Cultural Rights and Civic Virtue

This paper addresses the potential tension between two broadly stated policy objectives: the preservation of distinctive cultural traditions, often through the mechanism of formal legal rights, and the fostering of civic virtue, a sense of local community and the advancement of common civic enterprises. Many political liberals argued that liberal societies have an obligation to accommodate the cultural traditions of various sub groups through legal rights and a redistribution of social resources. The “right to cultural difference” is now widely (if not universally) understood to be a basic human right, on par with rights to religious liberty and racial equality. Other theorists writing in the liberal, civic republican, and urban sociology traditions expounded on the necessity of civic virtue, community and common enterprises initiated and executed at the local or municipal level of government or private association. These theorists argued that common projects, shared norms and social trust are indispensable elements of effective democratic government and are necessary to the altruism and public spiritedness that in turn secure social justice. These two policy goals therefore may at times be in conflict. This conflict is especially severe in larger culturally diverse cities, where social trust and civic virtue are most needed and often in shortest supply. Policies designed to counter cosmopolitan alienation and anomie by fostering civic virtue, social trust and common social norms will inevitably conflict with the cultural traditions and sub group identification of some minority groups. The paper argues that such conflicts are often best confronted on the field of political debate and policy analysis, not in the language of civil rights. Rights discourse, with its inherent absolutism, is ill suited to the type of subtle tradeoffs that these conflicts often entail.Law, Rights, Multiculturalism

Entropy production in full phase space for continuous stochastic dynamics

The total entropy production and its three constituent components are described both as fluctuating trajectory-dependent quantities and as averaged contributions in the context of the continuous Markovian dynamics, described by stochastic differential equations with multiplicative noise, of systems with both odd and even coordinates with respect to time reversal, such as dynamics in full phase space. Two of these constituent quantities obey integral fluctuation theorems and are thus rigorously positive in the mean by Jensen's inequality. The third, however, is not and furthermore cannot be uniquely associated with irreversibility arising from relaxation, nor with the breakage of detailed balance brought about by non-equilibrium constraints. The properties of the various contributions to total entropy production are explored through the consideration of two examples: steady state heat conduction due to a temperature gradient, and transitions between stationary states of drift-diffusion on a ring, both in the context of the full phase space dynamics of a single Brownian particle

Stability and reactivity of dimethylethoxysilane

The chemistry of the compound dimethylethoxysilane (DMES) is discussed especially as it relates to waterproofing silica surfaces. Some of the desirable properties of this compound are that it readily reacts with silica in the vapor phase, it is a low boiling point liquid (54 C), and the by-product of its reaction with silica is the rather inert substances ethanol. It is currently used by NASA to re-waterproof the HRSI shuttle tiles before relaunching the vehicle. Very little information is available on this particular compound in the literature or even on related silane compounds that have both a hydride group and an alkoxy group. Since the close proximity of two groups often drastically affects the chemical behavior of each group, chemical reactions were carried out in the laboratory with DMES to verify the expected behavior of these two functional groups located on DMES. Some of the reactions tested would be potentially useful for quantitative or qualitative measurements on DMES. To study the reactions of DMES with silica surfaces, cabosil was used as a silica substrate because of its high surface area and the ease of detection by infrared spectroscopy as well as other techniques

INFLATION AND ITS CONTROL

Financial Economics,