The price tag of oil spills : valuing temporal and spatial stability to prevent environmental damage from oil spills from ships

Oil spills from ships can cause environmental damage along shorelines as the oil will float and eventually reach the shoreline. This damage threatens marine life. Further, it influences the recreational experiences on the beach and other marine activities. Thus, it creates a temporary loss of welfare. Ecosystem services do not have a market price but do possess a value. This study conducts econometric analyses of two existing contingent valuation data sets of similar oil spill environmental damage scenarios from 2015 and 2020. The benefit transfer methods used are the unit transfer with income adjustments and different specifications of the value function transfer, both temporal over a five-year period and spatial. The results contribute to improving the validity of the cost-benefit analyses of measures to reduce the occurrence of marine oil spills from ships. The study finds that the different payment methods have an unexpected outcome as the willingness to pay for the 2020 data set is much higher than expected. It shows that a budget constraint affects the willingness to pay for one-time payments if the damage scenario is extra-large and gives a policy recommendation to avoid a high number of protest bidders. Further, the study could not prove an expected Covid-19 pandemic effect on people’s willingness to pay.M-Ø

Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910-1940: Operational Detection

Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialised films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through extensive archival research, Ilka Brasch details the aesthetic appeals of film serials within their context of marketing and exhibition and that they adapt the pleasures of a flourishing crime fiction culture to both serialised visual culture and the affordances of the media-modernity of the early 20th century. The study furthermore traces how film serials brought the broadcast model of radio and television to the big screen and thereby introduced models of serial storytelling that informed popular culture even beyond the serial's demise

Radiation Hardness of High-Q Silicon Nitride Microresonators for Space Compatible Integrated Optics

Integrated optics has distinct advantages for applications in space because it integrates many elements onto a monolithic, robust chip. As the development of different building blocks for integrated optics advances, it is of interest to answer the important question of their resistance with respect to ionizing radiation. Here we investigate effects of proton radiation on high-Q silicon nitride microresonators formed by a waveguide ring. We show that the irradiation with high-energy protons has no lasting effect on the linear optical losses of the microresonators

Combining Smart Material Platforms and New Computational Tools to Investigate Cell Motility Behavior and Control

Cell-extracellular matrix (ECM) interactions play a critical role in regulating important biological phenomena, including morphogenesis, tissue repair, and disease states. In vivo, cells are subjected to various mechanical, chemical, and electrical cues to collectively guide their functionality within a specific microenvironment. To better understand the mechanisms regulating cell adhesive, differentiation, and motility dynamics, researchers have developed in vitro platforms to synthetically mimic native tissue responses. While important information about cell-ECM interactions have been revealed using these systems, a knowledge gap currently exists regarding how cell responses in static environments relate to the dynamic cell-ECM interaction behaviors observed in vivo. Advances at the intersection of materials science, biophysics, and cell biology have recently enabled the production of dynamic ECM mimics where cells can be exposed to controlled mechanical, electrical or chemical cues to directly decouple cell-ECM related behaviors from cell-cell or cell-environmental factors. Utilization of these dynamic synthetic biomaterials will enable discovery of novel mechanisms fundamental in tissue development, homeostasis, repair, and disease. In this dissertation, the primary goal was to evaluate how mechanical changes in the ECM regulate cell motility and polarization responses. This was accomplished through two major aims: 1) by developing a modular image processing tool that could be applied in complex synthetic in vitro microenvironments to asses cell motility dynamics, and 2) to utilize that tool to advance understanding of mechanobiology and mechanotransduction processes associated with development, wound healing, and disease progression. Therefore, the first portion of this thesis (Chapters 2 and 3) dealt with proof of concept for our newly developed automated cell tracking system, termed ACTIVE (automated contour-based tracking for in vitro environments), while the second portion of this thesis (Chapter 4-7) addressed applying this system in multiple experimental designs to synthesize new knowledge regarding cell-ECM or cell-cell interactions. In Chapter 1, we introduced why cell-ECM interactions are essential for in vivo processes and highlighted the current state of the literature. In Chapter 2, we demonstrated that ACTIVE could achieve greater than 95% segmentation accuracy at multiple cell densities, while improving two-body cell-cell interaction error by up to 43%. In Chapter 3 we showed that ACTIVE could be applied to reveal subtle differences in fibroblast motility atop static wrinkled or static non-wrinkled surfaces at multiple cell densities. In Chapters 4 and 5, we characterized fibroblast motility and intracellular reorganization atop a dynamic shape memory polymer biomaterial, focusing on the role of the Rho-mediated pathway in the observed responses. We then utilized ACTIVE to identify differences in subpopulation dynamics of monoculture versus co-culture endothelial and smooth muscle cells (Chapter 6). In Chapter 7, we applied ACTIVE to investigate E. coli biofilm formation atop poly(dimethylsiloxane) surfaces with varying stiffness and line patterns. Finally, we presented a summary and future work in Chapter 8. Collectively, this work highlights the capabilities of the newly developed ACTIVE tracking system and demonstrates how to synthesize new information about mechanobiology and mechanotransduction processes using dynamic biomaterial platforms

HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP): Increasing Awareness in Primary Care

Primary care is a setting that has great potential for screening and reducing the rate of HIV transmission

The impact of new varieties on aggregate productivity growth*

Although there is an extensive body of literature on aggregate productivity growth, reallocation, and firm turnover, the contribution to overall productivity growth from new firms that produce new varieties is not well understood. In this paper, we propose a framework for aggregating productivity that identifies the contribution from new firms that produce new varieties. Our framework generalizes the frameworks currently used in the literature. To illustrate the decomposition, we analyse the case of firm turnover in Norway. We find that the net creation of new varieties due to firm turnover contributes about half a percentage point to annual aggregate labour productivity growth in the manufacturing sector.The impact of new varieties on aggregate productivity growth*publishedVersio

Mode spectrum and temporal soliton formation in optical microresonators

The formation of temporal dissipative solitons in optical microresonators enables compact, high repetition rate sources of ultra-short pulses as well as low noise, broadband optical frequency combs with smooth spectral envelopes. Here we study the influence of the resonator mode spectrum on temporal soliton formation. Using frequency comb assisted diode laser spectroscopy, the measured mode structure of crystalline MgF2 resonators are correlated with temporal soliton formation. While an overal general anomalous dispersion is required, it is found that higher order dispersion can be tolerated as long as it does not dominate the resonator's mode structure. Mode coupling induced avoided crossings in the resonator mode spectrum are found to prevent soliton formation, when affecting resonator modes close to the pump laser. The experimental observations are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations based on the nonlinear coupled mode equations, which reveal the rich interplay of mode crossings and soliton formation

Symplectic Dirac Operators on Hermitian Symmetric Spaces

We describe the shape of the symplectic Dirac operators on Hermitian symmetric spaces. For this, we consider these operators as families of operators that can be handled more easily than the original ones.Comment: 17 page