3,496 research outputs found
The political identities of neighbourhood planning in England
The rise of neighbourhood planning has been characterised as another step in a remorseless de-politicisation of the public sphere. A policy initiated by the Coalition Government in England to create the conditions for local communities to support housing growth, neighbourhood planning appears to evidence a continuing retreat from political debate and contestation. Clear boundaries are established for the holistic integration of participatory democracy into the strategic plan-making of the local authority. These boundaries seek to take politics out of development decisions and exclude all issues of contention from discussion. They achieve this goal at the cost of arming participatory democracy with a collective identity around which new antagonisms may develop. Drawing on the post-political theories of Chantal Mouffe this paper identifies the return of antagonism and conflict to participation in spatial planning. Key to its argument is the concept of the boundary or frontier that in Mouffe’s theoretical framework institutionalises conflict between political entities. Drawing on primary research with neighbourhood development plans in England the paper explores how boundary conditions and boundary designations generate antagonism and necessitate political action. The paper charts the development of the collective identities that result from these boundary lines and argues for the potential for neighbourhood planning to restore political conflict to the politics of housing development
A note on entropic uncertainty relations of position and momentum
We consider two entropic uncertainty relations of position and momentum
recently discussed in literature. By a suitable rescaling of one of them, we
obtain a smooth interpolation of both for high-resolution and low-resolution
measurements respectively. Because our interpolation has never been mentioned
in literature before, we propose it as a candidate for an improved entropic
uncertainty relation of position and momentum. Up to now, the author has
neither been able to falsify nor prove the new inequality. In our opinion it is
a challenge to do either one.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figures, 2 references adde
Extended quantum conditional entropy and quantum uncertainty inequalities
Quantum states can be subjected to classical measurements, whose
incompatibility, or uncertainty, can be quantified by a comparison of certain
entropies. There is a long history of such entropy inequalities between
position and momentum. Recently these inequalities have been generalized to the
tensor product of several Hilbert spaces and we show here how their derivations
can be shortened to a few lines and how they can be generalized. All the
recently derived uncertainty relations utilize the strong subadditivity (SSA)
theorem; our contribution relies on directly utilizing the proof technique of
the original derivation of SSA.Comment: 4 page
Some examples of exponentially harmonic maps
The aim of this paper is to study some examples of exponentially harmonic
maps. We study such maps firstly on flat euclidean and Minkowski spaces and
secondly on Friedmann-Lema\^ itre universes. We also consider some new models
of exponentially harmonic maps which are coupled with gravity which happen to
be based on a generalization of the lagrangian for bosonic strings coupled with
dilatonic field.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure
Social network dynamics of face-to-face interactions
The recent availability of data describing social networks is changing our
understanding of the "microscopic structure" of a social tie. A social tie
indeed is an aggregated outcome of many social interactions such as
face-to-face conversations or phone-calls. Analysis of data on face-to-face
interactions shows that such events, as many other human activities, are
bursty, with very heterogeneous durations. In this paper we present a model for
social interactions at short time scales, aimed at describing contexts such as
conference venues in which individuals interact in small groups. We present a
detailed anayltical and numerical study of the model's dynamical properties,
and show that it reproduces important features of empirical data. The model
allows for many generalizations toward an increasingly realistic description of
social interactions. In particular in this paper we investigate the case where
the agents have intrinsic heterogeneities in their social behavior, or where
dynamic variations of the local number of individuals are included. Finally we
propose this model as a very flexible framework to investigate how dynamical
processes unfold in social networks.Comment: 20 pages, 25 figure
Asymptotics of Toeplitz Determinants and the Emptiness Formation Probability for the XY Spin Chain
We study an asymptotic behavior of a special correlator known as the
Emptiness Formation Probability (EFP) for the one-dimensional anisotropic XY
spin-1/2 chain in a transverse magnetic field. This correlator is essentially
the probability of formation of a ferromagnetic string of length in the
antiferromagnetic ground state of the chain and plays an important role in the
theory of integrable models. For the XY Spin Chain, the correlator can be
expressed as the determinant of a Toeplitz matrix and its asymptotical
behaviors for throughout the phase diagram are obtained using
known theorems and conjectures on Toeplitz determinants. We find that the decay
is exponential everywhere in the phase diagram of the XY model except on the
critical lines, i.e. where the spectrum is gapless. In these cases, a power-law
prefactor with a universal exponent arises in addition to an exponential or
Gaussian decay. The latter Gaussian behavior holds on the critical line
corresponding to the isotropic XY model, while at the critical value of the
magnetic field the EFP decays exponentially. At small anisotropy one has a
crossover from the Gaussian to the exponential behavior. We study this
crossover using the bosonization approach.Comment: 40 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. The poor quality of some figures is due
