A Topological Study of Contextuality and Modality in Quantum Mechanics

Kochen-Specker theorem rules out the non-contextual assignment of values to physical magnitudes. Here we enrich the usual orthomodular structure of quantum mechanical propositions with modal operators. This enlargement allows to refer consistently to actual and possible properties of the system. By means of a topological argument, more precisely in terms of the existence of sections of sheaves, we give an extended version of Kochen-Specker theorem over this new structure. This allows us to prove that contextuality remains a central feature even in the enriched propositional system.Comment: 10 pages, no figures, submitted to I. J. Th. Phy

The marine Neogene of Eastern Venezuela : a preliminary report

Proceedings of tile 1" R.C.A.N.S. Congress, Lisboa, October 1992The studied marine Neogene-Quaternary of NE Venezuela outcrop in the localities of the Araya peninsula and in the Cubagua and Margarita islands discordant upon a basementof metamorphic rocks and pre-rniocenic sediments. These neogene-quaternary sections belong principally to the Cubagua Formation, which is composed of a lower clayish interval (Cerro Verde Member) and an upper one of calcareous nature (Cerro Negro Member), and to La Tejita and Tortuga formations. The age of this sedimentary interval, based upon analysis of planktonic foraminifera, ranges from the lower part of Late Miocene to Holocene. According to the calcareous nannoflora, in the Cubagua Formation a floral assemblage was identified which goes from the Zone NN10 until the limit of NN16-NN17 zones. The fauna of benthic foraminifera allowed one to establish that the paleoenvironmental evolution of the Cubagua Formation varied from bathial to neritic depths during the Early Pliocene. After a period of elevation an erosion during the greater part of the Pleistocene, water invading the eroded surface depositing upon it the calcareous sequence of the Tortuga Formation

Detection and prevention of financial abuse against elders

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright @ The Authors. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 3.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/ by/3.0/legalcode.Purpose – This paper reports on banking and finance professionals' decision making in the context of elder financial abuse. The aim was to identify the case features that influence when abuse is identified and when action is taken. Design/methodology/approach – Banking and finance professionals (n=70) were shown 35 financial abuse case scenarios and were asked to judge how certain they were that the older person was being abused and the likelihood of taking action. Findings – Three case features significantly influenced certainty of financial abuse: the nature of the financial problem presented, the older person's level of mental capacity and who was in charge of the client's money. In cases where the older person was more confused and forgetful, there was increased suspicion that financial abuse was taking place. Finance professionals were less certain that financial abuse was occurring if the older person was in charge of his or her own finances. Originality/value – The research findings have been used to develop freely available online training resources to promote professionals' decision making capacity (www.elderfinancialabuse.co.uk). The resources have been advocated for use by Building Societies Association as well as CIFAS, the UK's Fraud Prevention Service.The research reported here was funded by the UK cross council New Dynamicsof Ageing Programme, ESRC Reference No. RES-352-25-0026, with Mary L.M. Gilhooly asPrincipal Investigator. Web-based training tools, developed from the research findings, weresubsequently funded by the ESRC follow-on fund ES/J001155/1 with Priscilla A. Harries asPrincipal Investigator

The Redistributive Effects of Pandemics: Evidence of the Spanish Flu

This paper examines the impact of a pandemic in a developing economy. Measured by excess deaths relative to the historical trend, the 1918 influenza in Spain was one of the most intense in Western Europe. However, aggregate output and consumption were only mildly affected. In this paper we assess the impact of the flu by exploiting within-country variation in “excess deaths” and we focus on the returns to factors of production. Our main result is that the effect of flu-related “excess deaths” on real wages is large, negative, and short-lived. The effects are heterogeneous across occupations, from null to a 15 per cent decline,concentrated in 1918. The negative effects are exacerbated in more urbanized provinces. In addition, we do not find effects of the flu on the returns to capital. Indeed, neither dividends nor real estate prices (houses and land) were negatively affected by flu-related increases in mortality. Our interpretation is that the Spanish Flu represented a negative demand shock that was mostly absorbed by workers, especially in more urbanized regions

