Critique [of Fascism: A Review of Its History and Its Present Cultural Reality in the Americas]

Professor Forbes’ article represents a timely and important contribution. It should, if need be, serve as a means of raising the readers’ historical consciousnesses during a period in which dramatic changes in U.S. economic and social policies are under way, in a time when unabashed power politics seem to be imposed on half the globe by the ruling classes of both great imperial powers

Iterative Interplay between Aharonov-Bohm Deficit Angle and Berry Phase

Geometric phases can be observed by interference as preferred scattering directions in the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect or as Berry phase shifts leading to precession on cyclic paths. Without curvature single-valuedness is lost in both case. It is shown how the deficit angle of the AB conic metric and the geometric precession cone vertex angle of the Berry phase can be adjusted to restore single-valuedness. The resulting interplay between both phases confirms the non--linear iterative system providing for generalized fine structure constants obtained in the preliminary work. Topological solitons of the scalar coupling field emerge as localized, non-dispersive and non-singular solutions of the (complex) sine-Gordon equation with a relation to the Thirring coupling constant and non-linear optics

Refined limit multiplicity for varying conductor

Recent results by Abert, Bergeron, Biringer et al., Finis, Lapid and Mueller, and Shin and Templier have extended the limit multiplicity property to quite general classes of groups and sequences of level subgroups. Automorphic representations in the limit multiplicity problem are traditionally counted with multiplicity according to the number of fixed vectors of a level subgroup; our goal is to perform a slightly more refined analysis and count only automorphic representations with a given conductor with multiplicity 1.Comment: 13 page

Interface disorder and layer transitions in Ising thin films

The disorder and layer transitions in the interface between an Ising spin-1/2 film denoted $(n)$, and an Ising spin-1 film denoted $(m)$, are studied using Monte Carlo simulations. The effects of both an external magnetic field, acting only on the spin-1/2 film, and a crystal magnetic field acting only on the spin-1 film, are studied for a fixed temperature and selected values of the coupling constant $J_p$ between the two films. It is found that for large values of the constant $J_p$, the layers of the film $(n)$, as well as those of the film $(m)$, undergo a first order layering transition. On the other hand, the only disordered layer of the film $(n)$ is that one belonging to the interface films $(n)/(m)$, for any values of the crystal field $\Delta$. We show the existence of a critical value of the crystal field $\Delta_c$, above which this particular layer of the film $(n)$ is disordered. We found that $\Delta_c$ depends on the values of the constant coupling $(J_p)$ between the two films.Comment: 6 pages Latex, 13 figures Postscript forma

Expression cartography of human tissues using self organizing maps

Background: The availability of parallel, high-throughput microarray and sequencing experiments poses a challenge how to best arrange and to analyze the obtained heap of multidimensional data in a concerted way. Self organizing maps (SOM), a machine learning method, enables the parallel sample- and gene-centered view on the data combined with strong visualization and second-level analysis capabilities. The paper addresses aspects of the method with practical impact in the context of expression analysis of complex data sets.
Results: The method was applied to generate a SOM characterizing the whole genome expression profiles of 67 healthy human tissues selected from ten tissue categories (adipose, endocrine, homeostasis, digestion, exocrine, epithelium, sexual reproduction, muscle, immune system and nervous tissues). SOM mapping reduces the dimension of expression data from ten thousands of genes to a few thousands of metagenes where each metagene acts as representative of a minicluster of co-regulated single genes. Tissue-specific and common properties shared between groups of tissues emerge as a handful of localized spots in the tissue maps collecting groups of co-regulated and co-expressed metagenes. The functional context of the spots was discovered using overrepresentation analysis with respect to pre-defined gene sets of known functional impact. We found that tissue related spots typically contain enriched populations of gene sets well corresponding to molecular processes in the respective tissues. Analysis techniques normally used at the gene-level such as two-way hierarchical clustering provide a better signal-to-noise ratio and a better representativeness of the method if applied to the metagenes. Metagene-based clustering analyses aggregate the tissues into essentially three clusters containing nervous, immune system and the remaining tissues. 
Conclusions: The global view on the behavior of a few well-defined modules of correlated and differentially expressed genes is more intuitive and more informative than the separate discovery of the expression levels of hundreds or thousands of individual genes. The metagene approach is less sensitive to a priori selection of genes. It can detect a coordinated expression pattern whose components would not pass single-gene significance thresholds and it is able to extract context-dependent patterns of gene expression in complex data sets.
&#xa

Some Considerations Regarding the Problem of Multidimensional Utility

The concept of 'utility' is often used in ambiguous ways in economics, from having substantive psychological connotations to being a formal placeholder representing a person's preferences. In the accounts of the early utilitarians, it was a multidimensional measure that has been condensed during the marginalist revolution into the unidimensional measure we know today. But can we compare different pleasures? This paper assesses the evidence from psychology and neurosciences on how to best conceive of utility. It turns out that empirical evidence does not favor a view of multidimensional utility. This does not eliminate the possibility to make a normative argument supporting a multidimensional notion of utility.utility, pleasures, neuroeconomics, multidimensionality of utility