Governance, rational choice and new public management (npm): a general view (and some critics)

This article aims to study the New Public Management (NPM), one of the main trends associated to neoliberalism. It studies governance to show its general, wider and abstract scope. It also focuses on the Rational Choice as an important theory about governance, a basis for NPM. And it observes the neoliberal foundations of NPM, showing critical aspects of its real practice. Methodology: hypothetical deductive method of research, with a qualitative and critical approach and bibliographic-documental research technique. As results of this research, we can conclude that: i) the ideological usage of NPM has been expressed in a culture of minimal state and government - but in practice, such culture, when embossing implemented reforms, seldom reverted the role of the state, destroyed social safety nets, and placed the tax burden on the working majority rather than on the wealthy elite; ii) advocates for NPM have Western-shaped minds, generally making erroneous assumptions about institutions and cultures, which may be present in Anglo-American countries, but not in other culturally different ones; iii) in practice, NPM reforms were imposed to low-income countries by donor institutions to adjust their states for good governance - but those reforms did not solve problems with inefficiency and corruption. This work is original and valuable because it shows that even when public policies highlight the importance of less state intervention, solid norms and institutions are always necessary, and because it helps demystifying discourses that simply put that less state/more market politics can be valuable everywhere

Scalar scattering from black holes with tidal charge

The cross sections of black holes with tidal charge predicted in the context of the Randall--Sundrum brane-world scenario are computed considering the massless scalar field. Results obtained for black holes with different tidal-charge intensities are compared in order to study how this charge modifies the black hole cross sections. Such results are also compared with the ones for Schwarzschild and extreme Reissner--Nordstr\"om black holes. The increase of the tidal-charge intensity makes the black hole absorb more and can also be measured by the narrowing of interference fringes of the differential scattering cross section. These results indicate that the effects of the tidal charge are very important in phenomena which take place near the black hole, but can be neglected in the far region. Analytical results are obtained in the high-frequency limit and are shown to excellently agree with the numeric results obtained via the partial-wave method. It is shown numerically that black holes with tidal charge obey the universality of the low-frequency absorption cross section of stationary black holes for the massless scalar field

Aproximative solutions to the neutrino oscillation problem in matter

We present approximative solutions to the neutrino evolution equation calculated by different methods. In a two neutrino framework, using the physical parameters which gives the main effects to neutrino oscillations from nu{e} to another flavors for L=3000Km and E=1GeV, the results for the transition probability calculated by using series solutions, by to take the neutrino evolution operator as a product of ordered partial operators and by numerical methods, for a linearly and sinusoidally varying matter density are compared. The extension to an arbitrary density profile is discussed and the evolution operator as a product of partial operators in the three neutrino case is obtained.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure