Public participation in the marine spatial planning process : lessons learned from theoretical, legal, and empirical perspectives

Public participation is a crucial component in environmental decision-making. The accepted wisdom is that participatory decision-making is a good thing. However, there is no single solution for designing and implementing public participation. The participation pattern in the marine planning context should be different from those applied in other decision-making processes in order to address the particular challenges and demands of marine management. Few studies have focused on public participation in marine planning, especially in the English marine planning context. This thesis fills this knowledge gap by studying public participation in English marine planning from theoretical, legal and empirical perspectives.This thesis addresses three research questions. First, what is the appropriate participation strategy for English marine planning? Second, to what extent does the current legal regime ensure effective public participation in marine planning and other marine-related decision-making? Third, how have the requirements for participation been implemented in marine planning practices?To investigate these questions, this thesis constructs a pluralist rationale for participation, including normative, substantive and instrumental dimensions, which fits the English marine planning context. The appropriate strategy for participation is identified. This strategy will contribute to fulfil the pluralist rationale for participation in marine planning process. The thesis also reviews the relevant legal framework at the international and domestic levels, to examine to what extent these legal regimes can support the implementation of public participation in the marine decision-making context. Finally, as a qualitative case study, the process and outcome of participation in producing the English East Inshore and Offshore Marine Plans are evaluated to reveal the deficiencies regarding participation in the English marine planning regime

Revisitando o problema das condições de satisfação e a indispensabilidade do i-desire

Gregory Currie has argued for the indispensability of i-desires – a kind of imaginative counterpart of desires – by drawing a distinction between the satisfaction conditions of the desire-like states involved in our emotional responses to tragedies and those of genuine desires. Nevertheless, Fiora Salis has recently shown that the same sort of distinction can also be found in nonfictional cases and has proposed a solution to the issue of satisfaction conditions that dispenses with i-desires. In this paper, I refute Salis’s stance and argue for the indispensability of i-desires. For this aim to be achieved, I first argue that the distinction between the satisfaction conditions of i-desires and those of desires can be given a different explanation, and that in this case, the same sort of distinction cannot arise in nonfictional cases; Secondly, I argue that we cannot make sense of the conflict between our desire-like states triggered by fictions and our background desires, and therefore i-desires should be introduced to avoid this conflict.Keywords: i-desires, desire-like imaginings, tragedy, imaginative desires,Gregory Currie defendeu a indispensabilidade dos i-desejos – um tipo de contraponto imaginativo dos desejos – ao distinguir entre as condições de satisfação dos estados semelhantes ao desejo envolvidos em nossas reações emocionais às tragédias e entre as mesmas com relação a desejos autênticos. No entanto, Fiora Salis mostrou recentemente que o mesmo tipo de distinção também pode ser encontrado em casos não ficcionais e propôs uma solução para a questão das condições de satisfação que dispensam i-desejos. Neste artigo, contesto a posição de Salis e argumento a favor da indispensabilidade dos i-desejos. Para que esse objetivo seja alcançado, argumento primeiramente que a distinção entre as condições de satisfação dos i-desejos e as dos desejos em si pode receber uma explicação diferente e que, nesse caso, o mesmo tipo de distinção não pode surgir em casos não ficcionais; Em segundo lugar, argumento que não podemos dar sentido ao conflito entre nossos estados semelhantes ao desejo desencadeados por ficções e nossos desejos de fundo e, portanto, os i-desejos deveriam ser apresentados para evitar esse conflito.Palavras-chave: I-desejos, imaginações de desejo, tragédia, desejos imaginativos

Dupla Consciência do Ator e Imaginação Recreativa

Many actors report a form of dual-consciousness when playing roles on stage: they react to the given circumstances as their characters would do, but they do not forget they are on the stage. This paper analyzes the concept of dual-consciousness and argues that actor dual-consciousness results from the actor’s imaginings, which both recreate the experience of the character and inform the actor about the non-reality of the experience. Keywords: Acting, actor, dual-consciousness, recreative imagination, experiential identification.Muitos atores relatam uma forma de dupla consciência ao interpretar papéis em cena: eles reagem a determinadas circunstâncias como seus personagens reagiriam, mas não se esquecem de que estão em cena. Este estudo analisa o conceito de dupla consciência, e argumenta que a consciência dupla do ator resulta de sua imaginação, que tanto recria a experiência do personagem quanto informa o ator sobre a irrealidade da experiência. Palavras-chave: Atuação, ator, dupla consciência, imaginação recreativa, identificação experiencial.Muitos atores relatam uma forma de dupla consciência ao interpretar papéis em cena: eles reagem a determinadas circunstâncias como seus personagens reagiriam, mas não se esquecem de que estão em cena. Este estudo analisa o conceito de dupla consciência, e argumenta que a consciência dupla do ator resulta de sua imaginação, que tanto recria a experiência do personagem quanto informa o ator sobre a irrealidade da experiência. Palavras-chave: Atuação, ator, dupla consciência, imaginação recreativa, identificação experiencial

