Rereading Rawls in Arendtian Light: Reflective judgment and historical experience

An interpretation of Rawls constructivist procedure is offered that views it as a theoretical rendering of historical experiences.Publicad

Probing New Physics by Comparing Solar and KamLAND Data

We explore whether KamLAND and solar data may end up inconsistent when analyzed in terms of two-flavor neutrino oscillations. If this turned out to be the case, one would be led to conclude that there is more new physics, besides neutrino masses and mixing, in the leptonic sector. On the other hand, given that KamLAND and solar data currently agree when analyzed in terms of two-flavor neutrino oscillations, one is able to place nontrivial bounds on several manifestations of new physics. In particular, we compute how well a combined KamLAND and solar data analysis is able to constrain a specific form of violation of CPT invariance by placing a very stringent upper bound, |Delta m^2 - Delta bar{m}^2| < 1.1 10^{-4} eV^2 (3 sigma). We also estimate upper bounds on sin^2 theta - sin^2 bar{theta}. These are quite poor due to the fact that matter effects are almost irrelevant at KamLAND, which leads to an intrinsic inability to distinguish whether the antineutrino mixing angle is on the light (bar{theta} pi/4). We briefly discuss whether this ambiguity can be resolved by future long-baseline bar{nu}_e to bar{nu}_{e,mu} searches.Comment: Reference adde

An Application of Clustering Analysis to International Private Indebtedness

This paper presents a procedure for clustering analysis that combines Kohone’s Self organizing Feature Map (SOFM) and statistical schemes. The idea is to cluster the data in two stages: run SOFM and then minimize the segmentation dispersion. The advantages of proposed procedure will be illustrated through a synthetic experiment and a real macroeconomic problem. The procedure is then used to explore the relationship between private indebtedness and some macroeconomic variables commonly used to measure macroeconomic performance. The experiences of thirty-nine countries in the early nineties are analyzed. The procedure outperformed others clustering techniques in the job of identifying consistent groups of countries from the economic and statistical viewpoints. It found out similarities in different countries concerning their respective levels of private indebtedness when added to well accepted parameters to measure macroeconomic performance.Vector quantization, Clustering, Self-Organizing Feature Map,Macroeconomic Performance, Private Indebtedness.

Regional and demographic determinants of poverty in Brazil

The paper identifies the role of regional and demographic determinants of poverty in Brazil. We first estimate the probability of a household being classified as poor or indigent. We then apply decomposition techniques to identify the role of demographic variables (family size, parent’s education, etc.) and of regional variables in explaining those probabilities. We found out that parent’s education is the most important determinant, but regional aspects also play a role in determining poverty across states in Brazil.

Security Policy Consistency

With the advent of wide security platforms able to express simultaneously all the policies comprising an organization's global security policy, the problem of inconsistencies within security policies become harder and more relevant. We have defined a tool based on the CHR language which is able to detect several types of inconsistencies within and between security policies and other specifications, namely workflow specifications. Although the problem of security conflicts has been addressed by several authors, to our knowledge none has addressed the general problem of security inconsistencies, on its several definitions and target specifications.Comment: To appear in the first CL2000 workshop on Rule-Based Constraint Reasoning and Programmin

Fibonacci Oscillators in the Landau Diamagnetism problem

We address the issue of the Landau diamagnetism problem via $q$-deformed algebra of Fibonacci oscillators through its generalized sequence of two real and independent deformation parameters $q_1$ and $q_2$. We obtain $q$-deformed thermodynamic quantities such as internal energy, number of particles, magnetization and magnetic susceptibility which recover their usual form in the degenerate limit $q_1^2 + q_2^2$=1.Comment: Latex, 11 pages, two figures, version to appear in Physica