Contingent Fee Lobbying: Inflaming Avarice or Facilitating Constitutional Rights?

Contingent fee lobbying has long been a disfavored practice. Although some commentators argue that use of a contingent fee lobbying contract could open up federal legislative and regulatory processes to greater participation by Americans of limited means, many others, including the Supreme Court, have declared that lobbying a legislature or agency under a contingent fee contract is generally both illegal and unethical. However, the conclusion that the practice is illegal is often based on a declaration that the practice is unethical . . . without a thorough examination of the sources of law that led to the presumption of illegality in the first instance. Is it legal to lobby Congress or federal agencies on a contingent fee contract? If legal, would such a contract be ethical? These are the two core issues addressed in this article. On the way to our answers to these questions, we examine the history of lobbying and the legal treatment of lobbying. We review the early Supreme Court precedent that is often cited in support of a contingent fee lobbying ban, finding that the cases more reliably stand for a general ban on lobbying, not for a specific ban on contingent fee lobbying. We look at the evolution of lobbying – from reviled practice to respected profession – through the lenses of Senate hearings and executive branch procurement practices. We turn to the example of state law to review the competing philosophies underlying state regulation of contingent fee lobbying and to emphasize how the early Supreme Court pronouncements on lobbying may be easily employed to support either philosophy. Because the First Amendment may be implicated in any restriction on speech, we highlight how the Supreme Court’s more recent jurisprudence addressing restrictions on political speech is likely to affect any future evaluation of contingent free lobbying. Finally, regardless whether the practice of contingent fee lobbying is legal, we examine whether certain ethical boundaries should be drawn to curb any particular tendency to corruption that may result from use of a contingent fee lobbying contract. We conclude that contingent fee lobbying should not summarily be condemned or prohibited, but propose imposing a more rigorous disclosure regime specifically aimed at this type of lobbying compensation agreement

Domestic UK retrofit challenge: Barriers, incentives and current performance leading into the green deal

Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier - The official published version can be accessed from the link below.This paper reviews the thermal performance of the existing UK housing stock, the main fabric efficiency incentive schemes and the barriers to obtaining deep energy and CO2 savings throughout the stock. The UK faces a major challenge to improve the thermal performance of its existing housing stock. Millions of dwellings possess ‘hard-to-treat’ solid walls and have glazing which is not cost effective to improve. A range of fabric efficiency incentive schemes exist, but many do not target the full range of private and social housing. From now on, the Green Deal will be the UK's key energy efficiency policy. However, the scheme is forecasted to have low consumer appeal and low incentives for investors. Moreover, calculated Green Deal loan repayments will be reliant upon estimated energy savings, yet it is claimed that retrofit measures may only be half as effective as anticipated due to a lack of monitoring, poor quality installation and the increased use of heating following refurbishment. Looking to Germany, there has been success through the Passivhaus standard, but the UK currently lacks appropriate skills and cost effective components to replicate this approach. In addition, the embodied energy in retrofit products and materials threatens to counter operational savings.This study is funded by the EPSRC, Brunel University and Buro Happold Ltd

Improved simulation of phase change processes in applications where conduction is the dominant heat transfer mode

This is the post-print of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ElsevierThis paper reports on the development, experimental validation and application of a semi-empirical model for the simulation of the phase change process in phase change materials (PCM). PCMs are now increasingly being used in various building materials such as plasterboard, concrete or panels to improve thermal control in buildings and accurate modelling of their behaviour is important to effectively capture the effects of storage on indoor thermal conditions. Unlike many commercial simulation packages that assume very similar melting and freezing behaviour for the PCM and no hysteresis, the methodology employed treats the melting and freezing processes separately and this allows the inclusion of the effect of hysteresis in the modelling. As demonstrated by the results in this paper, this approach provides a more accurate prediction of the temperature and heat flow in the material, which is of particular importance in providing accurate representation of indoor thermal conditions during thermal cycling. The difference in the prediction accuracy of the two methods is a function of the properties of the PCM. The smaller the hysteresis of the PCM, the lower will be the prediction error of the conventional approach, and solution time will become the determining factor in selecting the simulation approach in practical applications.This work is funded from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK, Grant No: EP/H004181/1

