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From Open to Secret Ballot: Vote Buying and Modernization
The secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of democracy. We contend that the historical process of modernization caused the switch from open to secret ballot with the underlying mechanism being that income growth, urbanization, and rising education standards undermined vote markets and made electoral corruption uneconomical. We undertake event history studies of ballot reform in Western Europe and the Americas during the 19th and 20th centuries to establish that modernization was systematically related to ballot reform. We study electoral turnout before and after ballot reform amongst the US states and British parliamentary constituencies to substantiate the hypothesis that modernization made vote buying uneconomical
‘Paging Podiatry!’: an audit of acute inpatient podiatry referrals
For the analysis of small concentrations of organics in aqueous solutions, a novel add-on accessory for dual-beam / optical subtraction spectroscopy has been built for a commercial Fourier transform infrared spectrometer. A standard FT-IR instrument requires a sample measurement and a separate reference measurement, whereas the optical subtraction instrument directly measures the difference between sample and reference. This has a number of advantages. The time delay between the two measurements is eliminated, and the effective measurement time is improved by a factor of two. Moreover, the optical subtraction provides a large reduction in dynamic range of the measured signal, which prevents detector saturation, and enables effective use of dynamic range of the analog to digital converter in the FT-IR spectrometer. This results in an increased signal to noise ratio, compared to the standard FT-IR instrument. By changing detector and light source the instrument may be used for both near- and mid.-infrared spectroscopy. The increased sensitivity and stability of the optical subtraction instrument compared to the standard instrument is demonstrated by transmission measurements of aqueous urea solutions in the combination band region 4000 to 5000cm(-1) (2000 to 2500nm)
Spinning Strings, Black Holes and Stable Closed Timelike Geodesics
The existence and stability under linear perturbation of closed timelike
curves in the spacetime associated to Schwarzschild black hole pierced by a
spinning string are studied. Due to the superposition of the black hole, we
find that the spinning string spacetime is deformed in such a way to allow the
existence of closed timelike geodesics.Comment: 5 pages, RevTex4, some corrections and new material adde
On the stability of black hole event horizons
In this work we study a {\it gedanken} experiment constructed in order to
test the cosmic censorship hypothesis and the second law of black hole
thermo-dynamics. Matter with a negative gravitating energy is imagined added to
a near extremal -charged static black hole in Einstein-Maxwell theory.
The dynamics of a similar process is studied and the thermo-dynamical
properties of the resulting black hole structure is discussed. A new mechanism
which stabilizes black hole event horizons is shown to operate in such
processes.Comment: 16, grammatical errors corrected and two references adde
Multimedia Systems, Languages, And Infrastructures For Interactive Television
For this special issue on Multimedia Systems, Languages, and Infrastructures for Interactive Television the four best papers on multimedia systems and infrastructures were invited to extend their conference contribution in the form of a journal paper. These papers cover a wide range of current challenges for multimedia systems: content recommendation, participatory multimedia genres, evaluation of mobile media usage, and digital media narratives
Reconfiguration of list edge-colorings in a graph
11th International Symposium, WADS 2009, Banff, Canada, August 21-23, 2009. ProceedingsWe study the problem of reconfiguring one list edge-coloring of a graph into another list edge-coloring by changing one edge color at a time, while at all times maintaining a list edge-coloring, given a list of allowed colors for each edge. First we show that this problem is PSPACE-complete, even for planar graphs of maximum degree 3 and just six colors. Then we consider the problem restricted to trees. We show that any list edge-coloring can be transformed into any other under the sufficient condition that the number of allowed colors for each edge is strictly larger than the degrees of both its endpoints. This sufficient condition is best possible in some sense. Our proof yields a polynomial-time algorithm that finds a transformation between two given list edge-colorings of a tree with n vertices using O(n [superscript 2]) recolor steps. This worst-case bound is tight: we give an infinite family of instances on paths that satisfy our sufficient condition and whose reconfiguration requires Ω(n [superscript 2]) recolor steps
Helioseismology of Sunspots: A Case Study of NOAA Region 9787
Various methods of helioseismology are used to study the subsurface
properties of the sunspot in NOAA Active Region 9787. This sunspot was chosen
because it is axisymmetric, shows little evolution during 20-28 January 2002,
and was observed continuously by the MDI/SOHO instrument. (...) Wave travel
times and mode frequencies are affected by the sunspot. In most cases, wave
packets that propagate through the sunspot have reduced travel times. At short
travel distances, however, the sign of the travel-time shifts appears to depend
sensitively on how the data are processed and, in particular, on filtering in
frequency-wavenumber space. We carry out two linear inversions for wave speed:
one using travel-times and phase-speed filters and the other one using mode
frequencies from ring analysis. These two inversions give subsurface wave-speed
profiles with opposite signs and different amplitudes. (...) From this study of
AR9787, we conclude that we are currently unable to provide a unified
description of the subsurface structure and dynamics of the sunspot.Comment: 28 pages, 18 figure
Dyonic Kerr-Newman black holes, complex scalar field and Cosmic Censorship
We construct a gedanken experiment, in which a weak wave packet of the
complex massive scalar field interacts with a four-parameter (mass, angular
momentum, electric and magnetic charges) Kerr-Newman black hole. We show that
this interaction cannot convert an extreme the black hole into a naked
sigularity for any black hole parameters and any generic wave packet
configuration. The analysis therefore provides support for the weak cosmic
censorship conjecture.Comment: Refined emphasis on the weak cosmic censorship conjecture,
conclusions otherwise unchanged. Also, two sections merged, literature review
updated, references added, a few typos correcte
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