Fish Advisories: Useful Or Difficult to Interpret?

The authors note that fish and shellfish offer significant exposure to environmental toxins but find that consumer knowledge and other factors may limit efforts to control risk in urban populations

Spectral Representations of One-Homogeneous Functionals

This paper discusses a generalization of spectral representations related to convex one-homogeneous regularization functionals, e.g. total variation or $\ell^1$-norms. Those functionals serve as a substitute for a Hilbert space structure (and the related norm) in classical linear spectral transforms, e.g. Fourier and wavelet analysis. We discuss three meaningful definitions of spectral representations by scale space and variational methods and prove that (nonlinear) eigenfunctions of the regularization functionals are indeed atoms in the spectral representation. Moreover, we verify further useful properties related to orthogonality of the decomposition and the Parseval identity. The spectral transform is motivated by total variation and further developed to higher order variants. Moreover, we show that the approach can recover Fourier analysis as a special case using an appropriate $\ell^1$-type functional and discuss a coupled sparsity example

State Public Nuisance Claims and Climate Change Adaptation

This Article explores the potential for state public nuisance claims to facilitate adaptation, resource protection, and other climate change responses by coastal communities in California. The California public nuisance actions represent just the latest chapter in efforts to spur responses to climate change and attribute responsibility for climate change through the common law. Part II of this Article describes the California public nuisance lawsuits and situates them in the context of common law actions directed against climate change. Part III considers the preliminary defenses that defendants have raised and could raise in the California public nuisance lawsuits, including the existence of state common law in this context, separation of powers and the political question doctrine, displacement and preemption, and standing. Part IV considers the potential merits of the plaintiffs’ public nuisance claims under California law

Quark mass and chiral condensate from the Wilson twisted mass lattice quark propagator

In this work, we report about the determination of nonperturbative OPE parameters from fits of continuum perturbation theory to the Landau gauge quark propagator. The propagators are computed numerically using lattice QCD with Nf=2 dynamical Wilson twisted mass fermions. We use four different values of the lattice spacing ranging from about 0.1 fm to about 0.05 fm as well as several quark masses per lattice spacing. This allows us to obtain continuum results for the chiral condensate and the average up/down quark mass. The main results are the average up/down quark mass m_q = 3.0(4)(2) MeV at the physical point and a value of the chiral condensate of -(299(26)(29) MeV)^3 in the chiral limit, both in the MSbar scheme at 2 GeV. We have also studied nonperturbative contaminations of our results at small values of the momenta, which are often interpreted as the contribution of the gluon condensate A^2. We do see contributions from such terms, which are, however, not stable over the order in perturbation theory.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figure

Digitalization in Thermodynamics

Digitalization is about data and how they are used. This has always been a key topic in applied thermodynamics. In the present work, the influence of the current wave of digitalization on thermodynamics is analyzed. Thermodynamic modeling and simulation is changing as large amounts of data of different nature and quality become easily available. The power and complexity of thermodynamic models and simulation techniques is rapidly increasing, and new routes become viable to link them to the data. Machine learning opens new perspectives, when it is suitably combined with classical thermodynamic theory. Illustrated by examples, different aspects of digitalization in thermodynamics are discussed: strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats

Marketable Wealth in a Poor African Country

The study uses an asset index of consumer durables to track changes in household wealth in Ghana during the recent period of strong growth. Using the Ghana Living Standards Survey of 1998 that contains both wealth data and consumer durable data, the authors demonstrate that the asset index approximate marketable wealth adequately. Although asset index estimates of wealth cannot match the precision of wealth surveys,this approach can provide useful information on marketable wealth in countries where more appropriate sources are not available. The asset index analysis with the three demographic and health surveys for 1993, 1998 and 2003 suggests that the solid economic growth seen over this period has been accompanied by a strong rise in the average asset index scores.wealth, Ghana, asset index