Losses from natural disasters have increased in recent years due to growth of population in hazard-prone areas and inadequate enforcement of building codes. This article first examines why homeowners have not voluntarily adopted cost-effective protective measures and have limited interest in purchasing insurance. It then proposes a disaster-management program which utilizes insurance coupled wi...

This novel type of particle “cooling”, called Ionization Cooling, is applicable to slow ( ) ions stored in a small ring. The many traversals through a thin foil enhance the nuclear reaction probability, in a steady configuration in which ionisation losses are recovered at each turn by a RF-cavity. For a uniform target “foil”, typically few hundred v ≈ 0.1c μg cm thick, transverse betatron oscil...

Job Losses and Child Outcomes Based on matched employer-employee data from Norway, we analyze the effects of worker displacement in 1986-1987 on their children’s earnings in 1999-2001. Using displacement of fathers to indicate an exogenous earnings shock we seek to identify whether family resources have a direct effect on children’s economic outcome. As in previous Scandinavian studies, we find...

After a short review of Q-balls properties, in this paper we discuss their interaction with matter, and their energy losses in the earth, for a large range of velocities. These calculations are used to compute the fractional angular acceptance of a detector at Gran Sasso Laboratory. Furthermore we computed the light yield in liquid scintillators, the ionization in streamer tubes and the Restric...

This chapter considers the natural hazard Risk Manager as an agent for choosing between interventions that affect the impact of future hazards. As such, it is possible to proceed broadly quantitatively, and to set aside the many less-quantifiable concerns that arise during a period of real-time hazard management. Thus the aim is to describe a framework in which it is possible to address questio...

In a market for a homogeneous good where firms are identical, compete in quantities and produce with constant returns, the percentage of welfare losses (PWL) is small with as few as five competitors for a class of demand functions which includes linear and isoelastic cases. We study markets with positive fixed costs and asymmetric firms. We provide exact formulae of PWL and robust constructions...

Phosphorus (P) released from plants after freezing at the end of the growing season may be a contributor to P in runoff from agricultural landscapes. We evaluated P release from alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) and mixed grass species [mainly quackgrass (Agropyron repens)] after freezing or drying in laboratory and field studies. Freezing released 18-30 % of the total P as dissolved reactive P (DRP...

Future use of coated conductors in electric power applications like transmission cables, transformers or fault current limiters is sensitive to the amount of dissipation in the AC regime. This paper analyses factors controlling AC loss of coated conductors in typical configurations: the self-field case when transport current generates the magnetic field, and the case of AC applied field where t...

The fabrication of single-walled carbon nanotubes is still somewhat of an art form, and processes that either create the nanotubes at a much faster rate or of much greater length or purity is still needed. Zhu et al. (p. 884) use an improved floating catalyst method to create centimeterlong single-walled nanotube ropes that are significantly longer than those obtained from either chemical vapor...

About 120 million people worldwide suffer from congenital (early-onset) hearing loss. Thirty percent of them have syndromic hearing loss and the remaining 70% have non-syndromic hearing loss. In addition, a large number of elderly people worldwide suffer from age-related (late-onset) hearing loss. c-Ret and c-RET have been shown to be essential for the development and maintenance of neurons inc...