13,422 research outputs found
Funding Resilient Infrastructure in New Jersey: Attitudes Following a Natural Disaster
Recent major natural disasters in New Jersey have demonstrated the need to increase the resilience of transportation infrastructure. This research examines public attitudes toward revenue sources that can be dedicated to protecting vulnerable areas, most notably the transportation linkages on which the state depends. A statewide survey was conducted to gather data approximately four months following Superstorm Sandy, the costliest natural disaster in the stateâs history. The authorsâ objective was to sample public attitudes while the impacts of the disaster were still fresh. They found little support for temporary tax increases to improve resiliency, with the most positive support for taxing visitors (i.e., a hotel and recreational tax) and for a 30-year bond measure (i.e., taxing the future). This observation seemingly contradicts broad support for investing in new infrastructure, as well as maintaining and protecting existing infrastructure. Multivariate analysis to understand the underlying attitudes toward raising revenue found that more left-leaning or communitarian attitudes are associated with more support for gasoline, income, or sales taxes devoted to mitigating vulnerability. Those who supported investment in transit and protecting infrastructure also were more likely to support these taxes. There was no parallel finding of factors associated with taxing visitors or issuing bonds
Search for exchange-antisymmetric two-photon states
Atomic two-photon J=0 J'=1 transitions are forbidden for
photons of the same energy. This selection rule is related to the fact that
photons obey Bose-Einstein statistics. We have searched for small violations of
this selection rule by studying transitions in atomic Ba. We set a limit on the
probability that photons are in exchange-antisymmetric states:
.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, ReVTeX and .eps. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett.
Revised version 9/25/9
Anyons as quon particles
The momentum operator representation of nonrelativistic anyons is developed
in the Chern - Simons formulation of fractional statistics. The connection
between anyons and the q-deformed bosonic algebra is established.Comment: 10 pages,Late
Synchronized flow and wide moving jams from balanced vehicular traffic
Recently we proposed an extension to the traffic model of Aw, Rascle and
Greenberg. The extended traffic model can be written as a hyperbolic system of
balance laws and numerically reproduces the reverse shape of the
fundamental diagram of traffic flow. In the current work we analyze the steady
state solutions of the new model and their stability properties. In addition to
the equilibrium flow curve the trivial steady state solutions form two
additional branches in the flow-density diagram. We show that the
characteristic structure excludes parts of these branches resulting in the
reverse shape of the flow-density relation. The upper branch is
metastable against the formation of synchronized flow for intermediate
densities and unstable for high densities, whereas the lower branch is unstable
for intermediate densities and metastable for high densities. Moreover, the
model can reproduce the typical speed of the downstream front of wide moving
jams. It further reproduces a constant outflow from wide moving jams, which is
far below the maximum free flow. Applying the model to simulate traffic flow at
a bottleneck we observe a general pattern with wide moving jams traveling
through the bottleneck.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figure
Charge Conjugation from Space-Time Inversion
We show that the CPT group of the Dirac field emerges naturally from the PT
and P (or T) subgroups of the Lorentz group.Comment: 4 pages, no figure
The Free Quon Gas Suffers Gibbs' Paradox
We consider the Statistical Mechanics of systems of particles satisfying the
-commutation relations recently proposed by Greenberg and others. We show
that although the commutation relations approach Bose (resp.\ Fermi) relations
for (resp.\ ), the partition functions of free gases are
independent of in the range . The partition functions exhibit
Gibbs' Paradox in the same way as a classical gas without a correction factor
for the statistical weight of the -particle phase space, i.e.\ the
Statistical Mechanics does not describe a material for which entropy, free
energy, and particle number are extensive thermodynamical quantities.Comment: number-of-pages, LaTeX with REVTE
Stability of Relativistic Matter with Magnetic Fields for Nuclear Charges up to the Critical Value
We give a proof of stability of relativistic matter with magnetic fields all
the way up to the critical value of the nuclear charge .Comment: LaTeX2e, 12 page
Behaviour of Magnetic Tubes in Neutron Star's Interior
It is found from Maxwell's equations that the magnetic field lines are good
analogues of relativistic strings. It is shown that the super-conducting
current in the neutron star's interior causes local rotation of magnetic flux
tubes carrying quantized flux.Comment: 6 pages, no figure
Assessing Medical Studentsâ, Residentsâ, and the Public's Perceptions of the Uses of Personal Digital Assistants
Although medical schools are encouraging the use of personal digital assistants (PDAs), there have been few investigations of attitudes toward their use by students or residents and only one investigation of the public's attitude toward their use by physicians. In 2006, the University of Louisville School of Medicine surveyed 121 third- and fourth-year medical students, 53 residents, and 51 members of the non-medical public about their attitudes toward PDAs. Students were using either the Palm i705 or the Dell Axim X50v; residents were using devices they selected themselves (referred to in the study generically as PDAs). Three survey instruments were designed to investigate attitudes of (a) third- and fourth-year medical students on clinical rotations, (b) Internal Medicine and Pediatrics residents, and (c) volunteer members of the public found in the waiting rooms of three university practice clinics. Both residents and medical students found their devices useful, with more residents (46.8%) than students (16.2%) (p < 0.001) rating PDAs âvery useful.â While students and residents generally agreed that PDAs improved the quality of their learning, residentsâ responses were significantly higher (p < 0.05) than studentsâ. Residents also responded more positively than students that PDAs made them more effective as clinicians. Although members of the public were generally supportive of PDA use, they appeared to have some misconceptions about how and why physicians were using them. The next phase of research will be to refine the research questions and survey instruments in collaboration with another medical school
Pairing of Parafermions of Order 2: Seniority Model
As generalizations of the fermion seniority model, four multi-mode
Hamiltonians are considered to investigate some of the consequences of the
pairing of parafermions of order two. 2-particle and 4-particle states are
explicitly constructed for H_A = - G A^+ A with A^+}= 1/2 Sum c_{m}^+ c_{-m}^+
and the distinct H_C = - G C^+ C with C^+}= 1/2 Sum c_{-m}^+ c_{m}^+, and for
the time-reversal invariant H_(-)= -G (A^+ - C^+)(A-C) and H_(+) = -G
(A^+dagger + C^+)(A+C), which has no analogue in the fermion case. The spectra
and degeneracies are compared with those of the usual fermion seniority model.Comment: 18 pages, no figures, no macro
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