The environment as a challenge for governmental responsibility: The case of the European Water Framework Directive

The European Water Framework Directive is shaping a new conception of integrative water protection. In this article, the consequences of the Water Framework Directive in respect to national environmental policy will be discussed in referring to the notion of responsibility which is a central concept of political philosophy and theory. It will be shown that the new conception of integrative water protection entails a fundamental change in European water protection policy and also environmental policy at all. It implies that environmental policy has not only to prevent environmental damage but in particular has to warrant a good status of the environment, such that it must maintain a good status of water or even achieve it if this status does not exist. Achieving and maintaining a good status of the environment is, however, an encompassing task. Thereby, state power and will eventually be overexerted. The threat of such overexertion has to be kept in mind in discussing the perspective of the so called New Environmental Governance. It will be pointed out that the New Environmental Governance is not primarily a form of some sort of democratic participation but rather designed to improve state power in environmental politics. --Environmental politics,European Water Framework Directive,Responsibility,Environmental Governance

Practical High-Throughput, Non-Adaptive and Noise-Robust SARS-CoV-2 Testing

We propose a compressed sensing-based testing approach with a practical measurement design and a tuning-free and noise-robust algorithm for detecting infected persons. Compressed sensing results can be used to provably detect a small number of infected persons among a possibly large number of people. There are several advantages of this method compared to classical group testing. Firstly, it is non-adaptive and thus possibly faster to perform than adaptive methods which is crucial in exponentially growing pandemic phases. Secondly, due to nonnegativity of measurements and an appropriate noise model, the compressed sensing problem can be solved with the non-negative least absolute deviation regression (NNLAD) algorithm. This convex tuning-free program requires the same number of tests as current state of the art group testing methods. Empirically it performs significantly better than theoretically guaranteed, and thus the high-throughput, reducing the number of tests to a fraction compared to other methods. Further, numerical evidence suggests that our method can correct sparsely occurring errors.Comment: 8 Pages, 1 Figur

Investigation on the microstructure of ecap-processed iron-aluminium alloys

The present work deals with adjusting a fine-grained microstructure in iron-rich iron-aluminium alloys using the ECAP-process (Equal Channel Angular Pressing). Due to the limited formability of Fe-Al alloys with increased aluminium content, high forming temperatures and low forming speeds are required. Therefore, tool temperatures above 1100◦C are permanently needed to prevent cooling of the work pieces, which makes the design of the ECAP-process challenging. For the investigation, the Fe-Al work pieces were heated to the respective hot forming temperature in a chamber furnace and then formed in the ECAP tool at a constant punch speed of 5 mm/s. Besides the chemical composition (Fe9Al, Fe28Al and Fe38Al (at.%—Al)), the influences of a subsequent heat treatment and the holding time on the microstructure development were investigated. For this purpose, the average grain size of the microstructure was measured using the AGI (Average Grain Intercept) method and correlated with the aforementioned parameters. The results show that no significant grain refinement could be achieved with the parameters used, which is largely due to the high forming temperature significantly promoting grain growth. The holding times in the examined area do not have any influence on the grain refinement. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland