Systematic Study of Hadronic Observables in Nucleus Nucleus Collisions at CERN SPS

The possible transition of nuclear matter to a deconfined phase in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions is explored by a systematic variation of the collision system by means of system size, beam energy and centrality of the collision all measured within the same experiment NA49 at the CERN SPS. The investigation takes advantage of the large number of hadronic observables covered over a wide phase space by the acceptance of the NA49 TPCs.Comment: 3 pages and 4 figures Proceedings of the International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, Tampere, Finland, 15-21 July 1999, edited by K. Huitu, H. Kurki-Suonio and J. Maalampi, and published by IOP Publishing (Bristol, UK

The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, & Modernization Act of 2003: Are We Playing the Lottery With Healthcare Reform?

With millions of Americans unable to cope with the rising costs of prescription drugs, and many even forced to go without health insurance, the mounting pressure on Congress to enact major healthcare reform culminated in the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, & Modernization Act of 2003. This iBrief examines this legislation, and concludes that it provides elusive benefits for seniors and merely creates a windfall for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries

Left Behind: Social Movements, Parties, and the Politics of Reform

How does social reform occur in America? Is it through major public policy innovation? Is it through periodic partisan or electoral alignment? Or is it through moments of popular mobilization we call social movements? Can we explain the origin, development, and legacy of the civil rights movement by focusing on Brown v. Board of Education, Little Rock, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, bussing and affirmative action? Do we focus on the electoral dynamics, the liberal revolution in Congress in 1958, and the landslide reelection of the president in 1964? Or do we start with the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, SCLC, SNCC, CORE, the freedom rides, the marches, and other forms of direct action? In this paper I argue, first, that institutional constraints built into our electoral system inhibit the formation of social reform initiatives from the inside government officials, elected officials, or parties. Social reform initiatives are initiated, however, but from the outside, as social movements. Second, these social movements unfold in a uniquely American way. They make moral claims. They employ organizational forms to strategically link local action with national goals in intense, outcome focused, campaigns. And they develop leadership skilled in arts of collective action what de Tocqueville called knowledge of how to combine. Third, as social movement leaders find that achieving their goals requires new public policy, they gain leverage by engaging in electoral politics, most often aligned with a political party, which they may well transform in the process. Fourth, although social movements form and reform around fault lines in the American polity of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, and generation, in the last 30 years this dynamic has produced far more change on the right than on the left. One reason is that the right has made more robust linkages among its social movement base, its partisan politics, and public policy than the left.* Explaining how this process works and why the left lost its movement - may help explain why this has occurred and clarify options available to those who would change it. * Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off-Center: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy, (Yale University Press, 2005). The authors show how the conservative movement has leveraged its partisan influence to dominate public policy.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 34. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Clandestine Schemes: Burney\u27s \u3cem\u3eCecilia\u3c/em\u3e and the Marriage Act

This essay reads Frances Burney’s Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) alongside the debates surrounding the 1753 Clandestine Marriages Act in order to show how the novel responds to and participates in one of the most divisive public controversies of the Enlightenment. In doing so, the essay challenges the view of Burney as a conservative defender of patriarchal culture, while highlighting the balances that she strikes between individual freedom and filial duty. The novel criticizes secret matches not only because they challenge the legitimate authority of parents and guardians, but also because they enable men to undermine women’s consent. Burney is keenly aware that parents and guardians sometimes abuse their authority, but she ultimately affords them considerable control over marriage: Cecilia suggests that all couples—even those over the age of majority—ought to obtain the approval of parents or guardians before they wed. While the novel imaginatively extends the reach of the Act, however, it offers a subtle critique of the patriarchal principle that underwrites this law. In Cecilia, Burney shows the dangers of turning marriage into an exchange between men. Shifting the locus of authority from Cecilia’s guardian and prospective father-in-law to her prospective mother-in-law, Burney highlights the importance of maternal as well as paternal consent. She also affirms Cecilia’s own agency in the negotiation of her union with Mortimer and even hints at Cecilia’s autonomy as a wife. In the bequest that Mrs. Delvile’s sister leaves Cecilia when she dies and the change that Mortimer undergoes after Cecilia’s illness, the novel offers a model of marriage as an affective agreement between two equal agents