2,316 research outputs found
International Coercion, Emulation and Policy Diffusion: Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reforms, 1977-1999
Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that the domestic adoption of market-oriented reforms is strongly influenced by international pressures of coercion and emulation. We find robust support for these arguments with an event-history analysis of the determinants of reform in the telecommunications and electricity sectors of as many as 205 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of multilateral lending from the IMF, the World Bank or Regional Development Banks is increasing over time, a finding that is consistent with anecdotal evidence that multilateral organizations have broadened the scope of the âconditionalityâ terms specifying market-oriented reforms imposed on borrowing countries. We discuss the possibility that, by pressuring countries into policy reform, cross-national coercion and emulation may not produce ideal outcomes.Privatization, deregulation, liberalization, infrastructure, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Multileral Institutions, Development, Reform, Globalization, Adoption, International
It\u27s Your Land, and My Land
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-me/1108/thumbnail.jp
Observation of nonlinear self-trapping of broad beams in defocusing waveguide arrays
We demonstrate experimentally the localization of broad optical beams in periodic arrays of optical waveguides with defocusing nonlinearity. This observation in optics is linked to nonlinear self-trapping of Bose-Einstein-condensed atoms in stationary periodic potentials being associated with the generation of truncated nonlinear Bloch states, existing in the gaps of the linear transmission spectrum. We reveal that unlike gap solitons, these novel localized states can have an arbitrary width defined solely by the size of the input beam while independent of nonlinearity
Evolving rules for document classification
We describe a novel method for using Genetic Programming to create compact classification rules based on combinations of N-Grams (character strings). Genetic programs acquire fitness by producing rules that are effective classifiers in terms of precision and recall when evaluated against a set of training documents. We describe a set of functions and terminals and provide results from a classification task using the Reuters 21578 dataset. We also suggest that because the induced rules are meaningful to a human analyst they may have a number of other uses beyond classification and provide a basis for text mining applications
Using of small-scale quantum computers in cryptography with many-qubit entangled states
We propose a new cryptographic protocol. It is suggested to encode
information in ordinary binary form into many-qubit entangled states with the
help of a quantum computer. A state of qubits (realized, e.g., with photons) is
transmitted through a quantum channel to the addressee, who applies a quantum
computer tuned to realize the inverse unitary transformation decoding of the
message. Different ways of eavesdropping are considered, and an estimate of the
time needed for determining the secret unitary transformation is given. It is
shown that using even small quantum computers can serve as a basis for very
efficient cryptographic protocols. For a suggested cryptographic protocol, the
time scale on which communication can be considered secure is exponential in
the number of qubits in the entangled states and in the number of gates used to
construct the quantum network
More on Tachyon Cosmology in De Sitter Gravity
We aim to study rolling tachyon cosmological solutions in de Sitter gravity.
The solutions are taken to be flat FRW type and these are not time-reversal
symmetric. We find that cosmological constant of our universe has to be
fine-tuned at the level of the action itself, as in KKLT string
compactification. The rolling tachyon can give rise to required inflation with
suitable choice of the initial conditions which include nonvanishing Hubble
constant. We also determine an upper bound on the volume of the
compactification manifold.Comment: 15pp, 3 figures; references adde
Autonomous three-dimensional formation flight for a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles
This paper investigates the development of a new guidance algorithm for a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles. Using the new approach of bifurcating potential fields, it is shown that a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles can be successfully controlled such that verifiable autonomous patterns are achieved, with a simple parameter switch allowing for transitions between patterns. The key contribution that this paper presents is in the development of a new bounded bifurcating potential field that avoids saturating the vehicle actuators, which is essential for real or safety-critical applications. To demonstrate this, a guidance and control method is developed, based on a six-degreeof-freedom linearized aircraft model, showing that, in simulation, three-dimensional formation flight for a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles can be achieved
Observing Long Cosmic Strings Through Gravitational Lensing
We consider the gravitational lensing produced by long cosmic strings formed
in a GUT scale phase transition. We derive a formula for the deflection of
photons which pass near the strings that reduces to an integral over the light
cone projection of the string configuration plus constant terms which are not
important for lensing. Our strings are produced by performing numerical
simulations of cosmic string networks in flat, Minkowski space ignoring the
effects of cosmological expansion. These strings have more small scale
structure than those from an expanding universe simulation - fractal dimension
1.3 for Minkowski versus 1.1 for expanding - but share the same qualitative
features. Lensing simulations show that for both point-like and extended
objects, strings produce patterns unlike more traditional lenses, and, in
particluar, the kinks in strings tend to generate demagnified images which
reside close to the string. Thus lensing acts as a probe of the small scale
structure of a string. Estimates of lensing probablity suggest that for string
energy densities consistant with string seeded structure formation, on the
order of tens of string lenses should be observed in the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey quasar catalog. We propose a search strategy in which string lenses
would be identified in the SDSS quasar survey, and the string nature of the
lens can be confirmed by the observation of nearby high redshift galaxies which
are also be lensed by the string.Comment: 24 pages revtex with 12 postscript firgure
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