Funding Resilient Infrastructure in New Jersey: Attitudes Following a Natural Disaster

Recent major natural disasters in New Jersey have demonstrated the need to increase the resilience of transportation infrastructure. This research examines public attitudes toward revenue sources that can be dedicated to protecting vulnerable areas, most notably the transportation linkages on which the state depends. A statewide survey was conducted to gather data approximately four months following Superstorm Sandy, the costliest natural disaster in the state’s history. The authors’ objective was to sample public attitudes while the impacts of the disaster were still fresh. They found little support for temporary tax increases to improve resiliency, with the most positive support for taxing visitors (i.e., a hotel and recreational tax) and for a 30-year bond measure (i.e., taxing the future). This observation seemingly contradicts broad support for investing in new infrastructure, as well as maintaining and protecting existing infrastructure. Multivariate analysis to understand the underlying attitudes toward raising revenue found that more left-leaning or communitarian attitudes are associated with more support for gasoline, income, or sales taxes devoted to mitigating vulnerability. Those who supported investment in transit and protecting infrastructure also were more likely to support these taxes. There was no parallel finding of factors associated with taxing visitors or issuing bonds

Search for exchange-antisymmetric two-photon states

Atomic two-photon J=0 $\leftrightarrow$J'=1 transitions are forbidden for photons of the same energy. This selection rule is related to the fact that photons obey Bose-Einstein statistics. We have searched for small violations of this selection rule by studying transitions in atomic Ba. We set a limit on the probability $v$ that photons are in exchange-antisymmetric states: $v<1.2\cdot10^{-7}$.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, ReVTeX and .eps. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. Revised version 9/25/9

Anyons as quon particles

The momentum operator representation of nonrelativistic anyons is developed in the Chern - Simons formulation of fractional statistics. The connection between anyons and the q-deformed bosonic algebra is established.Comment: 10 pages,Late

Synchronized flow and wide moving jams from balanced vehicular traffic

Recently we proposed an extension to the traffic model of Aw, Rascle and Greenberg. The extended traffic model can be written as a hyperbolic system of balance laws and numerically reproduces the reverse $\lambda$ shape of the fundamental diagram of traffic flow. In the current work we analyze the steady state solutions of the new model and their stability properties. In addition to the equilibrium flow curve the trivial steady state solutions form two additional branches in the flow-density diagram. We show that the characteristic structure excludes parts of these branches resulting in the reverse $\lambda$ shape of the flow-density relation. The upper branch is metastable against the formation of synchronized flow for intermediate densities and unstable for high densities, whereas the lower branch is unstable for intermediate densities and metastable for high densities. Moreover, the model can reproduce the typical speed of the downstream front of wide moving jams. It further reproduces a constant outflow from wide moving jams, which is far below the maximum free flow. Applying the model to simulate traffic flow at a bottleneck we observe a general pattern with wide moving jams traveling through the bottleneck.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figure

Charge Conjugation from Space-Time Inversion

We show that the CPT group of the Dirac field emerges naturally from the PT and P (or T) subgroups of the Lorentz group.Comment: 4 pages, no figure

The Free Quon Gas Suffers Gibbs' Paradox

We consider the Statistical Mechanics of systems of particles satisfying the $q$-commutation relations recently proposed by Greenberg and others. We show that although the commutation relations approach Bose (resp.\ Fermi) relations for $q\to1$ (resp.\ $q\to-1$), the partition functions of free gases are independent of $q$ in the range $-1<q<1$. The partition functions exhibit Gibbs' Paradox in the same way as a classical gas without a correction factor $1/N!$ for the statistical weight of the $N$-particle phase space, i.e.\ the Statistical Mechanics does not describe a material for which entropy, free energy, and particle number are extensive thermodynamical quantities.Comment: number-of-pages, LaTeX with REVTE

Stability of Relativistic Matter with Magnetic Fields for Nuclear Charges up to the Critical Value

We give a proof of stability of relativistic matter with magnetic fields all the way up to the critical value of the nuclear charge $Z\alpha=2/\pi$.Comment: LaTeX2e, 12 page

Behaviour of Magnetic Tubes in Neutron Star's Interior

It is found from Maxwell's equations that the magnetic field lines are good analogues of relativistic strings. It is shown that the super-conducting current in the neutron star's interior causes local rotation of magnetic flux tubes carrying quantized flux.Comment: 6 pages, no figure

Assessing Medical Students’, Residents’, and the Public's Perceptions of the Uses of Personal Digital Assistants

Although medical schools are encouraging the use of personal digital assistants (PDAs), there have been few investigations of attitudes toward their use by students or residents and only one investigation of the public's attitude toward their use by physicians. In 2006, the University of Louisville School of Medicine surveyed 121 third- and fourth-year medical students, 53 residents, and 51 members of the non-medical public about their attitudes toward PDAs. Students were using either the Palm i705 or the Dell Axim X50v; residents were using devices they selected themselves (referred to in the study generically as PDAs). Three survey instruments were designed to investigate attitudes of (a) third- and fourth-year medical students on clinical rotations, (b) Internal Medicine and Pediatrics residents, and (c) volunteer members of the public found in the waiting rooms of three university practice clinics. Both residents and medical students found their devices useful, with more residents (46.8%) than students (16.2%) (p < 0.001) rating PDAs “very useful.” While students and residents generally agreed that PDAs improved the quality of their learning, residents’ responses were significantly higher (p < 0.05) than students’. Residents also responded more positively than students that PDAs made them more effective as clinicians. Although members of the public were generally supportive of PDA use, they appeared to have some misconceptions about how and why physicians were using them. The next phase of research will be to refine the research questions and survey instruments in collaboration with another medical school

Pairing of Parafermions of Order 2: Seniority Model

As generalizations of the fermion seniority model, four multi-mode Hamiltonians are considered to investigate some of the consequences of the pairing of parafermions of order two. 2-particle and 4-particle states are explicitly constructed for H_A = - G A^+ A with A^+}= 1/2 Sum c_{m}^+ c_{-m}^+ and the distinct H_C = - G C^+ C with C^+}= 1/2 Sum c_{-m}^+ c_{m}^+, and for the time-reversal invariant H_(-)= -G (A^+ - C^+)(A-C) and H_(+) = -G (A^+dagger + C^+)(A+C), which has no analogue in the fermion case. The spectra and degeneracies are compared with those of the usual fermion seniority model.Comment: 18 pages, no figures, no macro