Testosterone Trajectories and Reference Ranges in a Large Longitudinal Sample of Male Adolescents

Pubertal dynamics plays an important role in physical and psychological development of children and adolescents. We aim to provide reference ranges of plasma testosterone in a large longitudinal sample. Furthermore, we describe a measure of testosterone trajectories during adolescence that can be used in future investigations of development.We carried out longitudinal measurements of plasma testosterone in 2,216 samples obtained from 513 males (9 to 17 years of age) from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. We used integration of a model fitted to each participant's testosterone trajectory to calculate a measure of average exposure to testosterone over adolescence. We pooled these data with corresponding values reported in the literature to provide a reference range of testosterone levels in males between the ages of 6 and 19 years.The average values of total testosterone in the ALSPAC sample range from 0.82 nmol/L (Standard Deviation [SD]: 0.09) at 9 years of age to 16.5 (SD: 2.65) nmol/L at 17 years of age; these values are congruent with other reports in the literature. The average exposure to testosterone is associated with different features of testosterone trajectories such as Peak Testosterone Change, Age at Peak Testosterone Change, and Testosterone at 17 years of age as well as the timing of the growth spurt during puberty.The average exposure to testosterone is a useful measure for future investigations using testosterone trajectories to examine pubertal dynamics

Structural, vibrational and thermal properties of densified silicates : insights from Molecular Dynamics

Structural, vibrational and thermal properties of densified sodium silicate (NS2) are investigated with classical molecular dynamics simulations of the glass and the liquid state. A systematic investigation of the glass structure with respect to density was performed. We observe a repolymerization of the network manifested by a transition from a tetrahedral to an octahedral silicon environment, the decrease of the amount of non-bridging oxygen atoms and the appearance of three-fold coordinated oxygen atoms (triclusters). Anomalous changes in the medium range order are observed, the first sharp diffraction peak showing a minimum of its full-width at half maximum according to density. The previously reported vibrational trends in densified glasses are observed, such as the shift of the Boson peak intensity to higher frequencies and the decrease of its intensity. Finally, we show that the thermal behavior of the liquid can be reproduced by the Birch-Murnaghan equation of states, thus allowing us to compute the isothermal compressibility

Traumatic brain injury: Age at injury influences dementia risk after TBI

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is increasingly recognized as a risk factor for dementia. New data provide further support for this association and demonstrate the influence of age at injury and injury severity on dementia risk after TBI, revealing that even mild TBI increases dementia risk in those aged ≥65 years

Coupled TRNSYS-CFD simulations evaluating the performance of PCM plate heat exchangers in an Airport Terminal building displacement conditioning system

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier.This paper reports on the energy performance evaluation of a displacement ventilation (DV) system in an airport departure hall, with a conventional DV diffuser and a diffuser retrofitted with a phase change material storage heat exchanger (PCM-HX). A TRNSYS-CFD quasi-dynamic coupled simulation method was employed for the analysis, whereby TRNSYS® simulates the HVAC and PID control system and ANSYS FLUENT® is used to simulate the airflow inside the airport terminal space. The PCM-HX is also simulated in CFD, and is integrated into the overall model as a secondary coupled component in the TRNSYS interface. Different night charging strategies of the PCM-HX were investigated and compared with the conventional DV diffuser. The results show that: i) the displacement ventilation system is more efficient for cooling than heating a space; ii) the addition of a PCM-HX system reduces the heating energy requirements during the intermediate and summer periods for specific night charging strategies, whereas winter heating energy remains unaffected; iii) the PCM-HX reduces cooling energy requirements, and; iv) maximum energy savings of 34% are possible with the deployment of PCM-HX retrofitted DV diffuser.This work was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Grant No: EP/H004181/1