Volume Holography: Novel Materials, Methods and Applications

This chapter aims to establish a link between material compositions, analytical methods and advanced applications for volume holography. It provides basics on volume holography, serving as a compendium on volume holographic grating formation, specific material requirements for volume holography and diffractive properties of the different types of volume holographic gratings. The particular significance of three‐dimensional optical structuring for the final optical functionality is highlighted. In this context, the interrelation between function and structure of volume holograms is investigated with view to research on and development of novel materials, methods and applications. Particular emphasis will be placed on analytical methods, assuming that they provide access for a deeper understanding of volume holographic grating formation, which appears to be prerequisite for the design of novel material systems for advanced applications

A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism

In this Article, Professors Dorf and Sabel identify a new form of government, democratic experimentalism, in which power is decentralized to enable citizens and other actors to utilize their local knowledge to fit solutions to their individual circumstances, but in which regional and national coordinating bodies require actors to share their knowledge with others facing similar problems. This information pooling, informed by the example of novel kinds of coordination within and among private firms, both increases the efficiency of public administration by encouraging mutual learning among its parts and heightens its accountability through participation of citizens in the decisions that affect them. In democratic experimentalism, subnational units of government are broadly free to set goals and to choose the means to attain them. Regulatory agencies set and ensure compliance with national objectives by means of bestpractice performance standards based on information that regulated entities provide in return for the freedom to experiment with solutions they prefer. The authors argue that this type of self-government is currently emerging in settings as diverse as the regulation of nuclear power plants, community policing, procurement of sophisticated military hardware, environmental regulation, and child-protective services. The Article claims further that a shift towards democratic experimentalism holds out the promise of reducing the distance between, on the one hand, the Madisonian ideal of a limited government assured by a complex division of powers and, on the other hand, the governmental reality characteristic of the New Deal synthesis, in which an all-powerful Congress delegates much of its authority to expert agencies that are checked by the courts when they infringe individual rights, but are otherwise assumed to act in the public interest. Professors Dorf and Sabel argue that the combination of decentralization and mutual monitoring intrinsic to democratic experimentalism better protects the constitutional ideal than do doctrines of federalism and the separation of powers, so at odds with current circumstances, that courts recognize the futility of applying them consistently in practice by limiting themselves to fitful declarations of their validity in principle. For example, conventional administrative law imposes external judicial checks on administrative agencies, obliging judges to choose between superficial scrutiny of formal proprieties and disruptive, indeed often paralyzing, inquiry into what an idealized agency might be expected to do. By contrast, democratic experimentalism requires the social actors, separately and in exchange with each other, to take constitutional considerations into account in their decisionmaking. The administrative agency assists the actors even while monitoring their performance by scrutinizing the reactions of each to relevant proposals by the others. The courts then determine whether the agency has met its obligations to foster and generalize the results of this information pooling. Agencies and courts alike use the rich record of the parties\u27 intentions, as interpreted by their acts contained in the continuing, comparative evaluation of experimentation itself In the administrative and related settings, the aim of democratic experimentalism is to democratize public decisionmaking from within, and so lessen the burdens on a judiciary that today awkwardly superintends the every-day workings of democracy from an external vantage point. Finally, the Article reconceptualizes constitutional rights. Relying in this and other regards on ideas associated with early-twentieth-century American pragmatism, the Article treats disagreements over rights as principally about how to implement widely shared general principles. Under the heading of prophylactic rules and related doctrines, the United States Supreme Court has recognized that there are often a variety of acceptable remedies for a violation of rights or a variety of acceptable means of achieving a constitutionally mandated end. The authors argue for a radical extension of these doctrines, in which judicial recognition of a general, core right, permits substantial experimentation about how to implement that right. They propose institutional mechanisms to facilitate such experimentation. The authors contend, however, that with rights, as with other constitutionally entrenched principles, means and ends cannot be neatly separated, so that experimentation at the periphery also redefines the core, ultimately challenging the very distinction between core and periphery

Implications of different spatial (and temporal) resolutions for integrated assessment modelling on the regional to local scale – nesting, coupling, or model integration?

