Where does nuisance collide?

In tort law, a nuisance is a wrong that consists of an unreasonable interference with a person's use and enjoyment of their land, or with a right held in common by the public. A private nuisance protects an occupier of land against interferences such as noise, smells, smoke, or flooding coming from a neighbour, while a public nuisance is an unreasonable obstruction of a right common to everyone, such as a blocked highway. Prosser's 1966 Private Action for Public Nuisance traced how courts draw the line between these two, and when a private person may sue over a public one, with remedies running to money damages and injunctions that order the interference stopped. Here the word names a legal wrong and its remedy, not an unwanted quantity inside a statistical model or an overabundant organism in a lake.[1]

Unit

One actionable interference with land or a public right, tried case by case

Recovery means

The claimant may recover damages for the harm, and a court may grant an injunction ordering the interference stopped or abated

Measured by

Judged by whether the interference is unreasonable in degree and character, weighing its gravity against the utility of the conduct that causes it

In statistical inference, a nuisance parameter is a quantity in a model that must be present for the model to be correct but that the analyst does not actually want to estimate. When the goal is to estimate a mean, for example, the unknown variance is a nuisance parameter: it has to be accounted for, yet it is not the target. Basu's 1977 On the Elimination of Nuisance Parameters set out the main strategies for removing such parameters from a problem, including conditioning, marginalising, and working with the likelihood, so that inference can focus on the parameters of interest. Here the word names an obstacle inside a mathematical model, a number to be profiled out, not a legal wrong against land or a troublesome living organism.[2]

Unit

One unwanted model parameter that must be handled to reach the parameter of interest

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Handled by conditioning it away, integrating it out, or profiling the likelihood over it, so that it drops out of the final inference

In ecology and environmental science, a nuisance bloom or nuisance species is an organism whose overabundance causes ecological, economic, or aesthetic harm, whether or not it is toxic. The classic case is a nuisance algal bloom, in which phytoplankton such as cyanobacteria multiply so densely that they foul water, strip oxygen from it as they decay, and block recreational and drinking use. Paerl's 1988 Nuisance phytoplankton blooms in coastal, estuarine, and inland waters analysed the physical, chemical, and biological conditions that let such blooms form across marine, estuarine, and freshwater systems. Here the word names a living population that has grown too dense for its setting, counted in cells and biomass, not a legal wrong or an unwanted term in a model.[3]

Unit

A population of an organism grown dense enough to cause harm, per unit of water or area

Recovery means

A bloom may collapse once nutrients, light, or temperature no longer support it, and the water can then clear again

Measured by

Quantified by cell counts, chlorophyll concentration, and biomass, and by the ecological or economic damage the overabundance causes