The Role of Higher Education Institutions: Recruitment of Elites and Economic Growth

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of recruitment of elites and to investigate the nature of the links between recruitment of elites and economic growth. The main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for their recruitment. Although meritocratic selection should result in the best being chosen, we show that meritocratic recruitment actually leads to class stratification and auto-recruitment. We analyze the consequences of stratification resulting from meritocratic selection for the development of a country, and show that these consequences are dependent upon the type of technological changes occurring in the country.economic growth, education, elites, meritocracy, recruitment, social mobility, stratification

Changes in the Recruitment and Education of the Power Elites in Twentieth Century Western Democracies

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of recruitment of elites and to investigate the nature of the links between recruitment and training of elites and economic development. We show that there was a key shift at the turn of the nineteenth century in the way the Western world trained its elites, with a second shift taking place after World War II, when meritocracy became the basis for recruitment of elites. Although meritocratic selection should result in the best being chosen, we show that meritocratic recruitment leads to class stratification and auto-recruitment. We analyze whether stratification resulting from meritocratic selection is optimal for the development of a country, and show that it is dependent on the type of technological changes occurring in the country.elite; auto-recruitment; training; education; meritocracy; stratification; economic growth

Photometric quality of Dome C for the winter 2008 from ASTEP South

ASTEP South is an Antarctic Search for Transiting Exo- Planets in the South pole field, from the Concordia station, Dome C, Antarctica. The instrument consists of a thermalized 10 cm refractor observing a fixed 3.88\degree x 3.88\degree field of view to perform photometry of several thousand stars at visible wavelengths (700-900 nm). The first winter campaign in 2008 led to the retrieval of nearly 1600 hours of data. We derive the fraction of photometric nights by measuring the number of detectable stars in the field. The method is sensitive to the presence of small cirrus clouds which are invisible to the naked eye. The fraction of night-time for which at least 50% of the stars are detected is 74% from June to September 2008. Most of the lost time (18.5% out of 26%) is due to periods of bad weather conditions lasting for a few days ("white outs"). Extended periods of clear weather exist. For example, between July 10 and August 10, 2008, the total fraction of time (day+night) for which photometric observations were possible was 60%. This confirms the very high quality of Dome C for nearly continuous photometric observations during the Antarctic winter

ASTEP South: An Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets around the celestial South pole

ASTEP South is the first phase of the ASTEP project (Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets). The instrument is a fixed 10 cm refractor with a 4kx4k CCD camera in a thermalized box, pointing continuously a 3.88 degree x 3.88 degree field of view centered on the celestial South pole. ASTEP South became fully functional in June 2008 and obtained 1592 hours of data during the 2008 Antarctic winter. The data are of good quality but the analysis has to account for changes in the point spread function due to rapid ground seeing variations and instrumental effects. The pointing direction is stable within 10 arcseconds on a daily timescale and drifts by only 34 arcseconds in 50 days. A truly continuous photometry of bright stars is possible in June (the noon sky background peaks at a magnitude R=15 arcsec-2 on June 22), but becomes challenging in July (the noon sky background magnitude is R=12.5 arcsec?2 on July 20). The weather conditions are estimated from the number of stars detected in the field. For the 2008 winter, the statistics are between 56.3 % and 68.4 % of excellent weather, 17.9 % to 30 % of veiled weather and 13.7 % of bad weather. Using these results in a probabilistic analysis of transit detection, we show that the detection efficiency of transiting exoplanets in one given field is improved at Dome C compared to a temperate site such as La Silla. For example we estimate that a year-long campaign of 10 cm refractor could reach an efficiency of 69 % at Dome C versus 45 % at La Silla for detecting 2-day period giant planets around target stars from magnitude 10 to 15. This shows the high potential of Dome C for photometry and future planet discoveries. [Short abstract

Drilling Overdeepened Alpine Valleys (ICDP-DOVE): Quantifying the age, extent, and environmental impact of Alpine glaciations

