Fair compensation in large-scale land acquisitions: fair or fail?

Despite the existence of a legal framework defining the right to fair compensation, and notwithstanding the vast literature on transnational and domestic land deals, no theory has been developed so far to allow for a specific analysis of the economics of fair compensation in large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs), limiting our understanding of the underlying reasons of success or failure of this important legal protection mechanism. Building on the review of the existing literature on fair compensation and on the critical examination of several real-world case studies, this paper fills this gap by developing a three-player sequential game, which captures the peculiarities of fair compensation in large-scale land deals. We show that, under specific but not uncommon circumstances, the local community will be offered a zerocompensation as a rational consequence of the players’ optimisation, and this will lead to a land conflict, with all players incurring additional costs. Our findings suggest that local populations will be offered – and willing to accept – a compensation that is smaller than their original livelihood, unless they can oppose the land deal at no cost. Thus, the right to consent is inextricably related to the right to reject in LSLAs. If the former is frictionless while the latter comes at a cost, then there is space for strategic behaviours that exploit power imbalances and discretionary processes, and the fair compensation right is, in practice, weakened

The Question of Philanthropy: Social Reform in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance

Nathaniel Hawthorne presents three types of philanthropy in his novel The Blithedale Romance: the socialist community, feminism, and social reform. He does this so he can strike down each in turn and tell why they fail. Social problems do not have easy solutions, but Hawthorne advocates for the circle of community. This is the idea that those in need should be taken care of by their extended family or by those in the church. These people have a moral or religious obligation to those around them, and, through this Christian brotherhood, problems can be solved. The larger-scale reforms do not improve the situation, but actually lead to tragedy and sadness. This end is seen in The Blithedale Romance as the Blithedale experiment falls apart, Zenobia commits suicide, and Hollingsworth\u27s dream is crushed. This negative light is shed on large-scale philanthropy by Hawthorne to encourage individual philanthropy or more personal forms of aid. This is still important today because many people decide to participate in philanthropy and need to make an informed decision about which type of philanthropy to support. If everyone helped the people around them, the larger-scale projects, which he claims fail, would be unnecessary

Seshat: The Global History Databank

The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great differentials in wealth and power, and elaborate governance structures of today? Why do modern states sometimes fail to meet the basic needs of their populations? Why do economies decline, or fail to grow? In this article, we describe the structure and uses of a massive databank of historical and archaeological information, Seshat: The Global History Databank. The data that we are currently entering in Seshat will allow us and others to test theories explaining how modern societies evolved from ancestral ones, and why modern societies vary so much in their capacity to satisfy their members’ basic human needsPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Confinement from Instantons or Merons

In contrast to ensembles of singular gauge instantons, which are well known to fail to produce confinement, it is shown that effective theories based on ensembles of merons or regular gauge instantons do produce confinement. Furthermore, when the scale is set by the string tension, the action density, topological susceptibility, and glueball masses are similar to those arising in lattice QCD.Comment: 3 pages, 5 figures. Talk given at Lattice2004 (topology and confinement) Fermilab June 21-26, 200

Critical load and congestion instabilities in scale-free networks

We study the tolerance to congestion failures in communication networks with scale-free topology. The traffic load carried by each damaged element in the network must be partly or totally redistributed among the remaining elements. Overloaded elements might fail on their turn, triggering the occurrence of failure cascades able to isolate large parts of the network. We find a critical traffic load above which the probability of massive traffic congestions destroying the network communication capabilities is finite.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Jump-Diffusion Approximation of Stochastic Reaction Dynamics: Error bounds and Algorithms

Biochemical reactions can happen on different time scales and also the abundance of species in these reactions can be very different from each other. Classical approaches, such as deterministic or stochastic approach, fail to account for or to exploit this multi-scale nature, respectively. In this paper, we propose a jump-diffusion approximation for multi-scale Markov jump processes that couples the two modeling approaches. An error bound of the proposed approximation is derived and used to partition the reactions into fast and slow sets, where the fast set is simulated by a stochastic differential equation and the slow set is modeled by a discrete chain. The error bound leads to a very efficient dynamic partitioning algorithm which has been implemented for several multi-scale reaction systems. The gain in computational efficiency is illustrated by a realistically sized model of a signal transduction cascade coupled to a gene expression dynamics.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figure

Behavior of large-scale rectangular columns confined with FRP composites

This paper focuses on axially loaded, large-scale rectangular RC columns confined with fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) wrapping. Experimental tests are conducted to obtain the stress-strain response and ultimate load for three field-size columns having different aspect ratios and/or corner radii. Effective transverse FRP failure strain and the effect of increasing confining action on the stress-strain behavior are examined. Existing strength models, the majority of which were developed for small-scale specimens, are applied to predict the structural response. Since some of them fail to adequately characterize the test data and others are complex and require significant calculation, a simple design-oriented model is developed. The new model is based on the confinement effectiveness coefficient, an aspect ratio coefficient, and a corner radius coefficient. It accurately predicts the axial ultimate strength of the large-scale columns at hand and, when applied to the small-scale columns studied by other investigators, produces reasonable results

T-parity, its problems and their solution

We point out a basic difficulty in the construction of little-Higgs models with T-parity which is overlooked by large part of the present literature. Almost all models proposed so far fail to achieve their goal: they either suffer from sizable electroweak corrections or from a breakdown of collective breaking. We provide a model building recipe to bypass the above problem and apply it to build the simplest T-invariant extension of the Littlest Higgs. Our model predicts additional T-odd pseudo-Goldstone bosons with weak scale masses.Comment: 25 pages, 2 appendice

The resilience of interdependent transportation networks under targeted attack

Modern world builds on the resilience of interdependent infrastructures characterized as complex networks. Recently, a framework for analysis of interdependent networks has been developed to explain the mechanism of resilience in interdependent networks. Here we extend this interdependent network model by considering flows in the networks and study the system's resilience under different attack strategies. In our model, nodes may fail due to either overload or loss of interdependency. Under the interaction between these two failure mechanisms, it is shown that interdependent scale-free networks show extreme vulnerability. The resilience of interdependent SF networks is found in our simulation much smaller than single SF network or interdependent SF networks without flows.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Fermion Masses in SO(10) Models

We examine many SO(10) models for their viability or otherwise in explaining all the fermion masses and mixing angles. This study is carried out for both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric models and with minimal ($10+\bar{126}$) and non-minimal ($10+\bar{126}+120$) Higgs content. Extensive numerical fits to fermion masses and mixing are carried out in each case assuming dominance of type-II or type-I seesaw mechanism. Required scale of the B-L breaking is identified in each case. In supersymmetric case, several sets of data at the GUT scale with or without inclusion of finite supersymmetric corrections are used. All models studied provide quite good fits if the type-I seesaw mechanism dominates while many fail if the type-II seesaw dominates. This can be traced to the absence of the $b$-$\tau$ unification at the GUT scale in these models. The minimal non-supersymmetric model with type-I seesaw dominance gives excellent fits. In the presence of a $45_H$ and an intermediate scale, the model can also account for the gauge coupling unification making it potentially interesting model for the complete unification. Structure of the Yukawa coupling matrices obtained numerically in this specific case is shown to follow from a very simple U(1) symmetry and a Froggatt-Nielsen singlet.Comment: 31 pages, 9 Tables, 4 figure