The Physics of the B Factories

This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C

Land-Cover and Land-Use Change in the Brazilian Amazon: Smallholders, Ranchers and Frontier Stratification

Tropical deforestation is a significant driver of global environmental change, given its impacts on the carbon cycle and biodiversity. Loss of the Amazon forest, the focus of this article, is of particular concern because of the size and the rapid rate at which the forest is being converted to agricultural use. In this article, we identify what has been the most important driver of deforestation in a specific colonization frontier in the Brazilian Amazon. To this end, we consider (1) the land-use dynamics of smallholder households, (2) the formation of pasture by large-scale ranchers, and (3) structural processes of land aggregation by ranchers. Much has been written about relations between smallholders and ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon, particularly those involving conflict over land, and this article explicates the implications of such social processes for land cover. Toward this end, we draw on panel data (1996-2002) and satellite imagery (1986-1999) to show the deforestation that is attributable to small- and largeholders, and the deforestation that is attributable to aggregations of property arising from a process that we refer to as frontier stratification. Evidently, most of the recent deforestation in the study area has resulted from the household processes of smallholders, not from conversions to pasture pursuant to the appropriations of smallholders' property by well-capitalized ranchers or speculators

Revisiting Theories of Frontier Expansion in the Brazilian Amazon: A Survey of the Colonist Farming Population in Rondônia's Post-Frontier, 1992-2002

Summary In the 1970s, extensive areas of Brazilian Amazon were settled by landless farmers. These internal migrations prompted theoretical scholarship on the nature and outcomes of frontier expansion from three general frameworks: the capitalist penetration thesis, the inter-sectoral articulation thesis, and the household life-cycle thesis. This paper reports selected findings of a 10-year (1992-2002) panel study of 240 farms in three settlement areas in Rondônia. The empirical findings of this longitudinal survey research do not unequivocally confirm any of these theses. Instead, elements of each emerge from the data analysis inviting a more locally nuanced, pluralistic approach to understanding the frontier colonization experience.

Global homeomorphisms and covering projections on metric spaces

For a large class of metric spaces with nice local structure, which includes Banach-Finsler manifolds and geodesic spaces of curvature bounded above, we give sufficient conditions for a local homeomorphism to be a covering projection. We first obtain a general condition in terms of a path continuation property. As a consequence, we deduce several conditions in terms of path- liftings involving a generalized derivative, and in particular we obtain an extension of Hadamard global inversion theorem in this context. Next we prove that, in the case of quasi-isometric mappings, some of these sufficient conditions are also necessary. Finally, we give an application to the existence of global implicit functions