Environmental impact assessment system and process: A study on policy and legal instruments in Nepal

An efficient system of decision making for sustainable socioeconomic development, with an effective environmental management of the sources of environmental impact and effects of such impacts, need to be put in place in order to implement the government policy of environmental protection and safety at the regional level. To obtain such kind of results; Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) tool has been followed by the developing countries enacting environmental policies or judicial system to introduce regulatory framework in EIA system and procedures. Sustainable development is the result of carefully integrating environmental, economic and social needs in the policy level to achieve both an increased standard of living in the short term, and a net gain or equilibrium among human, natural and economic resources to support future generations. This study is based on the review of the EIA system and process, policy, guidelines and legal instruments and consultation with concerned stakeholders by emphasizing the EIA reports of 100 different projects from 12 different developmental sectors in Nepal. Nepal has taken an initiative to integrate environmental aspects in the national policy and development plan conducting EIA of major development projects since 1980 - 1996. Enforcement of the Environmental Protection Act (EPA), 1996, and the Environmental Protection Regulation (EPR), 1997, formally implemented EIA system with participatory monitoring. In Nepal, EIA has been conducted for 100 development projects up to 2010. Among these, the highest (25%) is in the hydropower sector and the lowest (3%) is in each of the hotel and tourism development, irrigation and apartment buildings, respectively. It has been found that the implementation of mitigation measures, monitoring and auditing of EIAs, limits only (20%) on the large scale donor supported projects. The EIA system only limits screening, scoping and ToR, prediction and assessment and monitoring of impacts. However, there is no policy for EIS as well as post evaluation mechanism which could show some implications and constraints in the EIA system for an effective EIA system as in the international level.Key words: EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment), EPA (Environmental Protection Act) EPR (Environmental Protection Regulation), EIS (Environmental Impact Statement), EIA system and process

On local structures of cubicity 2 graphs

A 2-stab unit interval graph (2SUIG) is an axes-parallel unit square intersection graph where the unit squares intersect either of the two fixed lines parallel to the $X$-axis, distance $1 + \epsilon$ ($0 < \epsilon < 1$) apart. This family of graphs allow us to study local structures of unit square intersection graphs, that is, graphs with cubicity 2. The complexity of determining whether a tree has cubicity 2 is unknown while the graph recognition problem for unit square intersection graph is known to be NP-hard. We present a polynomial time algorithm for recognizing trees that admit a 2SUIG representation

On Upward Drawings of Trees on a Given Grid

Computing a minimum-area planar straight-line drawing of a graph is known to be NP-hard for planar graphs, even when restricted to outerplanar graphs. However, the complexity question is open for trees. Only a few hardness results are known for straight-line drawings of trees under various restrictions such as edge length or slope constraints. On the other hand, there exist polynomial-time algorithms for computing minimum-width (resp., minimum-height) upward drawings of trees, where the height (resp., width) is unbounded. In this paper we take a major step in understanding the complexity of the area minimization problem for strictly-upward drawings of trees, which is one of the most common styles for drawing rooted trees. We prove that given a rooted tree $T$ and a $W\times H$ grid, it is NP-hard to decide whether $T$ admits a strictly-upward (unordered) drawing in the given grid.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

Advanced Multilevel Node Separator Algorithms

A node separator of a graph is a subset S of the nodes such that removing S and its incident edges divides the graph into two disconnected components of about equal size. In this work, we introduce novel algorithms to find small node separators in large graphs. With focus on solution quality, we introduce novel flow-based local search algorithms which are integrated in a multilevel framework. In addition, we transfer techniques successfully used in the graph partitioning field. This includes the usage of edge ratings tailored to our problem to guide the graph coarsening algorithm as well as highly localized local search and iterated multilevel cycles to improve solution quality even further. Experiments indicate that flow-based local search algorithms on its own in a multilevel framework are already highly competitive in terms of separator quality. Adding additional local search algorithms further improves solution quality. Our strongest configuration almost always outperforms competing systems while on average computing 10% and 62% smaller separators than Metis and Scotch, respectively

Pixel and Voxel Representations of Graphs

We study contact representations for graphs, which we call pixel representations in 2D and voxel representations in 3D. Our representations are based on the unit square grid whose cells we call pixels in 2D and voxels in 3D. Two pixels are adjacent if they share an edge, two voxels if they share a face. We call a connected set of pixels or voxels a blob. Given a graph, we represent its vertices by disjoint blobs such that two blobs contain adjacent pixels or voxels if and only if the corresponding vertices are adjacent. We are interested in the size of a representation, which is the number of pixels or voxels it consists of. We first show that finding minimum-size representations is NP-complete. Then, we bound representation sizes needed for certain graph classes. In 2D, we show that, for $k$-outerplanar graphs with $n$ vertices, $\Theta(kn)$ pixels are always sufficient and sometimes necessary. In particular, outerplanar graphs can be represented with a linear number of pixels, whereas general planar graphs sometimes need a quadratic number. In 3D, $\Theta(n^2)$ voxels are always sufficient and sometimes necessary for any $n$-vertex graph. We improve this bound to $\Theta(n\cdot \tau)$ for graphs of treewidth $\tau$ and to $O((g+1)^2n\log^2n)$ for graphs of genus $g$. In particular, planar graphs admit representations with $O(n\log^2n)$ voxels

