Quanta: The Originality of Einstein's Approach to Relativity?

We suggest that not only quanta may have played a role in Einstein's ideas on relativity, but that they themselves may be related to the dynamical and relativistic behaviour of the electromagnetic field exhibited in a Poincar\'e's 1900 paper, in particular to the identical transformation law of energy and frequency for bounded plane waves

Optimal Districting with Endogenous Party Platforms

This paper proposes a theory of socially optimal districting in a legislative-election model with endogenous party platforms. We generalize the model of Coate and Knight (2007), allowing parties to strategically condition their platforms on the districting. The socially optimal districting re ects the ideological leaning of the population, so that parties internalize voters' preferences in their policy platforms. The optimal seat-vote curve is unbiased when voters are risk-neutral, and -contrary to previous findings-biased against the largest partisan group when voters are risk-averse. The model is then calibrated by an econometric analysis of the elections of U.S. State legislators during the 1990s.

Runoff vs. plurality:the effects of the electoral system on local and central government behaviour

Plurality and runoff systems oer very different incentives to parties and coalition of voters, and demand different political strategies from potential candidates and chief executives. Italian mayors and city councils are elected with a different electoral system according to the locality's population, while municipalities are otherwise treated identically in terms of funding and powers. We exploit this institutional feature to test how the presence of different electoral systems affects the central government decisions on grants, and the local government decisions on local taxes. We find evidence that the upper-tier governments favour runoff-elected mayors, and that runoff-elected mayors levy lower taxes. This is broadly consistent with the literature on runoff and plurality rule electoral systems

Air blast parameters close to a liquid propellant explosion

Equations for determining air blast parameters close to liquid propellant explosions, and estimated peak overpressure in close fiel

Bs∗BKB_s^* B K vertex from QCD sum rules

The form factors and the coupling constant of the $B_s^* B K$ vertex are calculated using the QCD sum rules method. Three point correlation functions are computed considering both $K$ and $B$ mesons off-shell and, after an extrapolation of the QCDSR results, we obtain the coupling constant of the vertex. We study the uncertainties in our result by calculating a third form factor obtained when the $B^*_s$ is the off-shell meson, considering other acceptable structures and computing the variations of the sum rules' parameters. The form factors obtained have different behaviors but their simultaneous extrapolations reach to the same value of the coupling constant $g_{B_s^* B K}=10.6 \pm 1.7$. We compare our result with other theoretical estimates.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure

Adaptive scattered data fitting by extension of local approximations to hierarchical splines

We introduce an adaptive scattered data fitting scheme as extension of local least squares approximations to hierarchical spline spaces. To efficiently deal with non-trivial data configurations, the local solutions are described in terms of (variable degree) polynomial approximations according not only to the number of data points locally available, but also to the smallest singular value of the local collocation matrices. These local approximations are subsequently combined without the need of additional computations with the construction of hierarchical quasi-interpolants described in terms of truncated hierarchical B-splines. A selection of numerical experiments shows the effectivity of our approach for the approximation of real scattered data sets describing different terrain configurations