Protective effect of β-Lactoglobulin against heat induced loss of antioxidant activity of resveratrol

Resveratrol exhibits many health benefits; however, low water-solubility and instability under processing conditions such as heating can be some of the main challenges for its processing and formulation. Here the complexation of β-lactoglobulin (β-Lg) with resveratrol was investigated to improve its solubility and stability. The solubility of resveratrol in water was determined as 7 mg/100 ml. Resveratrol-β-Lg nanoparticles (181.8 nm) were produced at pH 6 and 75 °C for 45 min. Heating resveratrol solutions at 75 °C for 45 min resulted in isomerization of resveratrol and reduced antioxidant activity. However, resveratrol-β-Lg nanocomplexes which had undergone the same heat treatment exhibited improved antioxidant activity. Heating under pasteurisation conditions led to similar results and both native β-Lg and nanoparticles exhibited a protective effect against heat-induced chemical changes in resveratrol, resulting in enhanced antioxidant activity. Fluorescence measurements revealed strong interactions of resveratrol with both native protein and nanoparticles

Diversity and Education at WPI

The purpose of this project was to create a set of resources to help international students transitioning from their native country to their second home, WPI. In the first year, international students experience common problems, such as a language barrier, different education system and cultural shock. During our study, the team conducted four focus group meetings to confirm initial background research. As a result, the team developed guidelines that can be beneficial for the WPI community

Noise effects on purity and quantum entanglement in terms of physical implementability

Quantum decoherence due to imperfect manipulation of quantum devices is a key issue in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Standard analyses in quantum information and quantum computation use error rates to parameterize quantum noise channels. However, there is no explicit relation between the decoherence effect induced by a noise channel and its error rate. In this work, we propose to characterize the decoherence effect of a noise channel by the physical implementability of its inverse, which is a universal parameter quantifying the difficulty to simulate the noise inverse with accessible quantum channels. We establish two concise inequalities connecting the decrease of the state purity and logarithmic negativity after a noise channel to the physical implementability of the noise inverse. Our results are numerically demonstrated on several commonly adopted two-qubit noise models.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur

Rumba : a Python framework for automating large-scale recursive internet experiments on GENI and FIRE+

It is not easy to design and run Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) due to: 1) finding the optimal number of filters (i.e., the width) at each layer is tricky, given an architecture; and 2) the computational intensity of CNNs impedes the deployment on computationally limited devices. Oracle Pruning is designed to remove the unimportant filters from a well-trained CNN, which estimates the filters’ importance by ablating them in turn and evaluating the model, thus delivers high accuracy but suffers from intolerable time complexity, and requires a given resulting width but cannot automatically find it. To address these problems, we propose Approximated Oracle Filter Pruning (AOFP), which keeps searching for the least important filters in a binary search manner, makes pruning attempts by masking out filters randomly, accumulates the resulting errors, and finetunes the model via a multi-path framework. As AOFP enables simultaneous pruning on multiple layers, we can prune an existing very deep CNN with acceptable time cost, negligible accuracy drop, and no heuristic knowledge, or re-design a model which exerts higher accuracy and faster inferenc

Composite Quantum Phases in Non-Hermitian Systems

Non-Hermitian systems have attracted considerable interest in recent years owing to their unique topological properties that are absent in Hermitian systems. While such properties have been thoroughly characterized in free fermion models, they remain an open question for interacting bosonic systems. In this Letter, we present a precise definition of quantum phases for non-Hermitian systems and propose a new family of phases referred to as composite quantum phases. We demonstrate the existence of these phases in a one-dimensional spin-$1$ system and show their robustness against perturbations through numerical simulations. Furthermore, we investigate the phase diagram of our model, indicating the extensive presence of these new phases in non-Hermitian systems. Our work establishes a new framework for studying and constructing quantum phases in non-Hermitian interacting systems, revealing exciting possibilities beyond the single-particle picture.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure