Making space for a new picture of the world: Boys in Zinc and Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich

Based on a study of Boys in Zinc and Chernobyl Prayer, two books by the Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich, this paper’s core argument is that Alexievich’s writing represents an approach designed to capture that which eludes more conventional journalism. The paper seeks first to situate the subjects of Alexievich’s work in the wider media historical context of the end of the USSR, and also to argue that her writing is part of a uniquely Russian concept of journalism as literature--a concept that has its historical roots in the autocratic Russia of the 19th century. The paper further proposes that conflicts between the preternatural and the material, and between elite and non-elite voices--key themes of the works studied – are vital to understanding the age of change which Alexievich, through her use of extensive interviews, was seeking to record. It emphasizes the significance of the Soviet experience in World War II as an influence on the USSR for the remainder of its existence. It posits that Alexievich’s work also casts valuable light on the nature of journalism in the last years of the Soviet era – and concludes, while acknowledging certain criticisms and questioning of her presentation of her material, by arguing that it represents a way to understand new and bewildering times

Silicon Valley versus Corporate Welfare

The estimated $65 billion a year that the federal government now spends on corporate welfare programs harms U.S. industry in general and Silicon Valley companies in particular. The competitiveness of America's semiconductor firms and other high-technology industries would benefit if corporate subsidies were eliminated altogether and the savings were devoted to reducing corporate income taxes, the capital gains tax, or the personal income tax. Given Congress's reluctance to vote down corporate pork, one strategy for eliminating corporate welfare would be to form an independent commission to identify unnecessary subsidies. That would force Congress to vote yes or no on a package of corporate spending subsidies. More than 50 Silicon Valley CEOs agree with this critical assessment of federal subsidies to industry and have signed a "Declaration of Independence" from corporate welfare. In the statement, which appears in the Appendix of this study, the CEOs urge Congress to end corporate welfare "even if it means funding cuts to my own company.

FASB: Making Financial Statements Mysterious

Since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has passed rules that it promises will make corporate accounting more transparent. In fact, its revised Generally Accepted Accounting Principles have made it difficult for investors -- or even CEOs -- to understand a company's financial report. The first step in the wrong direction came when FASB mandated that companies list "intangibles" such as "goodwill" as corporate assets, artificially inflating balance sheets. After that, FASB meddled with the revenue recognition rules, in some cases not allowing companies to report revenue from cash payments received from a customer for a delivered product. Finally, and worst by far, FASB mandated punitive and nonsensical rules for so-called expensing of stock options. These accounting burdens, combined with the onerous yet ineffective mandates of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are starting to take a real toll on American businesses and markets. In 2007, only $8.5 billion or 7.7 percent of the total$109 billion in issuances of Initial Public Offerings were launched on U.S. stock exchanges, down from 60.8 percent a decade ago

W∞W_\infty and Anomalies of Self-Dual Einstein Theories

This manuscripts corrects some minor error in the paper, Mod. Phys. Lett. A 6 1893 (1991)Comment: (revised due to TeXnical errors), 11 page

Models for the size distribution of businesses in a price driven market

A microscopic model of aggregation and fragmentation is introduced to investigate the size distribution of businesses. In the model, businesses are constrained to comply with the market price, as expected by the customers, while customers can only buy at the prices offered by the businesses. We show numerically and analytically that the size distribution scales like a power-law. A mean-field version of our model is also introduced and we determine for which value of the parameters the mean-field model agrees with the microscopic model. We discuss to what extent our simple model and its results compare with empirical data on company sizes in the U.S. and debt sizes in Japan. Finally, possible extensions of the mean-field model are discussed, to cope with other empirical data.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, submitted for publicatio

Strategy Selection in the Minority Game

We investigate the dynamics of the choice of an active strategy in the minority game. A history distribution is introduced as an analytical tool to study the asymmetry between the two choices offered to the agents. Its properties are studied numerically. It allows us to show that the departure from uniformity in the initial attribution of strategies to the agents is important even in the efficient market. Also, an approximate expression for the variance of the number of agents at one side in the efficient phase is proposed. All the analytical propositions are supported by numerical simulations of the system.Comment: Latex file, 17 page, 4 figure

Spectral Density of Complex Networks with a Finite Mean Degree

In order to clarify the statistical features of complex networks, the spectral density of adjacency matrices has often been investigated. Adopting a static model introduced by Goh, Kahng and Kim, we analyse the spectral density of complex scale free networks. For that purpose, we utilize the replica method and effective medium approximation (EMA) in statistical mechanics. As a result, we identify a new integral equation which determines the asymptotic spectral density of scale free networks with a finite mean degree $p$. In the limit $p \to \infty$, known asymptotic formulae are rederived. Moreover, the $1/p$ corrections to known results are analytically calculated by a perturbative method.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure, minor corrections mad