The 1918 flu pandemic left Spain a more unequal country

The 1918 flu pandemic had a short-lived but devastating effect on Spain, write Sergi Basco (Universitat de Barcelona), Jordi Domènech (Universidad Carlos III) and Joan Roses (LSE). Unlike previous pandemics, it increased inequality, as the better-off could afford to socially distance to protect themselves

Contextual logic for quantum systems

In this work we build a quantum logic that allows us to refer to physical magnitudes pertaining to different contexts from a fixed one without the contradictions with quantum mechanics expressed in no-go theorems. This logic arises from considering a sheaf over a topological space associated to the Boolean sublattices of the ortholattice of closed subspaces of the Hilbert space of the physical system. Differently to standard quantum logics, the contextual logic maintains a distributive lattice structure and a good definition of implication as a residue of the conjunction.Comment: 16 pages, no figure

Prospects for probing the gluon density in protons using heavy quarkonium hadroproduction

We examine carefully bottomonia hadroproduction in proton colliders, especially focusing on the LHC, as a way of probing the gluon density in protons. To this end we develop some previous work, getting quantitative predictions and concluding that our proposal can be useful to perform consistency checks of the parameterization sets of different parton distribution functions.Comment: LaTeX, 14 pages, 6 EPS figure

Non-decoupling effects from heavy Higgs bosons by matching 2HDM to HEFT amplitudes

In this work we explore the low energy effects induced from the integration of the heavy Higgs boson modes, $H$, $A$ and $H^\pm$, within the Two Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) by assuming that the lightest Higgs boson $h$ is the one observed experimentally at $m_h \sim 125$ GeV. We work within the context of Effective Field Theories, focusing on the Higgs Effective Field Theory (HEFT), although some comparisons with the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) case are also discussed through this work. Our main focus is placed in the computation of the non-decoupling effects from the heavy Higgs bosons and the capture of such effects by means of the HEFT coefficients which are expressed in terms of the input parameters of the 2HDM. Our approach to solve this issue is by matching the amplitudes of the 2HDM and the HEFT for physical processes involving the light Higgs boson $h$ in the external legs, instead of the most frequently used matching procedure at the Lagrangian level. More concretely, we perform the matching at the amplitudes level for the following physical processes, including scattering and decays: $h\to WW^*\to Wf\bar{f'}$, $h\to ZZ^*\to Zf\bar{f}$, $WW \to hh$, $ZZ \to hh$, $hh \to hh$, $h \to \gamma \gamma$ and $h \to \gamma Z$. One important point of this work is that the matching is required to happen at low energies compared to the heavy Higgs boson masses, and these are heavier than the other particle masses. The proper expansion for this heavy mass limit is also defined here, which provides the results for the non-decoupling effects presented in this work. We finally discuss the implications of the resulting effective coefficients, and remark on the interesting correlations detected among them.Comment: 35 pages, 15 figure

Circular economy strategies for electric vehicle batteries reduce raw material reliance

The wide adoption of lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles will require increased natural resources for the automotive industry. The expected rapid increase in batteries could result in new resource challenges and supply-chain risks. To strengthen the resilience and sustainability of automotive supply chains and reduce primary resource requirements, circular economy strategies are needed. Here we illustrate how these strategies can reduce the extraction of primary raw materials, that is, cobalt supplies. Material flow analysis is applied to understand current and future flows of cobalt embedded in electric vehicle batteries across the European Union. A reference scenario is presented and compared with four strategies: technology-driven substitution and technology-driven reduction of cobalt, new business models to stimulate battery reuse/recycling and policy-driven strategy to increase recycling. We find that new technologies provide the most promising strategies to reduce the reliance on cobalt substantially but could result in burden shifting such as an increase in nickel demand. To avoid the latter, technological developments should be combined with an efficient recycling system. We conclude that more-ambitious circular economy strategies, at both government and business levels, are urgently needed to address current and future resource challenges across the supply chain successfully