Converting crisis to boom for Kenyan foundries and metal engineering industries: technical possibilities versus political and bureaucratic obstacles

The present foreign exchange crisis in Kenya could occasion a boom in our foundries and metal engineering workshops if the government adopts policies to vigorously encourage - instead of hampering - these key industries. Their plant and equipment, skilled workers, and supervisors are massively underuti1izea principally due to a lack of planned development for these industries. But now given that existing capacity, a boom in the foundries and metal engineering industries could be created by: drastically limiting the number of models of cars, trucks and various products, eliminating imports of domestically producible items, selectively improving the capacities and quality controls in these industries, lowering the inflated prices that wholesalers charge for specialty steels, reducing the over-reliance upon and cost of licensing agreements, restricting patent protection, and discriminatorily favouring the allocation of foreign exchange to foundries and the engineering industries. Also the government's huge railway workshops should be put to work to make components for many products (i.e. pumps). The implementation of these policies would create thousands of jobs through backward and forward linkages (e.g. for plastic components; assembly of the products, and from usage in agriculture) and would decrease import dependence. But the adoption of these policies to increase domestic production in these industries would encounter strong opposition from importers and multi-national assemblers of imported components. These conclusions were drawn from visits to 91 metal engineering workshops and 19 foundries in Nairobi, Kisumu, Thika, Magadi, Mombasa and elsewhere

Dies, moulds, and patterns: costly devices needed for deepening import substitutions

Many developing countries now assemble most of the final products they use, but they still need to import most inputs. To escape this dependence, developing countries are focusing on ways to make more intermediate inputs domestically. But very expensive dies, moulds and castings patterns are required to make most rubber, glass, plastic or metallic components used as intermediate inputs. On the other hand, the machinery and equipment used together with the dies, moulds and patterns can make a wide range to products but are often underutilized. So, often only the dies, moulds, or patterns are needed to begin the production of various components. But, to protect their financial interests, multinational corporations (MNCs) often will not allow a developing country to use these key pieces of equipment without a comprehensive transfer of technology agreement. Hence, often either the developing countries remain import dependent for the components or cannot compete internationally due to their small domestic markets and the high cost of the dies, moulds and patterns, and hence high per-unit production costs. So, the costs for DMPs must be lowered to economically enable LDCs to deepen import substitution for currently imported intermediate components. These costs might be lowered by: (1) better negotiation with MNCs; (2) joint South-South purchase of DMPs; (3) aid supported guarantees to encourage firms to lend DMPs to LDCs (4) decreasing the number of makes, models, and designs for products; and, (5) improving and subsidizing the facilities to make DMPs locally. However, to implement these programmes, third world governments would need to perceive their objectives clearly and firmly confront the resistance from internal and external vested interests which benefit from the LCDs' continuing import dependenc

DanceSport and Power Values

DanceSport is a competitive form of ballroom dancing. At a DanceSport event, couples perform multiple dances in front of judges. This paper shows how a goal for a couple and the judges\u27 evaluations of the couple\u27s dance performances can be used to formulate a weighted simple game. We explain why couples and their coaches may consider a variety of goals. We also show how prominent power values can be used to measure the contributions of dance performances to achieving certain goals. As part of our analysis, we develop novel visual representations of the Banzhaf and Shapley-Shubik index profiles for different thresholds. In addition, we show that the quota paradox is relevant for DanceSport events

Long gravitational-wave transients and associated detection strategies for a network of terrestrial interferometers

Searches for gravitational waves (GWs) traditionally focus on persistent sources (e.g., pulsars or the stochastic background) or on transients sources (e.g., compact binary inspirals or core-collapse supernovae), which last for time scales of milliseconds to seconds. We explore the possibility of long GW transients with unknown waveforms lasting from many seconds to weeks. We propose a novel analysis technique to bridge the gap between short O(s) “burst” analyses and persistent stochastic analyses. Our technique utilizes frequency-time maps of GW strain cross power between two spatially separated terrestrial GW detectors. The application of our cross power statistic to searches for GW transients is framed as a pattern recognition problem, and we discuss several pattern-recognition techniques. We demonstrate these techniques by recovering simulated GW signals in simulated detector noise. We also recover environmental noise artifacts, thereby demonstrating a novel technique for the identification of such artifacts in GW interferometers. We compare the efficiency of this framework to other techniques such as matched filtering

