Development of a land use regression model for black carbon using mobile monitoring data and its application to pollution-avoiding routing

Black carbon is often used as an indicator for combustion-related air pollution. In urban environments, on-road black carbon concentrations have a large spatial variability, suggesting that the personal exposure of a cyclist to black carbon can heavily depend on the route that is chosen to reach a destination. In this paper, we describe the development of a cyclist routing procedure that minimizes personal exposure to black carbon. Firstly, a land use regression model for predicting black carbon concentrations in an urban environment is developed using mobile monitoring data, collected by cyclists. The optimal model is selected and validated using a spatially stratified cross-validation scheme. The resulting model is integrated in a dedicated routing procedure that minimizes personal exposure to black carbon during cycling. The best model obtains a coefficient of multiple correlation of R = 0.520. Simulations with the black carbon exposure minimizing routing procedure indicate that the inhaled amount of black carbon is reduced by 1.58% on average as compared to the shortest-path route, with extreme cases where a reduction of up to 13.35% is obtained. Moreover, we observed that the average exposure to black carbon and the exposure to local peak concentrations on a route are competing objectives, and propose a parametrized cost function for the routing problem that allows for a gradual transition from routes that minimize average exposure to routes that minimize peak exposure

Processes and consequences in business ethical dilemmas: The oil industry and climate changes

This paper proposes a framework to examine business ethical dilemmas and business attitudes towards such dilemmas. Business ethical dilemmas can be understood as reflecting a contradiction between a socially detrimental process and a self-interested profitable consequence. This representation allows us to distinguish two forms of behavior differing by whether priority is put on consequences or on processes. We argue that these forms imply very different business attitudes towards society: controversial or competitive for the former and aligned or cooperative for the latter. These attitudes are then analyzed at the discursive level in order to address the question of good faith in business argumentation, i.e. to which extent are these attitudes consistent with actual business behaviors. We argue that consequential attitudes mostly involve communication and lobbying actions aiming at eluding the dilemma. Therefore, the question of good faith for consequential attitudes lies in the consistency between beliefs and discourse. On the other hand, procedural attitudes acknowledge the dilemma and claim a change of the process of behavior. They thus raise the question of the consistency between discourses and actual behavior. We apply this processes/consequences framework to the case of the oil industry’s climate change ethical dilemma which comes forth as a dilemma between ‘emitting greenhouse gases’ and ‘making more profits’. And we examine the different attitudes of two oil corporations-BP Amoco and ExxonMobil-towards the dilemma.Business ethical dilemma, procedural rationality, consequential rationality, oil industry, climate change, Kyoto protocol

A classification of ideals in Steinberg and Leavitt path algebras over arbitrary rings

We give a one-to-one correspondence between ideals in the Steinberg algebra of a Hausdorff ample groupoid $G$, and certain families of ideals in the group algebras of isotropy groups in $G$. This generalises a known ideal correspondence theorem for Steinberg algebras of strongly effective groupoids. We use this to give a complete graph-theoretic description of the ideal lattice of Leavitt path algebras over arbitrary commutative rings, generalising the classification of ideals in Leavitt path algebras over fields

Change Impact Analysis for SysML Requirements Models based on Semantics of Trace Relations

Change impact analysis is one of the applications of requirements traceability in software engineering community. In this paper, we focus on requirements and requirements relations from traceability perspective. We provide formal definitions of the requirements relations in SysML for change impact analysis. Our approach aims at keeping the model synchronized with what stakeholders want to be modeled, and possibly implemented as well, which we called as the domain. The differences between the domain and model are defined as external inconsistencies. The inconsistencies are propagated for the whole model by using the formalization of relations, and mapped to proposed model changes. We provide tool support which is a plug-in of the commercial visual software modeler BluePrint

The geometric Satake equivalence for integral motives

We prove the geometric Satake equivalence for mixed Tate motives over the integral motivic cohomology spectrum. This refines previous versions of the geometric Satake equivalence for split groups and power series affine Grassmannians. Our new geometric results include Whitney-Tate stratifications of Beilinson-Drinfeld Grassmannians and cellular decompositions of semi-infinite orbits. With future global applications in mind, we also achieve an equivalence relative to a power of the affine line. Finally, we use our equivalence to give Tannakian constructions of the C-group and a modified form of Vinberg's monoid.Comment: Comments welcome