the above to implement a refined IO monad that tracks capabilities and resource usage. This leap in expressiveness comes via a translation to "ghost" functions, which lets us retain the automated and decidable SMT based checking and inference that makes refinement typing effective in practice.Comment: 14 pages, International Conference on Functional Programming, ICFP 201