Showing 4511 - 4520 of 5831 Items
Identifying the Opportunity Cost of Critical Habitat Designation under the U.S. Endangered Species Act
Date: 2014-10-01
Creator: Erik Nelson, John C. Withey, Derric Pennington, Joshua J. Lawler
Access: Open access
- We determine the effect of the US Endangered Species Act’s Critical Habitat designation on land use change from 1992 to 2011. We find that the rate of change in developed land (constructed material) and agricultural land is not significantly affected by Critical Habitat designation. Therefore, Sections 7 and 9 of the Endangered Species Act do not appear to be more heavily applied in lands designated as Critical Habitat areas versus lands within listed species’ ranges, but without critical habitat designation. Further, there does not appear to be any extraordinary conservation activity in critical habitat areas; for example, environmental non-profits and land trusts do not appear to be concentrating activity in these areas. Before we conclude that the opportunity cost of Critical Habitat designation is negligible we need to examine the land management impacts of designation.
CrI3 revisited with a many-body ab initio theoretical approach
Date: 2021-06-01
Creator: Tom Ichibha, Allison L. Dzubak, Jaron T. Krogel, Valentino R. Cooper, Fernando A., Reboredo
Access: Open access
- CrI3 has recently been shown to exhibit low-dimensional, long-range magnetic ordering from few layers to single layers of CrI3. The properties of CrI3 bulk and few-layered systems are uniquely defined by a combination of short-range intralayer and long-range interlayer interactions, including strong correlations, exchange, and spin-orbit coupling. Unfortunately, both the long-range van der Waals interactions, which are driven by dynamic, many-body electronic correlations, and the competing strong intralayer correlations, present a formidable challenge for the local or semilocal mean-field approximations employed in workhorse electronic structure approaches like density-functional theory. In this paper we employ a sophisticated many-body approach that can simultaneously describe long- and short-range correlations. We establish that the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo (FNDMC) method reproduces the experimental interlayer separation distance of bulk CrI3 for the high-temperature monoclinic phase with a reliable prediction of the interlayer binding energy. We subsequently employed the FNDMC results to benchmark the accuracy of several density-functional theory exchange-correlation approximations.
Narrative-inspired generation of ambient music
Date: 2017-01-01
Creator: Sarah Harmon
Access: Open access
- An author might read other written works to polish their own writing skill, just as a painter might analyze other paintings to hone their own craft. Yet, either might also visit the theatre, listen to a piece of music, or otherwise experience the world outside their particular discipline in search of creative insight. This paper explores one example of how a computational system might rely on what they have learned from analyzing another distinct form of expression to produce creative work. Specifically, the system presented here extracts semantic meaning from an input text and uses this knowledge to generate ambient music. An independent measures experiment was conducted to provide a preliminary assessment of the system and direct future work.
Social Science and the Analysis of Environmental Policy
Date: 2020-09-01
Creator: Cary Coglianese, Shana M. Starobin
Access: Open access
- As much as environmental problems manifest themselves as problems with the natural environment, environmental problems—and their solutions—are ultimately social and behavioral in nature. Just as the natural sciences provide a basis for understanding the need for environmental policy and informing its design, the social sciences also contribute in significant ways to the understanding of the behavioral sources of environmental problems, both in terms of individual incentives and collective action challenges. In addition, the social sciences have contributed much to the understanding of the ways that laws and other institutions can be designed to solve environmental problems. In this review article, we distill core intellectual frameworks from among the social sciences that scaffold modern environmental policy in industrialized country contexts—focusing on key contributions principally from political science, economics, psychology, and sociology to the analysis of environmental problems and their solutions. These frameworks underlie how environmental problems are defined at multiple scales and the conceptualization and empirical testing of policy solutions that seek to shape human behavior in ways that improve environmental quality and promote sustainable economic growth. With the planet facing continued environmental threats, improving environmental policy decision-making depends on the insights and frameworks of social science research in addition to those of the natural sciences.
Bowdoin Orient, v. 133, no. 4
Date: 2003-10-03
Access: Open access
- There are two volumes numbered 133. This is the second.
Bowdoin Orient, v. 133, no. 7
Date: 2001-10-26
Access: Open access
- There are two volumes numbered 133. This is the original.