Brazil’s Deferred Highway: Mobility, Development, and Anticipating the State in Amazonia

Four decades ago, Brazilian officials plotted designs for colonization and resource extraction in Amazonia; subsequently the region has become a test-lab for successive development regimes. Along the Santarém-Cuiabá Highway (Br-163) in the state of Pará, residents have engaged in a range of licit and illicit activities as official development policy has shifted throughout the years. Despite assertions that living along the unpaved road is tantamount to “being stuck” in place and time, residents move widely throughout the region, using the road, trails, streams, and rivers as thoroughfares. I argue that “being stuck” functions as a discursive label for illegible mobilities and the speculative economies they support as agrarian reform clients, ranchers, and others compete for position in anticipation of the road’s paving. Novel forms of resource speculation result from the labor of moving and maintaining anticipatory structures along the road, a process that remains obscure from state development projects

W/Z + b,bbar/jets at NLO using the Monte Carlo MCFM

We summarize recent progress in next-to-leading order QCD calculations made using the Monte Carlo MCFM. In particular, we focus on the calculations of p anti-p -> W b-bbar, Z b-bbar and highlight the significant corrections to background estimates for Higgs searches in the channels WH and ZH at the Tevatron. We also report on the current progress of, and strategies for, the calculation of the process p anti-p -> W/Z + 2 jets.Comment: 4 pages, talk presented at the XXXVI Rencontres de Moriond, QCD and High Energy Hadronic Interactions, 17-24 March 2001, Les Arcs, Savoie, Franc

Ionospheric Corrections via PIM and Real-Time Data

We describe a method for removing ionospheric effects from single-frequency radio data a posteriori. This method is based on a theoretical climatological model developed by the USAF, which returns electron density as a function of position and time along the line of sight to the source. Together with a model of the earth's magnetic field, ionospheric delays and Faraday rotation values ensue. If contemoraneous ionospheric data -- GPS TEC observations or ionosonde profiles -- exist, they can be incorporated to update the modeled electron densities.Comment: 6 pages, 2 fiugres; LaTeX2e (96/12/01); uses elsart.cls (2.15, 98/07/15); to appear in New Astronomy Review