Catharine Macaulay and the Liberal and Republican Origins of American Public Administration

This dissertation utilizes the history of ideas to explore the philosophy of Catharine Macaulay, an eighteenth-century historian and philosopher, for application to contemporary American Public Administration. Macaulay\u27s view of human nature is paradoxical. Her characterization of man as corrupt and seduced by power is countered by her view that man is perfectible and capable of good works. The darker side of Macaulay\u27s vision supports government that checks power through the expansion of democracy, advocates the separation of powers, and adheres to the rule of law. In this respect she resembles a Lockean liberal. The more magnanimous side of Macaulay reveres ancient Greece and Rome, believes man is capable of civic virtue, and values the role of education in creating leaders. In this respect she resembles a classical republican. Combined, these visions offer a unique model of public administration. A Macaulay model of public administration rests its authority with the people. It uses the practice of administration as a check on power by the use of administrative discretion and the encouragement of citizen participation. The model advocates a generalist rather than a technical education for public administrators. Finally, the model includes the practice of benevolence, the belief that democratic values of justice, liberty, and equality are to be protected in the daily practice of Public Administratio

Graded Betti numbers of Cohen-Macaulay modules and the Multiplicity conjecture

We give conjectures on the possible graded Betti numbers of Cohen-Macaulay modules up to multiplication by positive rational numbers. The idea is that the Betti diagrams should be non-negative linear combinations of pure diagrams. The conjectures are verified in the cases where the structure of resolutions are known, i.e., for modules of codimension two, for Gorenstein algebras of codimension three and for complete intersections. The motivation for the conjectures comes from the Multiplicity conjecture of Herzog, Huneke and Srinivasan.Comment: 24 pages, references and examples adde

Population expansion in the North African Late Pleistocene signalled by mitochondrial DNA haplogroup U6

Background <br/> The archaeology of North Africa remains enigmatic, with questions of population continuity versus discontinuity taking centre-stage. Debates have focused on population transitions between the bearers of the Middle Palaeolithic Aterian industry and the later Upper Palaeolithic populations of the Maghreb, as well as between the late Pleistocene and Holocene. <br/> Results Improved resolution of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup U6 phylogeny, by the screening of 39 new complete sequences, has enabled us to infer a signal of moderate population expansion using Bayesian coalescent methods. To ascertain the time for this expansion, we applied both a mutation rate accounting for purifying selection and one with an internal calibration based on four approximate archaeological dates: the settlement of the Canary Islands, the settlement of Sardinia and its internal population re-expansion, and the split between haplogroups U5 and U6 around the time of the first modern human settlement of the Near East. <br/> Conclusions <br/> A Bayesian skyline plot placed the main expansion in the time frame of the Late Pleistocene, around 20 ka, and spatial smoothing techniques suggested that the most probable geographic region for this demographic event was to the west of North Africa. A comparison with U6's European sister clade, U5, revealed a stronger population expansion at around this time in Europe. Also in contrast with U5, a weak signal of a recent population expansion in the last 5,000 years was observed in North Africa, pointing to a moderate impact of the late Neolithic on the local population size of the southern Mediterranean coast

Catharine Macaulay and the Liberal and Republican Origins of American Public Administration

This dissertation utilizes the history of ideas to explore the philosophy of Catharine Macaulay, an eighteenth-century historian and philosopher, for application to contemporary American Public Administration. Macaulay\u27s view of human nature is paradoxical. Her characterization of man as corrupt and seduced by power is countered by her view that man is perfectible and capable of good works. The darker side of Macaulay\u27s vision supports government that checks power through the expansion of democracy, advocates the separation of powers, and adheres to the rule of law. In this respect she resembles a Lockean liberal. The more magnanimous side of Macaulay reveres ancient Greece and Rome, believes man is capable of civic virtue, and values the role of education in creating leaders. In this respect she resembles a classical republican. Combined, these visions offer a unique model of public administration. A Macaulay model of public administration rests its authority with the people. It uses the practice of administration as a check on power by the use of administrative discretion and the encouragement of citizen participation. The model advocates a generalist rather than a technical education for public administrators. Finally, the model includes the practice of benevolence, the belief that democratic values of justice, liberty, and equality are to be protected in the daily practice of Public Administratio

On the Complexity of Solving Quadratic Boolean Systems

A fundamental problem in computer science is to find all the common zeroes of $m$ quadratic polynomials in $n$ unknowns over $\mathbb{F}_2$. The cryptanalysis of several modern ciphers reduces to this problem. Up to now, the best complexity bound was reached by an exhaustive search in $4\log_2 n\,2^n$ operations. We give an algorithm that reduces the problem to a combination of exhaustive search and sparse linear algebra. This algorithm has several variants depending on the method used for the linear algebra step. Under precise algebraic assumptions on the input system, we show that the deterministic variant of our algorithm has complexity bounded by $O(2^{0.841n})$ when $m=n$, while a probabilistic variant of the Las Vegas type has expected complexity $O(2^{0.792n})$. Experiments on random systems show that the algebraic assumptions are satisfied with probability very close to~1. We also give a rough estimate for the actual threshold between our method and exhaustive search, which is as low as~200, and thus very relevant for cryptographic applications.Comment: 25 page

Catharine Macaulay and the Liberal and Republican Origins of American Public Administration

This dissertation utilizes the history of ideas to explore the philosophy of Catharine Macaulay, an eighteenth-century historian and philosopher, for application to contemporary American Public Administration. Macaulay\u27s view of human nature is paradoxical. Her characterization of man as corrupt and seduced by power is countered by her view that man is perfectible and capable of good works. The darker side of Macaulay\u27s vision supports government that checks power through the expansion of democracy, advocates the separation of powers, and adheres to the rule of law. In this respect she resembles a Lockean liberal. The more magnanimous side of Macaulay reveres ancient Greece and Rome, believes man is capable of civic virtue, and values the role of education in creating leaders. In this respect she resembles a classical republican. Combined, these visions offer a unique model of public administration. A Macaulay model of public administration rests its authority with the people. It uses the practice of administration as a check on power by the use of administrative discretion and the encouragement of citizen participation. The model advocates a generalist rather than a technical education for public administrators. Finally, the model includes the practice of benevolence, the belief that democratic values of justice, liberty, and equality are to be protected in the daily practice of Public Administratio