Integrated assessment modelling (IAM) in general is currently applied to a range of environmental problems addressing aspects of air pollution and climate change, water pollution and many more. While different branches have emerged from applications within different disciplines, they share a similar view of the core features of IAM, i.e. multi-disciplinary approaches, integration across environmental compartments, and the application of models with the aim to provide decision support for complex problems. Examples of IAMs on a regional scale are the RAINS/GAINS model suite (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, IIASA), with versions for Europe and Asia. On a national scale, several European countries are currently developing and applying IAMs for policy development, in some cases using special adaptations of the IIASA RAINS/GAINS model (e.g. Italy), or own models (UK, Germany). IAMs have been extensively used in the preparation of the Multi-Effect Protocol (United Nations Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, CLRTAP) and the European Clean Air For Europe (CAFE) strategy. In these applications, target setting included a mixture of health and ecosystem related indicators. State-of-the-art IAMs are typically operating on rigid spatial scales, and in most cases do not take into account the temporal patterns of emissions and effects in their assessment approaches. IAM results are typically provided on national or regional level (e.g. control measures, costs, benefits due to reduced environmental and health impacts) and for annual indicators (e.g. critical load exceedances or morbidity/mortality effects. However, scientific evidence is today capable of providing a better foundation to identify major aspects for uncertainties in these larger scale assessments, for instance investigating the distinct temporal patterns of air quality throughout the year and the detailed modelling and mapping of human exposure to air pollutants beyond statistical average exposures on total population level. This requires a more advanced and flexible design of IAMs to better model the temporal and spatial domains which are of relevance for the key issues to be assessed. First steps towards bridging the gap between regional and national, respectively national and local scale models for integrated assessments have taken the route to derive parameters for e.g. the urban differential in ambient air quality outside of the models regular domain and integrate these parametric values into the IAMs assessments. While this approach is moderately labour intensive, the major flaw is the integration of static values into an intrinsically dynamic model. In other words, if input datasets and external drivers (e.g. meteorology, atmospheric composition and chemistry) change, all other parameters have to be recalculated and re-integrated. This paper will discuss emerging trends for IAMs with a specific focus on spatial and temporal aspects and aims to elaborate on the policy context which is a key driver for the development of IAMs. The growing understanding of how complex interactions e.g. between/within the nitrogen and carbon cycles, where both management options and effects arise/occur on different spatial scales and with different time scales, both feeds into and requires the development of next generation IAMs, which are capable of tackling these problems

Drug Treatment Courts and Emergent Experimentalist Government

Despite the continuing war on drugs, the last decade has witnessed the creation and nationwide spread of a remarkable set of institutions, drug treatment courts. In drug treatment court, a criminal defendant pleads guilty or otherwise accepts responsibility for a charged offense and accepts placement in a court-mandated program of drug treatment. The judge and court personnel closely monitor the defendant\u27s performance in the program and the program\u27s capacity to serve the mandated client. The federal government and national associations in turn monitor the local drug treatment courts and disseminate successful practices. The ensemble of institutions, monitoring, and pooling exemplifies what the authors have elsewhere called experimentalism. The authors argue here that treatment courts as open and evolving experimentalist institutions point one way beyond the conventional limitations of courts and other oversight institutions. By pooling information on good and bad performance, and sanctioning when necessary unsatisfactory performers, the courts enable and oblige improvement by the actors both individually and as members of a complex ensemble. Judicial involvement in reform is permanent and continuous in this model. Yet it is, paradoxically, less imperious than traditional methods of court-directed reform for two reasons. First, the court in effect compels the actors to learn continuously and incrementally from each other rather than instructing them to implement a comprehensive remedial plan devised by the court alone or even in consultation with the parties. Second, the court is itself compelled to change in response to the changes it facilitates. In part this occurs through the exchanges with the treatment providers and in part it occurs in response to comparisons with experience in other jurisdictions as revealed by national pooling. Thus, the article argues, the experimentalist architecture of the drug courts suggests that they and like institutions need not face a strict tradeoff between efficacy and accountability

Drug Treatment Courts and Emergent Experimental Government

Despite the continuing war on drugs, the last decade has witnessed the creation and nationwide spread of a remarkable set of institutions, drug treatment courts. In drug treatment court, a criminal defendant pleads guilty or otherwise accepts responsibility for a charged offense and accepts placement in a court-mandated program of drug treatment. The judge and court personnel closely monitor the defendant\u27s performance in the program and the program\u27s capacity to serve the mandated client. The federal government and national associations in turn monitor the local drug treatment courts and disseminate successful practices. The ensemble of institutions, monitoring, and pooling exemplifies what the authors have elsewhere called experimentalism. The authors argue here that treatment courts as open and evolving experimentalist institutions point one way beyond the conventional limitation of courts and other institutions. By pooling information on good and bad performance, and sanctioning when necessary unsatisfactory performers, the courts enable and oblige improvement by the actors both individually and as members of a complex ensemble. Judicial involvement in reform is permanent and continuous in this model. Yet it is, paradoxically, less imperious than traditional methods of court-directed reform for two reasons. First, the court in effect compels the actors to learn continuously and incrementally from each other rather than instructing them to implement a comprehensive remedial plan devised by the court alone or even in consultation with the parties. Second, the court is itself compelled to change in response to the changes it facilitates. In part this occurs through the exchanges with the treatment providers and in part it occurs in response to comparisons with experience in other jurisdictions as revealed by national pooling. Thus, the article argues, the experimentalist architecture of the drug courts suggests that they and like institutions need not face a strict tradeoff between efficacy and accountability

