Public Policies Still Alive Within a Liberalized Environment: Insights From Costa Rica

We carry out a comparative study of four farm sectors in Costa Rica, based on a dynamic analysis of behaviors regarding institutional changes occurring during the liberalization process. We highlight organizations' capacities to adapt and contribute to institutional changes by implementing economical activities and participating to policy making processes. We show that organizations play a key role in the regulation of farm sectors, and that their success depends on the institutional and organizational thickness they have contributed to create in each sector and responds to a path-dependent logic. ...French Abstract : Nous menons une étude comparative de quatre filières agricoles au Costa Rica, qui repose sur une analyse dynamique des comportements des acteurs des filières au regard des changements institutionnels liés à la libéralisation économique. Les organisations de producteurs agricoles, qui jouent un rôle clé dans la régulation des filières, ont opté pour des comportements stratégiques différents. Nous mettons en évidence les capacités de ces organisations à s'adapter mais également à contribuer aux changements institutionnels en mettant en place des activités technico-économiques de transformation et commercialisation et en participant aux processus de négociation des politiques. Nous montrons que leur succès dépend de la densité institutionnelle et organisationnelle qu'elles ont contribué à créer au sein de chaque filière et s'inscrit dans une logique de dépendance au sentier.ORGANIZATIONS; POLICIES; INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE; PATHDEPENDENCY; ORGANISATIONS; POLITIQUES; CHANGEMENT INSTITUTIONNEL; DEPENDANCE AU SENTIER

Decoherence and gravitational backgrounds

We study the decoherence process associated with the scattering of stochastic gravitational waves. We discuss the case of macroscopic systems, such as the planetary motion of the Moon around the Earth, for which gravitational scattering is found to dominate decoherence though it has a negligible influence on damping. This contrast is due to the very high effective temperature of the background of gravitational waves in our galactic environment.Comment: 10 page

Quelles politiques de développement durable au Mali et à Madagascar ?

Ideas and values of "sustainable development" are transfered from the international to the national level in policy-making processes and give way to a recomposition of rural development policies : we study that policy transfert. In Mali and Madagascar, sustainable development policies are quite different. We give an interpretation of these differences by a comparative analysis of strategies of actors involved in policy-making processes. We show that these strategies are related to historical processes. In Mali and Madagascar, the long run analysis of agricultural and rural policy making allows us a better understanding of current sustainable development policies. ...French Abstract : Nous étudions le processus de transfert politique selon lequel les idées et valeurs du " développement durable ", mûries et véhiculées au niveau international, donnent lieu au niveau national à une recomposition des modes publics d'intervention en milieu rural. Au Mali et à Madagascar, les politiques de développement durable recouvrent des expressions différentes. Nous interprétons ces différences par une analyse comparative des stratégies des acteurs intervenant dans le jeu politique. Nous montrons que ces stratégies renvoient à des processus historiques. L'analyse sur le temps long des processus de construction et de mise en oeuvre des politiques agricoles et rurales dans ces pays permet de mieux comprendre les expressions qu'y revêt aujourd'hui le développement durable.POLICIES; RURAL DEVELOPMENT; SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT; DEVELOPPEMENT RURAL; DEVELOPPEMENT DURABLE; MALI; MADAGASCAR

An adaptive security construct: insurgency in Sudan

Internal wars are by default the business of others, until someone says they are not. Artificially contained within the confines of the current international system, insurgent conflicts are considered domestic affairs only until they threaten external interests. In judging intrastate conflict by and large from a crisis-response perspective, conventional assessment methodologies, oriented largely toward interstate wars, tend to fall short in objectively analyzing the historical and dynamic aspects of internal wars. This thesis develops an Adaptive Security Construct (ASC) that aims to correct such shortcomings through the multi-disciplinary integration of three conceptual lenses: a qualitative situation estimate, a game-theoretic dynamic conflict model, and geospatially oriented nexus topography. Using Sudan's internal wars as a case study, where the existence of signed peace-agreements in both the south and Darfur exist in apparent contradiction of these conflicts' causes, the ASC iteratively correlates the analysis of each of the three lenses to provide an observer a more objective external view of conflicts that are inherently "internal." This thesis presents the ASC as an iterative process and perspective that enables the formulation of general imperatives and specific approaches in response to contemporary arenas of conflict, both in Sudan and within the international community at large.http://archive.org/details/andaptivesecurit109453057Major, United States ArmyMajor, United States Air ForceApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Parametric Self-Oscillation via Resonantly Enhanced Multiwave Mixing

