Attitudes Towards Work and the Market Economy in the Czech and Slovak Republics

[Excerpt] This report is the final in a series of four reports whose main purpose is to present a preliminary overview of attitudes towards work and the market economy in four Eastern and Central European countries (actually five by now, following the division of Czechoslovakia into the Czech and the Slovak republics). The project was initiated by the Bureau of International Labor Affairs of the U.S. Department of Labor in mid-1991 in order to gather information which might assist in designing technical assistance programs appropriate for the new political and economic situation in these countries. Thus, the starting point was to develop a survey design and instrument which could illuminate the transition phase and how it is perceived in the population to conduct the surveys and to report their findings, as soon as possible, so as to allow for modifications in programs being planed or in operation

Attitudes Towards Work And The Market Economy In Bulgaria

[Excerpt] As in the reports on Poland (Ruiz Quintanilla 1992a) and Hungary (Ruiz Quintanilla 1992b), this summary will center on how life has changed in Bulgaria as evaluated by the Bulgarian people. The domain of interest are attitudes and values related to the economy, work and political issues. The focus will be on where progress has been made and where, there has been regression. What are the hopes, intentions and plans for the future? How is the role of the West perceived? What kind of Western Assistance is wanted

Orthogonality criterion for banishing hydrino states from standard quantum mechanics

Orthogonality criterion is used to shown in a very simple and general way that anomalous bound-state solutions for the Coulomb potential (hydrino states) do not exist as bona fide solutions of the Schr\"{o}dinger, Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations.Comment: 6 page

Asymptotic cosmological solutions for string/brane gases with solitonic fluxes

We present new cosmological solutions for brane gases with solitonic fluxes that can dynamically explain the existence of three large spatial dimensions. This reasserts the importance of fluxes for understanding the full space of solutions in a potential implementation of the Brandenberger-Vafa mechanism with M2-branes. Additionally, we study a particular example in which the cosmological dynamics supported by a string gas with a NS flux in the ten-dimensional dilaton gravity framework is asymptotically equivalent to that of a M2-brane gas with a certain wrapping configuration in eleven-dimensional supergravity. We speculate that this connection between the ten- and eleven-dimensional implementations of the Brandenberger-Vafa mechanism could be a general feature.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, revtex

Attitudes Towards Work and the Market Economy in Hungary

[Excerpt] A common approach in describing countries in Eastern and Central Europe is to focus on similarities among them currently and in their past but to neglect differences. This approach utilizes broad categories as in seeing their economic systems as copies of the soviet model versus a Western free-market model . The principal focus is on delineating East-West differences. But to help Eastern and Central European countries overcome obstacles in this transition era, we need to understand distinctive country-characteristics and idiosyncrasies

Attitudes Towards Work and the Market Economy in Poland

[Excerpt] The results of the June, 1989 elections demonstrated the willingness of a majority of the Polish people to initiate the change from a one-party regime to political pluralism. While the past has been rejected, replacing a centrally planned economy with a market economy can neither be achieved overnight nor by simply by voting for it. The traces of the previous centrally planned economy as well as those of the autocratic political system still remain embedded in Polish work-organizations and institutions. Fragments of the former system have survived in the structure of the institutions, in daily routines and habits, and in the minds and conventions of the people

Primordial torsion fields as an explanation of the anisotropy in cosmological electromagnetic propagation

In this note we provide a simple explanation of the recent finding of anisotropy in electromagnetic (EM) propagation claimed by Nodland and Ralston (astro-ph/9704196). We consider, as a possible origin of such effect, the effective coupling between EM fields and some tiny background torsion field. The coupling is obtained after integrating out charged fermions, it is gauge invariant and does not require the introduction of any new physics.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX, one figure, enlarged version with minor correction

On Resumming Inflationary Perturbations beyond One-loop

It is well known that the correlation functions of a scalar field in a quasi-de Sitter space exhibit at the loop level cumulative infra-red effects proportional to the total number of e-foldings of inflation. Using the in-in formalism, we explore the behavior of these infra-red effects in the large N limit of an O(N) invariant scalar field theory with quartic self-interactions. By resumming all higher-order loop diagrams non-perturbatively, we show that the connected four-point correlation function, which is a signal of non-Gaussianity, is non-perturbatively enhanced with respect to its tree-level value.Comment: 17 pages, v2: minor corrections, to appear in jca