A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism

In this Article, Professors Dorf and Sabel identify a new form of government, democratic experimentalism, in which power is decentralized to enable citizens and other actors to utilize their local knowledge to fit solutions to their individual circumstances, but in which regional and national coordinating bodies require actors to share their knowledge with others facing similar problems. This information pooling, informed by the example of novel kinds of coordination within and among private firms, both increases the efficiency of public administration by encouraging mutual learning among its parts and heightens its accountability through participation of citizens in the decisions that affect them. In democratic experimentalism, subnational units of government are broadly free to set goals and to choose the means to attain them. Regulatory agencies set and ensure compliance with national objectives by means of best-practice performance standards based on information that regulated entities provide in return for the freedom to experiment with solutions they prefer. The authors argue that this type of self-government is currently emerging in settings as diverse as the regulation of nuclear power plants, community policing, procurement of sophisticated military hardware, environmental regulation, and child-protective services. The Article claims further that a shift towards democratic experimentalism holds out the promise of reducing the distance between, on the one hand, the Madisonian ideal of a limited government assured by a complex division of powers and, on the other hand, the governmental reality characteristic of the New Deal synthesis, in which an all-powerful Congress delegates much of its authority to expert agencies that are checked by the courts when they infringe individual rights, but are otherwise assumed to act in the public interest. Professors Dorf and Sabel argue that the combination of decentralization and mutual monitoring intrinsic to democratic experimentalism better protects the constitutional ideal than do doctrines of federalism and the separation of powers, so at odds with current circumstances, that courts recognize the futility of applying them consistently in practice by limiting themselves to fitful declarations of their validity in principle. For example, conventional administrative law imposes external judicial checks on administrative agencies, obliging judges to choose between superficial scrutiny of formal proprieties and disruptive, indeed often paralyzing, inquiry into what an idealized agency might be expected to do. By contrast, democratic experimentalism requires the social actors, separately and in exchange with each other, to take constitutional considerations into account in their decisionmaking. The administrative agency assists the actors even while monitoring their performance by scrutinizing the reactions of each to relevant proposals by the others. The courts then determine whether the agency has met its obligations to foster and generalize the results of this information pooling. Agencies and courts alike use the rich record of the parties\u27 intentions, as interpreted by their acts contained in the continuing, comparative evaluation of experimentation itself In the administrative and related settings, the aim of democratic experimentalism is to democratize public decisionmaking from within, and so lessen the burdens on a judiciary that today awkwardly superintends the every-day workings of democracy from an external vantage point. Finally, the Article reconceptualizes constitutional rights. Relying in this and other regards on ideas associated with early-twentieth-century American pragmatism, the Article treats disagreements over rights as principally about how to implement widely shared general principles. Under the heading of prophylactic rules and related doctrines, the United States Supreme Court has recognized that there are often a variety of acceptable remedies for a violation of rights or a variety of acceptable means of achieving a constitutionally mandated end. The authors argue for a radical extension of these doctrines, in which judicial recognition of a general, core right, permits substantial experimentation about how to implement that right. They propose institutional mechanisms to facilitate such experimentation. The authors contend, however, that with rights, as with other constitutionally entrenched principles, means and ends cannot be neatly separated, so that experimentation at the periphery also redefines the core, ultimately challenging the very distinction between core and periphery

Beyond Backyard Environmentalism

From California habitats to Massachusetts toxics, the United States is in the midst of a fundamental reorientation of its environmental regulation, one that is as improbable as it is unremarked Minimally, the new forms of regulation promise to improve the quality of our environment At a maximum, they suggest a novel form of democracy that combines the virtues oflocalism and decentraliz.ation with the discipline of national coordination. In substance and spirit, this new approach to regulation grows out of the tradition of backyard environmentalism. For two decades, residents of Woburn, Love Canal, and countless other communities across the country have organiz.ed to reclaim authority over their lived environment These pioneers of citiz.en environmental activism typically fought to keep harmful activity out of their neighborhoods-hence the acronym NIMBY, for Not In My Backyard. In their struggles to protect themselves and their children from poisoned air, soil, and water, ordinary citiz.ens have often been pitted against certified experts from corporations, government, and even big environmental organiz.ations

Correctness of an STM Haskell implementation

A concurrent implementation of software transactional memory in Concurrent Haskell using a call-by-need functional language with processes and futures is given. The description of the small-step operational semantics is precise and explicit, and employs an early abort of conflicting transactions. A proof of correctness of the implementation is given for a contextual semantics with may- and should-convergence. This implies that our implementation is a correct evaluator for an abstract specification equipped with a big-step semantics

The Changing Shape of Government

Gillian E. Metzger, Alfred C. Aman Jr., Charles F. Sabel, Lester M. Salamon, E.S. Savas and Elliot D. Sclar participate in panel discussions focusing on the question of how to secure government accountability in the context of the expansion of privatization in government? This panel discusses some of the changes we are seeing in government institutions and in the ways government operates. The panelists describe ways in which the move toward privatization and the expansion of the gray area between public and private is occurring, but also will talk about changes we may see as being particularly useful in dealing with some of the challenges this expansion of privatization presents