Retrospective voting studies typically examine policies where the public has common interests. By contrast, climate policy has broad public support but concentrated opposition in communities where costs are imposed. This spatial distribution of weak supporters and strong, local opponents mirrors opposition to other policies with diffuse public benefits and concentrated local costs. I use a natu...

The study reports an analysis of the drafts produced by two groups of students during an exam. Drafts were categorized as a function of some of their graphic features (e.g. their length), and of theii different planning strategies used for their production (e.g. note draft, organized draft, composed draft). Grades obtained by the students on their essays related to the different categories of d...

Algorithmic research strives to develop fast algorithms for fundamental problems. Despite its many successes, however, many problems still do not have very efficient algorithms. For years researchers have explained the hardness for key problems by proving NP-hardness, utilizing polynomial time reductions to base the hardness of key problems on the famous conjecture P 6= NP. For problems that al...

Using an integrated physical and biological approach, we examined across-shelf advection and exchange and the associated transport of bivalve larvae in the presence of a strong coastal current separated from the coast by a stratified inshore environment. We tested the hypothesis that the interface of the coastal current and inshore waters can act as an ecological barrier to across-shelf transpo...

The characteristics of wind turbine systems such as nonlinearity, uncertainty and strong coupling, as well as external interference, present great challenges in wind turbine controller design. In this paper, a quasi-continuous high-order sliding mode method is used to design controllers due to its strong robustness to external disturbances, unmodeled dynamics and parameter uncertainties. It can...

Serving as one key component of the most important lifeline infrastructure system, transmission towers are vulnerable to multiple nature hazards including strong wind and could pose severe threats to the power system security with possible blackouts under extreme weather conditions, such as hurricanes, derechoes, or winter storms. For the security and resiliency of the power system, it is impor...

BACKGROUND Understanding how environmental conditions, especially wind, influence birds' flight speeds is a prerequisite for understanding many important aspects of bird flight, including optimal migration strategies, navigation, and compensation for wind drift. Recent developments in tracking technology and the increased availability of data on large-scale weather patterns have made it possibl...