The relationship between likelihood and fear of criminal victimisation: evaluating risk sensitivity as a mediating concept

Crime surveys typically ask respondents how ‘likely’ they think it is that they will become a crime victim in the future. The responses are interpreted here as ‘risk’ statements. An investigation of the risk literature shows the concept to be considerably more complex than at first imagined, but shows that individual risk predictions are largely based on interpretations far removed from rational considerations of likelihood based on recorded crime rates. Responses from three waves of a longitudinal crime survey conducted in Trinidad are examined in this light. It is concluded that fear of criminal victimization might best be considered as differential sensitivity to predicted risk.</p

The visual standards for the selection and retention of astronauts

Literature search with abstracts on visual performance standards for selection and retention of astronaut

Gaussian excitations model for glass-former dynamics and thermodynamics

We describe a model for the thermodynamics and dynamics of glass-forming liquids in terms of excitations from an ideal glass state to a Gaussian manifold of configurationally excited states. The quantitative fit of this three parameter model to the experimental data on excess entropy and heat capacity shows that ``fragile'' behavior, indicated by a sharply rising excess heat capacity as the glass transition is approached from above, occurs in anticipation of a first-order transition -- usually hidden below the glass transition -- to a ``strong'' liquid state of low excess entropy. The dynamic model relates relaxation to a hierarchical sequence of excitation events each involving the probability of accumulating sufficient kinetic energy on a separate excitable unit. Super-Arrhenius behavior of the relaxation rates, and the known correlation of kinetic with thermodynamic fragility, both follow from the way the rugged landscape induces fluctuations in the partitioning of energy between vibrational and configurational manifolds. A relation is derived in which the configurational heat capacity, rather than the configurational entropy of the Adam Gibbs equation, controls the temperature dependence of the relaxation times, and this gives a comparable account of the experimental observations.Comment: 21 pp., 17 fig

Nonequilibrium theory of Coulomb blockade in open quantum dots

We develop a non-equilibrium theory to describe weak Coulomb blockade effects in open quantum dots. Working within the bosonized description of electrons in the point contacts, we expose deficiencies in earlier applications of this method, and address them using a 1/N expansion in the inverse number of channels. At leading order this yields the self-consistent potential for the charging interaction. Coulomb blockade effects arise as quantum corrections to transport at the next order. Our approach unifies the phase functional and bosonization approaches to the problem, as well as providing a simple picture for the conductance corrections in terms of renormalization of the dot's elastic scattering matrix, which is obtained also by elementary perturbation theory. For the case of ideal contacts, a symmetry argument immediately allows us to conclude that interactions give no signature in the averaged conductance. Non-equilibrium applications to the pumped current in a quantum pump are worked out in detail.Comment: Published versio

Codimension Two Branes and Distributional Curvature

In general relativity, there is a well-developed formalism for working with the approximation that a gravitational source is concentrated on a shell, or codimension one surface. By contrast, there are obstacles to concentrating sources on surfaces that have a higher codimension, for example, a string in a spacetime with dimension greater than or equal to four. Here it is shown that, by giving up some of the generality of the codimension one case, curvature can be concentrated on submanifolds that have codimension two. A class of metrics is identified such that (1) the scalar curvature and Ricci densities exist as distributions with support on a co-dimension two submanifold, and (2) using the Einstein equation, the distributional curvature corresponds to a concentrated stress-energy with equation of state p equals minus the energy density, where p is the isotropic pressure tangent to the submanifold. This is the appropriate stress-energy to describe a self-gravitating brane that is governed by an area action, or a brane world deSitter cosmology. The possibility of having a different equation of state arise from a wider class of metrics is discussed.Comment: 18 pages; v2 references added; typos corrected, references added; additional references adde

Chiral two-pion exchange and proton-proton partial-wave analysis

The chiral two-pion exchange component of the long-range pp interaction is studied in an energy-dependent partial-wave analysis. We demonstrate its presence and importance, and determine the chiral parameters c_i (i=1,3,4). The values agree well with those obtained from pion-nucleon amplitudes.Comment: 13 pages, no figure