Global Answers to Global Problems: Health as a Global Public Good. 1/2007

Address by Jorge Sampaio, UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy to Stop Tuberculosis and former President of Portugal, on the occasion of the 8th Hendrik Brugmans Memorial Lecture to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Hendrik Brugmans, sponsored by the College of Europe, the Madariaga Foundation and the Alumni Association of the College of Europe, Brussels City Hall, 14 December 2006

Crossing Disciplinary Borders: Latino/a Studies and Latin American Studies in the 1990s

Over the 30 years of their existence, studies of Latinos/as in the U.S. and the field of Latin American Studies have emerged largely as divided disciplines. That is, despite what would appear to be similar sensibilities including comparable criticisms of Western hegemony and the neocolonial practices of the U.S., as well as the political, economic, and cultural displacement of similar populations, the two areas of study have more often regarded each other as competitive colleagues rather than complimentary practices. In the following study, I examine the nature of the two disciplines paying particular attention to the political context surrounding their formations and the foundations of their discursive frameworks. I examine changes to these disciplines in the methodological and ideological shifts surrounding the emergence of empirical and postmodern studies, and the relationship between these theoretical shifts and the expansion of globalization. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the emerging field of transnational and bi-national studies and the opportunities for crossing the disciplinary borders between Latino/as studies in the U.S. and Latin American Studies presented in this literature

Multiplicity of analytic hypersurface singularities under bi-Lipschitz homeomorphisms

We give partial answers to a metric version of Zariski's multiplicity conjecture. In particular, we prove the multiplicity of complex analytic surface (not necessarily isolated) singularities in $\mathbb{C}^3$ is a bi-Lipschitz invariant.Comment: Accepted for publication by the Journal of Topolog

Conclusion: New Projects and Old Reminders

Globalization and the transnational networks established by economic integration have produced a context in which the gathering of knowledge about Latina/o and Latin American communities is largely devoid of any processual perspective. This means that we must construct an alternative methodology to capture the international and transnational social fields and arenas of this multinational population. Nowhere does this type of dialogue appear more necessary than in studies of immigration from Latin America to the United States. In particular, we maintain that the integration of Latin American and Latina/o studies requires viewing these new waves of migrants as part of a synchronic flow of capital, goods, and resources back and forth between the United States and their countries of origin. We have shown in our discussion of remittances that multiple levels of economic dependency result

Numerical Artifacts in the Discontinuous Generalized Porous Medium Equation: How to Avoid Spurious Temporal Oscillations

Numerical discretizations of the Generalized Porous Medium Equation (GPME) with discontinuous coefficients are analyzed with respect to the formation of numerical artifacts. In addition to the degeneracy and self-sharpening of the GPME with continuous coefficients, detailed in [1], increased numerical challenges occur in the discontinuous coefficients case. These numerical challenges manifest themselves in spurious temporal oscillations in second order finite volume discretizations with both arithmetic and harmonic averaging. The integral average, developed in [2] leads to improved solutions with monotone and reduced amplitude temporal oscillations. In this paper, we propose a new method called the Shock-Based Averaging Method (SAM) that incorporates the shock position into the numerical scheme. The shock position is numerically calculated by discretizing the theoretical speed of the front from the GPME theory. The speed satisfies the jump condition for integral conservation laws. SAM results in a non-oscillatory temporal profile, producing physically valid numerical results. We use SAM to demonstrate that the choice of averaging alone is not the cause of the oscillations, and that the shock position must be a part of the numerical scheme to avoid the artifacts.Comment: Accepted, Journal of Computational Physic

Social-Economic Impacts of the Marine Shrimp Culture in Selected Brazilian Cities

The impact of farmed shrimp on the economy of ten municipalities are analyzed. A model of the municipal economy is developed and input-output tables are used to estimate indirect and induced impacts on job, income and municipal finances. It is concluded that farmed shrimp has a sizable contribution to job increases, in particular formal employment. Indirect and induced impacts are reduced because of spillovers to larger municipalities and other states. Income impacts can be sizable in particular in small counties. In general, the generated income represents a large share of total municipal product. In relation to municipal finance, direct contribution is rather small but indirect, through product increases and mainly transferences from State and Country taxes may be substantial. In conclusion, shrimp farms in the selected municipalities, contributes to expand and stabilize employment, to expand income and product, to increase municipal finances and to improve life conditions.Farmed Shrimp, Job, Income, Municipal Level Impacts, Direct Indirect and Induced Impacts, Tax Impacts, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q10, Q22, R0,

Minimum mean-squared error iterative successive parallel arbitrated decision feedback detectors for DS-CDMA systems

In this paper we propose minimum mean squared error (MMSE) iterative successive parallel arbitrated decision feedback (DF) receivers for direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems. We describe the MMSE design criterion for DF multiuser detectors along with successive, parallel and iterative interference cancellation structures. A novel efficient DF structure that employs successive cancellation with parallel arbitrated branches and a near-optimal low complexity user ordering algorithm are presented. The proposed DF receiver structure and the ordering algorithm are then combined with iterative cascaded DF stages for mitigating the deleterious effects of error propagation for convolutionally encoded systems with both Viterbi and turbo decoding as well as for uncoded schemes. We mathematically study the relations between the MMSE achieved by the analyzed DF structures, including the novel scheme, with imperfect and perfect feedback. Simulation results for an uplink scenario assess the new iterative DF detectors against linear receivers and evaluate the effects of error propagation of the new cancellation methods against existing ones