Quantifying the effects of delisting wolves after the first state began lethal management

Predators and their protection are controversial worldwide. Gray wolves, Canis lupus, lost U.S. federal protection (delisting) and the State of Wisconsin began lethal management first among all states and tribes that regained authority over wolves. Here we evaluated the initial success of reaching the state’s explicit objective, “…to allow for a sustainable harvest that neither increases nor decreases the state’s wolf population…” We used official state figures for hunter-killed wolves, population estimates from April 2017–2020, and the latest peer-reviewed model of individual wolf survival to estimate additional deaths resulting from federal delisting. More than half of the additional deaths were predicted to be cryptic poaching under the assumption that this period resembled past periods of liberalized wolf-killing in Wisconsin. We used a precautionary approach to construct three conservative scenarios to predict the current status of this wolf population and a minimum estimate of population decline since April 2020. From our scenarios that vary in growth rates and additional mortality estimates, we expect a maximum of 695–751 wolves to be alive in Wisconsin by 15 April 2021, a minimum 27–33% decline in the preceding 12 months. This contradicts the state expectation of no change in the population size. We draw a conclusion about the adequacy of regulatory mechanisms under state control of wolves and discuss the particular governance conditions met in Wisconsin. We recommend greater rigor and independent review of the science used by agencies to plan wolf hunting quotas and methods. We recommend clearer division of duties between state wildlife agencies, legislatures, and courts. We recommend federal governments reconsider the practice of sudden deregulation of wolf management and instead recommend they consider protecting predators as non-game or transition more slowly to subnational authority, to avoid the need for emergency relisting.

Semantic Entropy in Language Comprehension

Language is processed on a more or less word-by-word basis, and the processing difficulty induced by each word is affected by our prior linguistic experience as well as our general knowledge about the world. Surprisal and entropy reduction have been independently proposed as linking theories between word processing difficulty and probabilistic language models. Extant models, however, are typically limited to capturing linguistic experience and hence cannot account for the influence of world knowledge. A recent comprehension model by Venhuizen, Crocker, and Brouwer (2019, Discourse Processes) improves upon this situation by instantiating a comprehension-centric metric of surprisal that integrates linguistic experience and world knowledge at the level of interpretation and combines them in determining online expectations. Here, we extend this work by deriving a comprehension-centric metric of entropy reduction from this model. In contrast to previous work, which has found that surprisal and entropy reduction are not easily dissociated, we do find a clear dissociation in our model. While both surprisal and entropy reduction derive from the same cognitive process—the word-by-word updating of the unfolding interpretation—they reflect different aspects of this process: state-by-state expectation (surprisal) versus end-state confirmation (entropy reduction).

Aspects of quantum energy and stress in inhomogeneous unbounded dielectric continua

This article explores a number of issues associated with the problem of calculating and detecting electromagnetic quantum induced energy and stress in a stationary dielectric material with a smooth inhomogeneous polarizability. By concentrating on a particular system composed of an ENZ-type (epsilon-near-zero) meta-material, chosen to have a particular anisotropic and smooth inhomogeneous permittivity, confined in an infinitely long perfectly conducting open rectangular waveguide, we are able to deduce analytically from the source-free Maxwell’s equations and their boundary conditions a complete set of bounded harmonic electromagnetic evanescent eigen-modes and their associated eigen-frequencies. Since these solutions prohibit the existence of asymptotic scattering states in the guide, the application of the conventional Lifshitz approach to the Casimir stress problem becomes uncertain. An alternative approach is adopted based upon the spectral properties of the system and a regularization scheme constructed with direct applicability to more general systems composed of dielectrics with smooth inhomogeneous permittivities and open systems that may only admit evanescent modes. This more general scheme enables one, for the first time, to prescribe precise criteria for the extraction of finite quantum expectation values from regularized mode sums together with error bounds on these values, and is used to derive analytic or numeric results for regularized electromagnetic ground state expectation values in the guide.