Universal Geometric Graphs

We introduce and study the problem of constructing geometric graphs that have few vertices and edges and that are universal for planar graphs or for some sub-class of planar graphs; a geometric graph is \emph{universal} for a class $\mathcal H$ of planar graphs if it contains an embedding, i.e., a crossing-free drawing, of every graph in $\mathcal H$. Our main result is that there exists a geometric graph with $n$ vertices and $O(n \log n)$ edges that is universal for $n$-vertex forests; this extends to the geometric setting a well-known graph-theoretic result by Chung and Graham, which states that there exists an $n$-vertex graph with $O(n \log n)$ edges that contains every $n$-vertex forest as a subgraph. Our $O(n \log n)$ bound on the number of edges cannot be improved, even if more than $n$ vertices are allowed. We also prove that, for every positive integer $h$, every $n$-vertex convex geometric graph that is universal for $n$-vertex outerplanar graphs has a near-quadratic number of edges, namely $\Omega_h(n^{2-1/h})$; this almost matches the trivial $O(n^2)$ upper bound given by the $n$-vertex complete convex geometric graph. Finally, we prove that there exists an $n$-vertex convex geometric graph with $n$ vertices and $O(n \log n)$ edges that is universal for $n$-vertex caterpillars.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures; a 12-page extended abstracts of this paper will appear in the Proceedings of the 46th Workshop on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science (WG 2020

Comparative Study of Different Memetic Algorithm Configurations for the Cyclic Bandwidth Sum Problem

The Cyclic Bandwidth Sum Problem (CBSP) is an NP-Hard Graph Embedding Problem which aims to embed a simple, finite graph (the guest) into a cycle graph of the same order (the host) while minimizing the sum of cyclic distances in the host between guest’s adjacent nodes. This paper presents preliminary results of our research on the design of a Memetic Algorithm (MA) able to solve the CBSP. A total of 24 MA versions, induced by all possible combinations of four selection schemes, two operators for recombination and three for mutation, were tested over a set of 25 representative graphs. Results compared with respect to the state-of-the-art top algorithm showed that all the tested MA versions were able to consistently improve its results and give us some insights on the suitability of the tested operators

Inclusive J/ψ production at mid-rapidity in pp collisions at √s = 5.02 TeV

Inclusive J/ψ production is studied in minimum-bias proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of s = 5.02 TeV by ALICE at the CERN LHC. The measurement is performed at mid-rapidity (|y| &lt; 0.9) in the dielectron decay channel down to zero transverse momentum pT, using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of Lint = 19.4 ± 0.4 nb−1. The measured pT-integrated inclusive J/ψ production cross sec- tion is dσ/dy = 5.64 ± 0.22(stat.) ± 0.33(syst.) ± 0.12(lumi.) μb. The pT-differential cross section d2σ/dpTdy is measured in the pT range 0–10 GeV/c and compared with state-of- the-art QCD calculations. The J/ψ 〈pT〉 and 〈pT2〉 are extracted and compared with results obtained at other collision energies. [Figure not available: see fulltext.]

Measurement of Λ (1520) production in pp collisions at √s=7TeV and p–Pb collisions at √sNN=5.02TeV

The production of the Λ (1520) baryonic resonance has been measured at midrapidity in inelastic pp collisions at s=7TeV and in p–Pb collisions at sNN=5.02TeV for non-single diffractive events and in multiplicity classes. The resonance is reconstructed through its hadronic decay channel Λ (1520) → pK - and the charge conjugate with the ALICE detector. The integrated yields and mean transverse momenta are calculated from the measured transverse momentum distributions in pp and p–Pb collisions. The mean transverse momenta follow mass ordering as previously observed for other hyperons in the same collision systems. A Blast-Wave function constrained by other light hadrons (π, K, KS0, p, Λ) describes the shape of the Λ (1520) transverse momentum distribution up to 3.5GeV/c in p–Pb collisions. In the framework of this model, this observation suggests that the Λ (1520) resonance participates in the same collective radial flow as other light hadrons. The ratio of the yield of Λ (1520) to the yield of the ground state particle Λ remains constant as a function of charged-particle multiplicity, suggesting that there is no net effect of the hadronic phase in p–Pb collisions on the Λ (1520) yield