The sedimentary infill of glacially overdeepened valleys (i.e., structures eroded below the fluvial base level) is an excellent but yet underexplored archive with regard to the age, extent, and nature of past glaciations. The ICDP project DOVE (Drilling Overdeepened Alpine Valleys) Phase 1 investigates a series of drill cores from glacially overdeepened troughs at several locations along the northern front of the Alps. All sites will be investigated with regard to several aspects of environmental dynamics during the Quaternary, with focus on the glaciation, vegetation, and landscape history. Geophysical methods (e.g., seismic surveys), for example, will explore the geometry of overdeepened structures to better understand the process of overdeepening. Sedimentological analyses combined with downhole logging, analysis of biological remains, and state-of-the-art geochronological methods, will enable us to reconstruct the erosion and sedimentation history of the overdeepened troughs. This approach is expected to yield significant novel data quantifying the extent and timing of Middle and Late Pleistocene glaciations of the Alps. In a first phase, two sites were drilled in late 2021 into filled overdeepenings below the paleolobe of the Rhine Glacier, and both recovered a trough filling composed of multiphase glacial sequences. Fully cored Hole 5068_1_C reached a depth of 165m and recovered 10m molasse bedrock at the base. This hole will be used together with two flush holes (5068_1_A, 5068_1_B) for further geophysical cross-well experiments. Site 5068_2 reached a depth of 255m and bottomed out near the soft rock-bedrock contact. These two sites are complemented by three legacy drill sites that previously recovered filled overdeepenings below the more eastern Alpine Isar-Loisach, Salzach, and Traun paleoglacier lobes (5068_3, 5068_4, 5068_5). All analysis and interpretations of this DOVE Phase 1 will eventually lay the ground for an upcoming Phase 2 that will complete the pan-Alpine approach. This follow-up phase will investigate overdeepenings formerly occupied by paleoglacier lobes from the western and southern Alpine margins through drilling sites in France, Italy, and Slovenia. Available geological information and infrastructure make the Alps an ideal area to study overdeepened structures; however, the expected results of this study will not be restricted to the Alps. Such features are also known from other formerly glaciated mountain ranges, which are less studied than the Alps and more problematic with regards to drilling logistics. The results of this study will serve as textbook concepts to understand a full range of geological processes relevant to formerly glaciated areas all over our planet

Complete high-intensity focused ultrasound in prostate cancer: outcome from the @-Registry

n/

The secondary eclipses of WASP-19b as seen by the ASTEP 400 telescope from Antarctica

The ASTEP (Antarctica Search for Transiting ExoPlanets) program was originally aimed at probing the quality of the Dome C, Antarctica for the discovery and characterization of exoplanets by photometry. In the first year of operation of the 40 cm ASTEP 400 telescope (austral winter 2010), we targeted the known transiting planet WASP-19b in order to try to detect its secondary transits in the visible. This is made possible by the excellent sub-millimagnitude precision of the binned data. The WASP-19 system was observed during 24 nights in May 2010. The photometric variability level due to starspots is about 1.8% (peak-to-peak), in line with the SuperWASP data from 2007 (1.4%) and larger than in 2008 (0.07%). We find a rotation period of WASP-19 of 10.7 +/- 0.5 days, in agreement with the SuperWASP determination of 10.5 +/- 0.2 days. Theoretical models show that this can only be explained if tidal dissipation in the star is weak, i.e. the tidal dissipation factor Q'star > 3.10^7. Separately, we find evidence for a secondary eclipse of depth 390 +/- 190 ppm with a 2.0 sigma significance, a phase consistent with a circular orbit and a 3% false positive probability. Given the wavelength range of the observations (420 to 950 nm), the secondary transit depth translates into a day side brightness temperature of 2690(-220/+150) K, in line with measurements in the z' and K bands. The day side emission observed in the visible could be due either to thermal emission of an extremely hot day side with very little redistribution of heat to the night side, or to direct reflection of stellar light with a maximum geometrical albedo Ag=0.27 +/- 0.13. We also report a low-frequency oscillation well in phase at the planet orbital period, but with a lower-limit amplitude that could not be attributed to the planet phase alone, and possibly contaminated with residual lightcurve trends.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 13 pages, 13 figure

The GTC exoplanet transit spectroscopy survey IX. Detection of haze, Na, K, and Li in the super-Neptune WASP-127b

Exoplanets with relatively clear atmospheres are prime targets for detailed studies of chemical compositions and abundances in their atmospheres. Alkali metals have long been suggested to exhibit broad wings due to pressure broadening, but most of the alkali detections only show very narrow absorption cores, probably because of the presence of clouds. We report the strong detection of the pressure-broadened spectral profiles of Na, K, and Li absorption in the atmosphere of the super-Neptune WASP-127b, at 4.1$\sigma$, 5.0$\sigma$, and 3.4$\sigma$, respectively. We performed a spectral retrieval modeling on the high-quality optical transmission spectrum newly acquired with the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), in combination with the re-analyzed optical transmission spectrum obtained with the 2.5 m Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT). By assuming a patchy cloudy model, we retrieved the abundances of Na, K, and Li, which are super-solar at 3.7$\sigma$ for K and 5.1$\sigma$ for Li (and only 1.8$\sigma$ for Na). We constrained the presence of haze coverage to be around 52%. We also found a hint of water absorption, but cannot constrain it with the global retrieval owing to larger uncertainties in the probed wavelengths. WASP-127b will be extremely valuable for atmospheric characterization in the era of James Webb Space Telescope