On the Nature of GW190814 and Its Impact on the Understanding of Supranuclear Matter

The observation of a compact object with a mass of 2.50-2.67Me on 2019 August 14, by the LIGO Scientific and Virgo collaborations (LVC) has the potential to improve our understanding of the supranuclear equation of state. While the gravitational-wave analysis of the LVC suggests that GW190814 likely was a binary black hole system, the secondary component could also have been the heaviest neutron star observed to date. We use our previously derived nuclear-physics-multimessenger astrophysics framework to address the nature of this object. Based on our findings, we determine GW190814 to be a binary black hole merger with a probability of >99.9%. Even if we weaken previously employed constraints on the maximum mass of neutron stars, the probability of a binary black hole origin is still ∼81%. Furthermore, we study the impact that this observation has on our understanding of the nuclear equation of state by analyzing the allowed region in the mass-radius diagram of neutron stars for both a binary black hole or neutron star-black hole scenario. We find that the unlikely scenario in which the secondary object was a neutron star requires rather stiff equations of state with a maximum speed of sound cs ≥0.6 times the speed of light, while the binary black hole scenario does not offer any new insight

Multimessenger constraints on the neutron-star equation of state and the Hubble constant

Observations of neutron-star mergers with distinct messengers, including gravitational waves and electromagnetic signals, can be used to study the behavior of matter denser than an atomic nucleus and to measure the expansion rate of the Universe as quantified by the Hubble constant. We performed a joint analysis of the gravitational-wave event GW170817 with its electromagnetic counterparts AT2017gfo and GRB170817A, and the gravitational-wave event GW190425, both originating from neutron-star mergers. We combined these with previous measurements of pulsars using X-ray and radio observations, and nuclear-theory computations using chiral effective field theory, to constrain the neutron-star equation of state. We found that the radius of a 1:4-solar mass neutron star is 11:75þ0:86_0:81 km at 90% confidence and the Hubble constant is 66:2þ4:4_4:2 at 1s uncertainty

Central exclusive production of longlived gluinos at the LHC

We examine the possibility of producing gluino pairs at the LHC via the exclusive reaction pp -> p+gluino+gluino+p in the case where the gluinos are long lived. Such long lived gluinos are possible if the scalar super-partners have large enough masses. We show that it may be possible to observe the gluinos via their conversion to R-hadron jets and measure their mass to better than 1% accuracy for masses below 350 GeV with 300/fb of data.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures. Minor corrections to version

Probing Quarkyonic Matter in Neutron Stars with the Bayesian Nuclear-Physics Multi-Messenger Astrophysics Framework

The interior of neutron stars contains matter at the highest densities realized in our Universe. Interestingly, theoretical studies of dense matter, in combination with the existence of two solar mass neutron stars, indicate that the speed of sound $c_s$ has to increase to values well above the conformal limit ($c_s^2\sim 1/3$) before decreasing again at higher densities. The decrease could be explained by either a strong first-order phase transition or a cross-over transition from hadronic to quark matter. The latter scenario leads to a pronounced peak in the speed of sound reaching values above the conformal limit, naturally explaining the inferred behavior. In this work, we use the Nuclear-Physics Multi-Messenger Astrophysics framework \textsc{NMMA} to compare predictions of the quarkyonic matter model with astrophysical observations of neutron stars, with the goal of constraining model parameters. Assuming quarkyonic matter to be realized within neutron stars, we find that there can be a significant amount of quarks inside the core of neutron stars with masses in the two solar mass range, amounting to up to $\sim 0.13M_\odot$, contributing $\sim 5.9\%$ of the total mass. Furthermore, for the quarkyonic matter model investigated here, the radius of a $1.4M_\odot$ neutron star would be $13.44^{+1.69}_{-1.54} (13.54^{+1.02}_{-1.04})$ km, at $95\%$ credibility, without (with) the inclusion of AT2017gfo.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure