China Since Tiananmen: The Labor Movement

[Excerpt] The twenty years since 1989 have brought two major developments in worker activism. First, whereas workers were part of the mass uprising in the Tiananmen movement, albeit as subordinate partners to the students, labor activism since then has been almost entirely confined to the working class. While the ranks of aggrieved workers have proliferated (expanding from workers in the state-owned sector to include migrant workers) and the forms and incidents of labor activism have multiplied, there is hardly any sign of mobilization that transcends class or regional lines. Second, we observe that a long-term decline in worker power at the point of production – power that was previously institutionalized in skill hierarchies, union representation, democratic management, permanent or long-term employment, and other conditions of service constitutive of the socialist social contract - is going on even as workers gain more power (at least on paper) outside the workplace. New labor laws have broadened workers\u27 rights and expanded administrative and judicial channels for resolving labor conflicts. These legal and bureaucratic procedures have atomized and depoliticized labor activism even as they have engendered and intensified mobilization outside official limits

Improving parallel program performance using critical path analysis

A programming tool that performs analysis of critical paths for parallel programs has been developed. This tool determines the critical path for the program as scheduled onto a parallel computer with P processing elements, the critical path for the program expressed as a data flow graph (when maximal parallelism can be expressed), and the minimum number of processing elements (P_opt) needed to obtain maximum program speedup. Experiments were performed using several versions of a Gaussian elimination program to examine how speedup varied with changes in granularity and critical path length. These experiments showed that when the available numer of processing elements P < P_opt, increasing granularity improved program speedup more than reducing (the data flow graph's) critical path length, whereas when P ≥ P_opt, increasing granularity degraded program speedup while reducing critical path length improved program speedup

Is Lavelle-McMullan transformation a really new symmetry in QED?

Lavelle-McMullan symmetry of QED is examined at classical and quantum levels. It is shown that Lavelle-McMullan symmetry does not give any new non-trivial information in QED by examining the Ward-Takahashi identities. Being inspired by the examination of Ward-Takahashi identity, we construct the generalized non-local and non-covariant symmetries of QED.Comment: LATEX, 9 pages, two figures generated by Feynma

Dynamics of rapidly rotating Bose-Einstein condensates in a harmonic plus quartic trap

A two-dimensional rapidly rotating Bose-Einstein condensate in a harmonic plus quartic trap is expected to have unusual vortex states that do not occur in a pure harmonic trap. At a critical rotation speed $\Omega_h$, a central hole appears in the condensate, and at some faster rotation speed $\Omega_g$, the system undergoes a transition to a giant vortex state with pure irrotational flow. Using a time-dependent variational analysis, we study the behavior of an annular condensate with a single concentric ring of vortices. The transition to a giant vortex state is investigated by comparing the energy of the two equilibrium states (the ring of vortices and the giant vortex) and also by studying the dynamical stability of small excitation modes of the ring of vortices.Comment: 12pages, 4figure

Spectral classification of short numerical exon and intron sequences

This research presents three new numerical representations for classifying short exon and intron sequences using discrete Fourier transform period-3 value. Based on the human genome, results indicate that the Complex Twin-Pair representation is attractive compared with other numerical representations and the approach has potential applications in genome annotation and read mapping

The informativeness of stochastic frontier and programming frontier efficiency scores: Cost efficiency and other measures of bank holding company performance

This paper examines the properties of the X-inefficiencies in U.S. bank holding companies derived from both stochastic and linear programming frontiers. This examination allows the robustness of results across methods to be compared. While we find that calculated programming inefficiency scores are two to three times larger than those estimated using a stochastic frontier, the patterns of the scores across banks and time are similar, and there is a relatively high correlation of the rankings of banks' efficiencies under the two methods. However, when we examine the "informativeness" of the efficiency measured by the two different techniques, we find some large differences. We find evidence that the stochastic frontier scores are more closely related to risk-taking behavior, managerial competence, and bank stock returns. Based on these findings, we conclude that while both methods produce informative efficiency scores, for this data set decision makers should put more weight on the stochastic frontier efficiency estimates.Bank holding companies ; Banks and banking - Costs

Modeling T Tauri Winds from He I 10830 Profiles

The high opacity of He I 10830 makes it an exceptionally sensitive probe of the inner wind geometry of accreting T Tauri stars. In this line blueshifted absorption below the continuum results from simple scattering of stellar photons, a situation which is readily modeled without definite knowledge of the physical conditions and recourse to multi-level radiative transfer. We present theoretical line profiles for scattering in two possible wind geometries, a disk wind and a wind emerging radially from the star, and compare them to observed He I 10830 profiles from a survey of classical T Tauri stars. The comparison indicates that subcontinuum blueshifted absorption is characteristic of disk winds in ~30% of the stars and of stellar winds in ~40%. We further conclude that for many stars the emission profile of helium likely arises in stellar winds, increasing the fraction of accreting stars inferred to have accretion-powered stellar winds to ~60%. Stars with the highest disk accretion rates are more likely to have stellar wind than disk wind signatures and less likely to have redshifted absorption from magnetospheric funnel flows. This suggests the possibility that when accretion rates are high, disks can extend closer to the star, magnetospheric accretion zones can be reduced in size and conditions arise that favor radially outflowing stellar winds.Comment: 41 pages, 11 figures. Accepted by Astrophysical Journa