2,053 research outputs found
Research program on the management of science and technology Annual report, 1964 - 1965
Research program on management of science and technolog
Film support and the challenge of âsustainabilityâ: on wing design, wax and feathers, and bolts from the blue
In recognition of the importance of film in generating both economic and cultural value, the UK Labour government set up a new agencyâââthe United Kingdom Film Council (UKFC)âââin 2000 with a remit to build a sustainable film industry. But, reflecting a plethora of differing expectations in relation to the purposes behind public support for film, the UKFC's agenda shifted and broadened over the organisation's lifetime (2000â11). Apparently unconvinced by the UKFC's achievements, the Coalition government which came to power in May 2010 announced the Council's abolition and reassigned its responsibilities as part of a general cost-cutting strategy. Based on original empirical research, this article examines how the UKFC's sense of strategic direction was determined, how and why the balance of objectives it pursued changed over time and what these shifts tell us about the nature of film policy and the challenges facing bodies that are charged with enacting it in the twenty-first century
Statistical mechanics of voting
Decision procedures aggregating the preferences of multiple agents can
produce cycles and hence outcomes which have been described heuristically as
`chaotic'. We make this description precise by constructing an explicit
dynamical system from the agents' preferences and a voting rule. The dynamics
form a one dimensional statistical mechanics model; this suggests the use of
the topological entropy to quantify the complexity of the system. We formulate
natural political/social questions about the expected complexity of a voting
rule and degree of cohesion/diversity among agents in terms of random matrix
models---ensembles of statistical mechanics models---and compute quantitative
answers in some representative cases.Comment: 9 pages, plain TeX, 2 PostScript figures included with epsf.tex
(ignore the under/overfull \vbox error messages
Report of the GDR working group on the R-parity violation
This report summarizes the work of the "R-parity violation group" of the
French Research Network (GDR) in Supersymmetry, concerning the physics of
supersymmetric models without conservation of R-parity at HERA, LEP, Tevatron
and LHC and limits on R-parity violating couplings from various processes. The
report includes a discussion of the recent searches at the HERA experiment,
prospects for new experiments, a review of the existing limits, and also
theoretically motivated alternatives to R-parity and a brief discussion on the
implications of R-parity violation on the neutrino masses.Comment: 60 pages, LaTeX, 22 figures, 2 table
Propositional update operators based on formula/literal dependence
International audienceWe present and study a general family of belief update operators in a propositional setting. Its operators are based on formula/literal dependence, which is more fine-grained than the notion of formula/variable dependence that was proposed in the literature: formula/variable dependence is a particular case of formula/literal dependence. Our update operators are defined according to the "forget-then-conjoin" scheme: updating a belief base by an input formula consists in first forgetting in the base every literal on which the input formula has a negative influence, and then conjoining the resulting base with the input formula. The operators of our family differ by the underlying notion of formula/literal dependence, which may be defined syntactically or semantically, and which may or may not exploit further information like known persistent literals and pre-set dependencies. We argue that this allows to handle the frame problem and the ramification problem in a more appropriate way. We evaluate the update operators of our family w.r.t. two important dimensions: the logical dimension, by checking the status of the Katsuno-Mendelzon postulates for update, and the computational dimension, by identifying the complexity of a number of decision problems (including model checking, consistency and inference), both in the general case and in some restricted cases, as well as by studying compactability issues. It follows that several operators of our family are interesting alternatives to previous belief update operators
Can majority support save an endangered language? A case study of language attitudes in Guernsey
Many studies of minority language revitalisation focus on the attitudes and perceptions of minorities, but not on those of majority group members. This paper discusses the implications of these issues, and presents research into majority andf minority attitudes towards the endangered indigenous vernacular of Guernsey, Channel Islands. The research used a multi-method approach (questionnaire and interview) to obtain attitudinal data from a representative sample of the population that included politicians and civil servants (209 participants). The findings suggested a shift in language ideology away from the post-second world war âculture of modernisationâ and monolingual ideal, towards recognition of the value of a bi/trilingual linguistic heritage. Public opinion in Guernsey now seems to support the maintenance of the indigenous language variety, which has led to a degree of official support. The paper then discusses to what extent this âattitude shiftâ is reflected in linguistic behaviour and in concrete language planning measures
Translation, Adaptation and Validation of the Coronary Revascularization Outcome Questionnaire (CROQ) into Greek
Date of Acceptance: 31/05/2015Evaluating the impact of coronary revascularization on patientsâ health related quality of life with a patient-based and disease-specific tool is important for drawing conclusions about treatment and outcomes. This study reports on the translation, adaptation and psychometric evaluation of a Greek version of the Coronary Revascularization Outcome Questionnaire (CROQ-Gr)Peer reviewe
Sheared Solid Materials
We present a time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau model of nonlinear elasticity in
solid materials. We assume that the elastic energy density is a periodic
function of the shear and tetragonal strains owing to the underlying lattice
structure. With this new ingredient, solving the equations yields formation of
dislocation dipoles or slips. In plastic flow high-density dislocations emerge
at large strains to accumulate and grow into shear bands where the strains are
localized. In addition to the elastic displacement, we also introduce the local
free volume {\it m}. For very small the defect structures are metastable
and long-lived where the dislocations are pinned by the Peierls potential
barrier. However, if the shear modulus decreases with increasing {\it m},
accumulation of {\it m} around dislocation cores eventually breaks the Peierls
potential leading to slow relaxations in the stress and the free energy
(aging). As another application of our scheme, we also study dislocation
formation in two-phase alloys (coherency loss) under shear strains, where
dislocations glide preferentially in the softer regions and are trapped at the
interfaces.Comment: 16pages, 11figure
Open subgroups of locally compact Kac-Moody groups
Let G be a complete Kac-Moody group over a finite field. It is known that G
possesses a BN-pair structure, all of whose parabolic subgroups are open in G.
We show that, conversely, every open subgroup of G is contained with finite
index in some parabolic subgroup; moreover there are only finitely many such
parabolic subgroups. The proof uses some new results on parabolic closures in
Coxeter groups. In particular, we give conditions ensuring that the parabolic
closure of the product of two elements in a Coxeter group contains the
respective parabolic closures of those elements.Comment: Minor changes. Theorem A has been slightly improved and now contains
an additional finiteness statemen
- âŠ