47,378 research outputs found
The Benefits of Campaign Spending
Critics of American politics often say that spending on electoral campaigns harms our democracy. They charge that the money goes for cynical, negative, and misleading advertisements that alienate the public from politics and elections. Political scientists have collected and analyzed data on the connection between campaign spending and civic life. The data bear on several questions at issue in campaign finance debates: Does campaign spending reduce public trust? Does it reduce levels of citizen involvement in or attention to campaigns? Does it lower citizens' knowledge of information relevant to their votes? Who benefits from campaign spending? Studies indicate that campaign spending does not diminish trust, efficacy, and involvement, contrary to what critics charge. Moreover, spending increases public knowledge of the candidates, across essentially all groups in the population. Less spending on campaigns is not likely to increase public trust, involvement, or attention. Implicit or explicit spending limits reduce public knowledge during campaigns. Getting more money into campaigns should, on the whole, be beneficial to American democracy
Transport anomalies in a simplified model for a heavy electron quantum critical point
We discuss the transport anomalies associated with the development of heavy
electrons out of a neutral spin fluid using the large-N treatment of the
Kondo-Heisenberg lattice model. At the phase transition in this model the spin
excitations suddenly acquire charge. The Higgs process by which this takes
place causes the constraint gauge field to loosely ``lock'' together with the
external, electromagnetic gauge field. From this perspective, the heavy fermion
phase is a Meissner phase in which the field representing the difference
between the electromagnetic and constraint gauge field, is excluded from the
material. We show that at the transition into the heavy fermion phase, both the
linear and the Hall conductivity jump together. However, the Drude weight of
the heavy electron fluid does not jump at the quantum critical point, but
instead grows linearly with the distance from the quantum critical point,
forming a kind of ``gossamer'' Fermi-liquid.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures. Small change in references in v
Using template/hotwire cutting to demonstrate moldless composite fabrication
The objective of this experiment is to provide a simple, inexpensive composite fabrication technique which can be easily performed with a minimum of equipment and facilities. This process eliminates expensive female molds and uses only male molds which are easily formed from foam blocks. Once the mold is shaped, it is covered with fiberglass and becomes a structural component of the product
Quadratic diffusion Monte Carlo and pure estimators for atoms
The implementation and reliability of a quadratic diffusion Monte Carlo
method for the study of ground-state properties of atoms are discussed. We show
in the simple yet non-trivial calculation of the binding energy of the Li atom
that the method presented is effectively second-order in the time step. The
fulfilment of the expected quadratic behavior relies on some basic requirements
of the trial wave function used for importance sampling, in the context of the
fixed-node approximation. Expectation values of radial operators are calculated
by means of a pure estimation based on the forward walking methodology. It is
shown that accurate results without extrapolation errors can be obtained with a
pure algorithm that can be easily implemented in any previous diffusion Monte
Carlo program.Comment: RevTex, 20 pages, 3 figures, accepted in J. Chem. Phy
A Characterisation of the Weylian Structure of Space-Time by Means of Low Velocity Tests
The compatibility axiom in Ehlers, Pirani and Schild's (EPS) constructive
axiomatics of the space-time geometry that uses light rays and freely falling
particles with high velocity, is replaced by several constructions with low
velocity particles only. For that purpose we describe in a space-time with a
conformal structure and an arbitrary path structure the radial acceleration, a
Coriolis acceleration and the zig-zag construction. Each of these quantities
give effects whose requirement to vanish can be taken as alternative version of
the compatibility axiom of EPS. The procedural advantage lies in the fact, that
one can make null-experiments and that one only needs low velocity particles to
test the compatibility axiom. We show in addition that Perlick's standard clock
can exist in a Weyl space only.Comment: to appear in Gen.Rel.Gra
Source Reconstruction as an Inverse Problem
Inverse Problem techniques offer powerful tools which deal naturally with
marginal data and asymmetric or strongly smoothing kernels, in cases where
parameter-fitting methods may be used only with some caution. Although they are
typically subject to some bias, they can invert data without requiring one to
assume a particular model for the source. The Backus-Gilbert method in
particular concentrates on the tradeoff between resolution and stability, and
allows one to select an optimal compromise between them. We use these tools to
analyse the problem of reconstructing features of the source star in a
microlensing event, show that it should be possible to obtain useful
information about the star with reasonably obtainable data, and note that the
quality of the reconstruction is more sensitive to the number of data points
than to the quality of individual ones.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. To be published in "Microlensing 2000, A New Era
of Microlensing Astrophysics", eds., J.W. Menzies and P.D. Sackett, ASP
Conference Serie
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