Public disclosure of environmental violations in the Republic of Korea

Since 1989, environmental authorities of the Republic of Korea have published on a monthly basis a list of enterprises violating the country's environmental rules and regulations. This may be the longest environmental public disclosure program currently in existence. Over the period 1993-2001 in excess of 7,000 violations have been recorded in these monthly violation lists, involving more than 3,400 different companies. In this paper, the authors provide a comprehensive descriptive analysis of this dataset. Results suggest that the news media have given an important, though perhaps declining coverage, to the violation lists, with a focus on publicly traded companies, failures to operate pollution abatement equipment, and prosecutions.Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Decentralization,Public Health Promotion,Water and Industry,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Water and Industry,Health Economics&Finance,National Governance

LAND USE PLANNING AND POLICY IN THE SOUTH

Land Economics/Use,

Short and efficient synthesis of fluorinated δ-lactams

The diastereoselective synthesis of fluorinated δ-lactams has been achieved through an efficient five step process. The route can tolerate a range of functionalities, and provides a quick route for the generation of new fluorinated medicinal building blocks

Competencies for practitioners working in food systems

This report describes a recent project funded through USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (USDA AMS) to understand food systems practitioner’s needs in various environments, cultures, and focus areas, as well as curriculum that is currently available to support food systems work. This project took place in 2019 with a group of over 30 individuals across the nation with diverse background and understanding of food systems and the systemic issues they connect to. Between August 2019-December 2019, partners worked collectively to identify core competencies needed for practitioners working in food systems, created a set of learning objectives for each competency, and identified existing curricula around the nation that met the objectives described

Effect of time delay on feedback control of a flashing ratchet

It was recently shown that the use of feedback control can improve the performance of a flashing ratchet. We investigate the effect of a time delay in the implementation of feedback control in a closed-loop collective flashing ratchet, using Langevin dynamics simulations. Surprisingly, for a large ensemble, a well-chosen delay time improves the ratchet performance by allowing the system to synchronize into a quasi-periodic stable mode of oscillation that reproduces the optimal average velocity for a periodically flashing ratchet. For a small ensemble, on the other hand, finite delay times significantly reduce the benefit of feedback control for the time-averaged velocity, because the relevance of information decays on a time scale set by the diffusion time of the particles. Based on these results, we establish that experimental use of feedback control is realistic.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Europhysics Letter

Improving the CASIE SAR Images

In the summer 2009 NASA Characterization of Arctic Sea Ice Experiment (CASIE09), the microASAR, a small LFMCW SAR, was operated on the NASA Sierra unmanned aerial system (UAS). An overview of the microASAR and its role in CASIE09 are described in [1, 2]. While the limitations in the motion measurements stored with the microASAR data during the CASIE09 mission originally precluded full motion compensation, motion data collected for other CASIE sensors can be employed to improve the SAR image focus and calibration. This paper describes the methodology developed to time-align this motion data and applies this data along with other algorithm improvements to the processing of the microASAR data. This paper also presents a concise description of the backprojection image processing used

Realization of a feedback controlled flashing ratchet

A flashing ratchet transports diffusive particles using a time-dependent, asymmetric potential. Particle speed is predicted to increase when a feedback algorithm based on particle positions is used. We have experimentally realized such a feedback ratchet using an optical line trap, and observed that use of feedback increases velocity by up to an order of magnitude. We compare two different feedback algorithms for small particle numbers, and find good agreement with simulations. We also find that existing algorithms can be improved to be more tolerant to feedback delay times