Rent Seeking and the Unveiling of 'De Facto' Institutions: Development and Colonial Heritage within Brazil

This paper analyzes the roots of variation in de facto institutions, within a constant de jure institutional setting. We explore the role of rent-seeking episodes in colonial Brazil as determinants of the quality of current local institutions, and argue that this variation reveals a de facto dimension of institutional quality. We show that municipalities with origins tracing back to the sugar-cane colonial cycle -- characterized by a polarized and oligarchic socioeconomic structure -- display today more inequality in the distribution of land. Municipalities with origins tracing back to the gold colonial cycle -- characterized by an over-bureaucratic and heavily intervening presence of the Portuguese state -- display today worse governance practices and less access to justice. The colonial rent-seeking episodes are also correlated with lower provision of public goods and lower income per capita today, and the latter correlation seems to work partly through worse institutional quality at the local level.

Institutional Development and Colonial Heritage within Brazil

This paper analyzes the determinants of local institutions and distribution of political power within a constant 'macro-institutional' setting. We show that characteristics of Brazilian municipalities related to institutional quality and distribution of political power are partly inherited from the colonial histories experienced by different areas of the country. Municipalities with origins tracing back to the sugar-cane colonial cycle – characterized by a polarized and oligarchic socioeconomic structure – display today more inequality in the distribution of endowments (land). Municipalities with origins tracing back to the gold colonial cycle – characterized by a heavily inefficient presence of the Portuguese state – display today worse governance practices and less access to justice. The colonial rent-seeking episodes are also correlated with lower provision of public goods and lower income per capita.institutions, colonial heritage, rent-seeking, geography, Brazil

Fifty years of life in classrooms: an inquiry into the scholarly contributions of Philip Jackson

The intent of this article is to explore the scholarly influence of Philip W. Jackson through examining the spread of his scholarship and the ideas he generated. The research design of this paper is borrowed from a previous study (Ben-Peretz & Craig, 2018) about another distinguished curriculum scholar, Joseph J. Schwab. The work begins with a biography of Philip Jackson and continues with literature reviews on the history of ideas and the use of knowledge in education. This background is followed by a description of the study's research method, 'inquiry into inquiry', and its data sources (Scopus-listed articles, published books/Google citations, invited addresses, transcribed interviews, conference proceedings, invited addresses, etc.) The papers' findings focus on (1) the influence of Jackson's ideas and approaches, (2) Jackson's direct impact through involvement in projects/organizations, and (3) Jackson's impact on the scholarly literature. Discussions of generative scholarship, intergenerational legacy and scholarly influence conclude the article, along with the recommendation that the 'inquiry into inquiry' approach be re-enacted with other noteworthy curriculum figures to more fully understand the influence of ideas and research dissemination in curriculum and instruction/teaching and teacher education.Portuguese national funds through the FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) within the framework of the CIEC (Research Center for Child Studies of the University of Minho) project under the reference UIDB/00317/202

Thermal Effects on Photon-Induced Quantum Transport

We theoretically investigate laser induced quantum transport in a two-level quantum dot attached to electric contacts. Our approach, based on nonequilibrium Green function technique, allows to include thermal effects on the photon-induced quantum transport and excitonic coherent dynamics. By solving a set of coupled integrodifferential equations, involving correlation and propagator functions, we obtain the photocurrent and the dot occupations as a function of time. The characteristic coherent Rabi oscillations are found in both occupations and photocurrent, with two distinct sources of decoherence: incoherent tunneling and thermal fluctuations. In particular, for increasing temperature the dot becomes more thermally occupied which shrinks the amplitude of the Rabi oscillations, due to Pauli blockade. Finally, due to the interplay between photon and thermal induced electron populations, the photocurrent can switch sign as time evolves and its stationary value can be maximized by tunning the laser intensity.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

MapMi: automated mapping of microRNA loci.

BACKGROUND: A large effort to discover microRNAs (miRNAs) has been under way. Currently miRBase is their primary repository, providing annotations of primary sequences, precursors and probable genomic loci. In many cases miRNAs are identical or very similar between related (or in some cases more distant) species. However, miRBase focuses on those species for which miRNAs have been directly confirmed. Secondly, specific miRNAs or their loci are sometimes not annotated even in well-covered species. We sought to address this problem by developing a computational system for automated mapping of miRNAs within and across species. Given the sequence of a known miRNA in one species it is relatively straightforward to determine likely loci of that miRNA in other species. Our primary goal is not the discovery of novel miRNAs but the mapping of validated miRNAs in one species to their most likely orthologues in other species. RESULTS: We present MapMi, a computational system for automated miRNA mapping across and within species. This method has a sensitivity of 92.20% and a specificity of 97.73%. Using the latest release (v14) of miRBase, we obtained 10,944 unannotated potential miRNAs when MapMi was applied to all 21 species in Ensembl Metazoa release 2 and 46 species from Ensembl release 55. CONCLUSIONS: The pipeline and an associated web-server for mapping miRNAs are freely available on http://www.ebi.ac.uk/enright-srv/MapMi/. In addition precomputed miRNA mappings of miRBase miRNAs across a large number of species are provided

Large-scale analysis of microRNA evolution.

BACKGROUND: In animals, microRNAs (miRNA) are important genetic regulators. Animal miRNAs appear to have expanded in conjunction with an escalation in complexity during early bilaterian evolution. Their small size and high-degree of similarity makes them challenging for phylogenetic approaches. Furthermore, genomic locations encoding miRNAs are not clearly defined in many species. A number of studies have looked at the evolution of individual miRNA families. However, we currently lack resources for large-scale analysis of miRNA evolution. RESULTS: We addressed some of these issues in order to analyse the evolution of miRNAs. We perform syntenic and phylogenetic analysis for miRNAs from 80 animal species. We present synteny maps, phylogenies and functional data for miRNAs across these species. These data represent the basis of our analyses and also act as a resource for the community. CONCLUSIONS: We use these data to explore the distribution of miRNAs across phylogenetic space, characterise their birth and death, and examine functional relationships between miRNAs and other genes. These data confirm a number of previously reported findings on a larger scale and also offer novel insights into the evolution of the miRNA repertoire in animals, and it's genomic organization

Relativistic Bose-Einstein condensate in the rainbow gravity

In this paper, we study the effects of a modified theory of gravity - the rainbow gravity - on the relativistic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). We initially discuss some formal aspects of the model in order to compute the corrections to the relevant quantities of the condensate. Following, we evaluate the generating functional from which obtain some thermodynamic parameters. Then we calculate the corrected critical temperature $T_c$ that sets the relativistic Bose-Einstein condensate considering the three principal rainbow functions, finding, in addition, a phenomenological upper bound for the parameters involved in the model. Finally, we discuss how harder is for the particles at an arbitrary temperature $T<T_c$ to enter the condensed state compared to the usual scenario, {\it i.e.}, without rainbow gravity.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure, matches version accepted in EP

Effects of Lorentz violation in the Bose-Einstein condensation

In this paper we study the corrections emergent from a Lorentz-violating CPT-odd extension of the complex scalar sector to the Bose-Einstein condensation and to the thermodynamics parameters. We initially discussed some features of the model to only then compute the corrections to the Bose-Einstein condensation. The calculations were done by computing the generating functional, from which we extract the thermodynamics parameters. We also obtained a Lorentz-violating correction for the critical temperature $T_c$ that sets the Bose-Einstein Condensation.Comment: 6 pages. 2 figures. Version accepted by EPL. Minor typo corrections. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2009.0230