We demonstrate an efficient nonlinear process in which Stokes and anti-Stokes components are generated spontaneously in a Raman-like, near resonant media driven by low power counter-propagating fields. Oscillation of this kind does not require optical cavity and can be viewed as a spontaneous formation of atomic coherence grating

Autofeedback scheme for preservation of macroscopic coherence in microwave cavities

We present a scheme for controlling the decoherence of a linear superposition of two coherent states with opposite phases in a high-Q microwave cavity, based on the injection of appropriately prepared ``probe'' and ``feedback'' Rydberg atoms, improving the one presented in [D. Vitali et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 2442 (1997)]. In the present scheme, the information transmission from the probe to the feedback atom is directly mediated by a second auxiliary cavity. The detection efficiency for the probe atom is no longer a critical parameter, and the decoherence time of the superposition state can be significantly increased using presently available technology.Comment: revtex, 15 pages, 4 eps figure

Self-Consistency Requirements of the Renormalization Group for Setting the Renormalization Scale

In conventional treatments, predictions from fixed-order perturbative QCD calculations cannot be fixed with certainty due to ambiguities in the choice of the renormalization scale as well as the renormalization scheme. In this paper we present a general discussion of the constraints of the renormalization group (RG) invariance on the choice of the renormalization scale. We adopt the RG based equations, which incorporate the scheme parameters, for a general exposition of RG invariance, since they simultaneously express the invariance of physical observables under both the variation of the renormalization scale and the renormalization scheme parameters. We then discuss the self-consistency requirements of the RG, such as reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity, which must be satisfied by the scale-setting method. The Principle of Minimal Sensitivity (PMS) requires the slope of the approximant of an observable to vanish at the renormalization point. This criterion provides a scheme-independent estimation, but it violates the symmetry and transitivity properties of the RG and does not reproduce the Gell-Mann-Low scale for QED observables. The Principle of Maximum Conformality (PMC) satisfies all of the deductions of the RG invariance - reflectivity, symmetry, and transitivity. Using the PMC, all non-conformal $\{\beta^{\cal R}_i\}$-terms (${\cal R}$ stands for an arbitrary renormalization scheme) in the perturbative expansion series are summed into the running coupling, and one obtains a unique, scale-fixed, scheme-independent prediction at any finite order. The PMC scales and the resulting finite-order PMC predictions are both to high accuracy independent of the choice of initial renormalization scale, consistent with RG invariance. [...More in the text...]Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures. References updated. To be published in Phys.Rev.

Urinary metabolic profiles in early pregnancy are associated with preterm birth and fetal growth restriction in the Rhea mother-child cohort study

Syftet med studien var att undersöka vilka möjligheter matematikundervisning utomhus kan ge för elevernas utveckling och lärande. Syftet var även att undersöka hur utomhusmatematik kan användas som ett komplement till den traditionella inomhusundervisningen i ämnet matematik. Studien baserades på en kvalitativ forskningsansats där kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer och ostrukturerade observationer användes som metoder för att besvara studiens forskningsfrågor. Sex lärare i F-3 intervjuades och två observationer på två olika skolor genomfördes. Resultatet visar att utomhusmatematiken kompletterar matematikundervisningen inomhus genom ett samspel mellan arbetssätt och miljöer. Resultatet visar även på flera positiva effekter med utomhusmatematik så som verklighetsanknytning, motivation, fysisk aktivitet, hälsa, sinnligt lärande, tillåtande miljö och sociala effekter.  De positiva effekter utomhusmatematiken medföljer för elevernas utveckling och lärande bör uppmärksamma fler lärare om dess möjligheter.