to arxiv space limitations. If You would like to see the pdf with good
quality figures, please contact Fabio Franchini at
"[email protected]
Gene and protein nomenclature in public databases
BACKGROUND: Frequently, several alternative names are in use for biological objects such as genes and proteins. Applications like manual literature search, automated text-mining, named entity identification, gene/protein annotation, and linking of knowledge from different information sources require the knowledge of all used names referring to a given gene or protein. Various organism-specific or general public databases aim at organizing knowledge about genes and proteins. These databases can be used for deriving gene and protein name dictionaries. So far, little is known about the differences between databases in terms of size, ambiguities and overlap. RESULTS: We compiled five gene and protein name dictionaries for each of the five model organisms (yeast, fly, mouse, rat, and human) from different organism-specific and general public databases. We analyzed the degree of ambiguity of gene and protein names within and between dictionaries, to a lexicon of common English words and domain-related non-gene terms, and we compared different data sources in terms of size of extracted dictionaries and overlap of synonyms between those. The study shows that the number of genes/proteins and synonyms covered in individual databases varies significantly for a given organism, and that the degree of ambiguity of synonyms varies significantly between different organisms. Furthermore, it shows that, despite considerable efforts of co-curation, the overlap of synonyms in different data sources is rather moderate and that the degree of ambiguity of gene names with common English words and domain-related non-gene terms varies depending on the considered organism. CONCLUSION: In conclusion, these results indicate that the combination of data contained in different databases allows the generation of gene and protein name dictionaries that contain significantly more used names than dictionaries obtained from individual data sources. Furthermore, curation of combined dictionaries considerably increases size and decreases ambiguity. The entries of the curated synonym dictionary are available for manual querying, editing, and PubMed- or Google-search via the ProThesaurus-wiki. For automated querying via custom software, we offer a web service and an exemplary client application
Quantum information entropies of the eigenstates and the coherent state of the P\"oschl-Teller potential
The position and momentum space information entropies, of the ground state of
the P\"oschl-Teller potential, are exactly evaluated and are found to satisfy
the bound, obtained by Beckner, Bialynicki-Birula and Mycielski. These
entropies for the first excited state, for different strengths of the potential
well, are then numerically obtained. Interesting features of the entropy
densities, owing their origin to the excited nature of the wave functions, are
graphically demonstrated. We then compute the position space entropies of the
coherent state of the P\"oschl-Teller potential, which is known to show revival
and fractional revival. Time evolution of the coherent state reveals many
interesting patterns in the space-time flow of information entropy.Comment: Revtex4, 11 pages, 11 eps figures and a tabl
Cognitive Impairment among Older Adults in the Emergency Department
Background: Within the next 30 years, the number of visits older adults will make to emergency departments (EDs) is expected to double from 16 million, or 14% of all visits, to 34 million and comprise nearly a quarter of all visits.Objective: The objectives of this study were to determine prevalence rates of cognitive impairment among older adults in the ED and to identify associations, if any, between environmental factors unique to the ED and rates of cognitive impairment.Methods: A cross-sectional observational study of adults 65 and older admitted to the ED of a large, urban, tertiary academic health center was conducted between September 2007 and May 2008. Patients were screened for cognitive impairment in orientation, recall and executive function using the Six-Item Screen (SIS) and the CLOX1, clock drawing task. Cognitive impairment among this ED population was assessed and both patient demographics and ED characteristics (crowding, triage time, location of assessment, triage class) were compared through adjusted generalized linear models.Results: Forty-two percent (350/829) of elderly patients presented with deficits in orientation and recall as assessed by the SIS. An additional 36% of elderly patients with no impairment in orientation or recall had deficits in executive function as assessed by the CLOX1. In full model adjusted analyses patients were more likely to screen deficits in orientation and recall (SIS) if they were 85 years or older (Relative Risk [RR]=1.63, 95% Confidence Interval [95% CI]=1.3-2.07), black (RR=1.85, 95% CI=1.5-2.4) and male (RR=1.42, 95% CI=1.2-1.7). Only age was significantly associated with executive functioning deficits in the ED screened using the clock drawing task (CLOX1) (75-84 years: RR=1.35, 95% CI= 1.2-1.6; 85+ years: RR=1.69, 95% CI= 1.5-2.0).Conclusion: These findings have several implications for patients seen in the ED. The SIS coupled with a clock drawing task (CLOX1) provide a rapid and simple method for assessing and documenting cognition when lengthier assessment tools are not feasible and add to the literature on the use of these tools in the ED. Further research on provider use of these tools and potential implication for quality improvement is needed. [West J Emerg Med. 2011; 12(1):56-62.
Entropy and the uncertainty principle
We generalize, improve and unify theorems of Rumin, and Maassen--Uffink about
classical entropies associated to quantum density matrices. These theorems
refer to the classical entropies of the diagonals of a density matrix in two
different bases. Thus they provide a kind of uncertainty principle. Our
inequalities are sharp because they are exact in the high-temperature or
semi-classical limit.Comment: 6 page
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