Subsurface analysis of the depositional environments of the Bedford and Berea Formations in Northern Central Ohio

The Bedford and Berea formations of eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky have been studied by generations of geologists because of their economic and educational value. The Bedford and Berea are clastic units which display a distinct coarsening-upward trend. Past studies have proposed a prograding deltaic complex as the depositional origin of these formations, but much debate still surrounds the interpretation of specific depositional environments within the Bedford/Berea complex. This study utilized 130 geophysical well logs from Morrow, Knox, and Richland counties to determine the distribution and depositional setting of the Bedford/Berea in north central Ohio. Data collected from these wells were used to construct isopach maps of the Bedford and Berea and surface structure contour maps on the tops of the Ohio Shale and Berea Sandstone. These maps support the general interpretation of clastics prograding to the south and southeast into the Appalachian Basin in late Devonian and early Mississippian time. Some of the isopach patterns strongly suggest influence by pre-existing structures in the Ohio Shale on the deposition of the overlying Bedford Shale and Berea Sandstone. Other patterns indicate the importance of gravity driven flows in depositing these sediments

The Polish “Good Change” – What does it mean for relations with Germany and the rest of Europe? EPC Policy Brief, 22 July 2016

Since winning a majority in October 2015, the Law and Justice Party (PiS) has implemented a policy of ‘Good Change’ in Poland, which limits the competences of the Polish Constitutional Court and has drawn vocal criticism from the EU and member states, especially Germany. In this Policy Brief, Adam Balcer warns of an ‘Orbanisation’ of Poland as the nationalistic and right-wing PiS steers the country increasingly towards a Hungarian model of illiberal democracy, and assesses the implications of this transition for relations with Germany and the rest of Europe. He also writes that Brexit could stoke fresh anti-EU sentiment in an already Eurosceptic Poland, and encourage further divergence from Germany and the Union itself

Europejska prespektywa Balkanow Zachodnich. Unia Europejska a Moldawia. Relacje Turcji z Unia Europejska. Prace OSW 13/2004 = European prospects of the Western Balkans. The European Union and Moldova. Relations between Turkey and the European Union. OSW Study 13/2004

The relations between Turkey and the European Union are special for several reasons. Of all candidates, Turkey has been aspiring to EU membership for the longest time. With 70 million citizens, it is the most populous candidate country, and if it were admitted to the EU, around the year 2020 would become the single most populous Member State. It would also be the only UE Member State inhabited almost exclusively by Muslims. Like Cyprus, it lies almost entirely in the Asian continent. Because of the scale of Turkey's internal problems, the country faces much more serious reservations concerning its accession than the remaining candidates. Turkey's membership application meets with the strongest opposition in the European Union. This paper aims to discuss the history of the complex relations between Turkey and the European Union, the main issues that impede Turkey's integration with the Community, including the country's internal problems in particular, and the transformations taking place in Turkey under the influence of Community policy

The challenge of freedom in the Southeastern Europe. OSW Report, July 2015

Over the past few decades substantial progress has been achieved in the democratisation and modernisation of the countries of Southeastern Europe. The formal democratic institutions were introduced, a liberalisation of trade resulted in the reintegration of the region into the global economy and some of them successfully applied to join the EU and NATO. But the transformation process is far from over. In the past years the achievements of the political and economic transformation have been rolled back and the quality of governance has declined in many countries. To avoid a further deterioration of the situation in the region the new impulse for institutional transformation and a change of the development model are needed. This report is the outcome of a discussion held during the conference “The Freedom Challenge in Southeastern Europe – Implications for Poland”. This joint event was developed by the Centre for Eastern Studies and Ideas Lab – the President’s Expert Programme at the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland. The chapters of the report reflect the main three subjects debated during the conference. In the first chapter Spasimir Domaradzki assesses the rule of law and its influence on the consolidation of democracy in the region. In the second chapter Marta Szpala focuses on economic development in Southeastern Europe. The third chapter is written by Adam Balcer and analyses the key instruments Russia is using to build influence in this region

Definition, technology readiness, and development cost of the orbit transfer vehicle engine integrated control and health monitoring system elements

An Integrated Control and Health Monitoring (ICHM) system was conceived for use on a 20 Klb thrust baseline Orbit Transfer Vehicle (OTV) engine. Considered for space used, the ICHM was defined for reusability requirements for an OTV engine service free life of 20 missions, with 100 starts and a total engine operational time of 4 hours. Functions were derived by flowing down requirements from NASA guidelines, previous OTV engine or ICHM documents, and related contracts. The elements of an ICHM were identified and listed, and these elements were described in sufficient detail to allow estimation of their technology readiness levels. These elements were assessed in terms of technology readiness level, and supporting rationale for these assessments presented. The remaining cost for development of a minimal ICHM system to technology readiness level 6 was estimated. The estimates are within an accuracy range of minus/plus 20 percent. The cost estimates cover what is needed to prepare an ICHM system for use on a focussed testbed for an expander cycle engine, excluding support to the actual test firings

Differential Privacy on Finite Computers

We consider the problem of designing and analyzing differentially private algorithms that can be implemented on discrete models of computation in strict polynomial time, motivated by known attacks on floating point implementations of real-arithmetic differentially private algorithms (Mironov, CCS 2012) and the potential for timing attacks on expected polynomial-time algorithms. We use a case study: the basic problem of approximating the histogram of a categorical dataset over a possibly large data universe X. The classic Laplace Mechanism (Dwork, McSherry, Nissim, Smith, TCC 2006 and J. Privacy & Confidentiality 2017) does not satisfy our requirements, as it is based on real arithmetic, and natural discrete analogues, such as the Geometric Mechanism (Ghosh, Roughgarden, Sundarajan, STOC 2009 and SICOMP 2012), take time at least linear in |X|, which can be exponential in the bit length of the input. In this paper, we provide strict polynomial-time discrete algorithms for approximate histograms whose simultaneous accuracy (the maximum error over all bins) matches that of the Laplace Mechanism up to constant factors, while retaining the same (pure) differential privacy guarantee. One of our algorithms produces a sparse histogram as output. Its "per-bin accuracy" (the error on individual bins) is worse than that of the Laplace Mechanism by a factor of log |X|, but we prove a lower bound showing that this is necessary for any algorithm that produces a sparse histogram. A second algorithm avoids this lower bound, and matches the per-bin accuracy of the Laplace Mechanism, by producing a compact and efficiently computable representation of a dense histogram; it is based on an (n+1)-wise independent implementation of an appropriately clamped version of the Discrete Geometric Mechanism