Repackaging in South–North Policy Learning: The Chilean Model of Pension Reform as a Lopsided Exportschlager

South–North policy learning faces many obstacles and often leads to missed opportunities or distorted translations. Given the pariah nature of the Chilean dictatorship, international learning happened against all odds. Drawing on several sources – media content, parliamentary debates, and some background interviews – the article illustrates how the Chilean pension reform became “repackaged” in two ways. First, it was concealed, meaning proponents avoided referencing Chile. Second, it was imperfectly translated, which led to several distortions, such as avoiding a reflection on the political prerequisites for stable pension reforms. Some general lessons are derived for South–North policy learning.Global Challenges (FGGA

Concept for a Time-of-Flight Small Angle Neutron Scattering Instrument at the European Spallation Source

A new Small Angle Neutron Scattering instrument is proposed for the European Spallation Source. The pulsed source requires a time-of-flight analysis of the gathered neutrons at the detector. The optimal instrument length is found to be rather large, which allows for a polarizer and a versatile collimation. The polarizer allows for studying magnetic samples and incoherent background subtraction. The wide collimation will host VSANS and SESANS options that increase the resolution of the instrument towards um and tens of um, respectively. Two 1m2 area detectors will cover a large solid angle simultaneously. The expected gains for this new instrument will lie in the range between 20 and 36, depending on the assessment criteria, when compared to up-to-date reactor based instruments. This will open new perspectives for fast kinetics, weakly scattering samples, and multi-dimensional contrast variation studies.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure

Strategic negotiation and trust in diplomacy - the DipBlue approach

The study of games in Artificial Intelligence has a long tradition. Game playing has been a fertile environment for the development of novel approaches to build intelligent programs. Multi-agent systems (MAS), in particular, are a very useful paradigm in this regard, not only because multi-player games can be addressed using this technology, but most importantly because social aspects of agenthood that have been studied for years by MAS researchers can be applied in the attractive and controlled scenarios that games convey. Diplomacy is a multi-player strategic zero-sum board game, including as main research challenges an enormous search tree, the difficulty of determining the real strength of a position, and the accommodation of negotiation among players. Negotiation abilities bring along other social aspects, such as the need to perform trust reasoning in order to win the game. The majority of existing artificial players (bots) for Diplomacy do not exploit the strategic opportunities enabled by negotiation, focusing instead on search and heuristic approaches. This paper describes the development of DipBlue, an artificial player that uses negotiation in order to gain advantage over its opponents, through the use of peace treaties, formation of alliances and suggestion of actions to allies. A simple trust assessment approach is used as a means to detect and react to potential betrayals by allied players. DipBlue was built to work with DipGame, a MAS testbed for Diplomacy, and has been tested with other players of the same platform and variations of itself. Experimental results show that the use of negotiation increases the performance of bots involved in alliances, when full trust is assumed. In the presence of betrayals, being able to perform trust reasoning is an effective approach to reduce their impact. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Medicinal Plants of Chile: Evaluation of their Anti-Trypanosoma cruzi Activity

San Martin, J (San Martin, Jose). Univ Talca, Inst Biol Vegetal & Biotecnol, Talca, ChileThe extracts of several plants of Central Chile exhibited anti-Trypanosoma cruzi trypomastigotes activity. Most active extracts were those obtained from Podanthus ovatifolius, Berberis microphylla, Kageneckia oblonga, and Drimys winteri. The active extract of Drimys winteri (IC50 51.2 mu g/mL) was purified and three drimane sesquiterpenes were obtained: polygodial, drimenol, and isodrimenin. Isodrimenin and drimenol were found to be active against the trypomastigote form of T cruzi with IC50 values of 27.9 and 25.1 mu M, respectivel

Meson Production in p+d Reactions

The production of neutral and charged pions as well as eta mesons is studied in the Delta and N* resonance region, respectively. Heavy A=3 recoils were measured with the GEM detector. The differential cross sections covering the full angular range are compared with model calculations.Comment: 4 pages, latex, 4 figures, talk presented at the XVIIth European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, Evora, Portugal, September 2000; to be published in Nucl. Phys.

Measurement of p + d -> 3He + eta in S(11) Resonance

We have measured the reaction p + d -> 3He + eta at a proton beam energy of 980 MeV, which is 88.5 MeV above threshold using the new ``germanium wall'' detector system. A missing--mass resolution of the detector system of 2.6% was achieved. The angular distribution of the meson is forward peaked. We found a total cross section of (573 +- 83(stat.) +- 69(syst.))nb. The excitation function for the present reaction is described by a Breit Wigner form with parameters from photoproduction.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, corrected typos in heade

Search for eta-mesic 4He in the dd->3He n pi0 and dd->3He p pi- reactions with the WASA-at-COSY facility

The search for 4He-eta bound states was performed with the WASA-at-COSY facility via the measurement of the excitation function for the dd->3He n pi0 and dd->3He p pi- processes. The beam momentum was varied continuously between 2.127 GeV/c and 2.422 GeV/c, corresponding to the excess energy for the dd->4He eta reaction ranging from Q=-70 MeV to Q=30 MeV. The luminosity was determined based on the dd->3He n reaction and quasi-free proton-proton scattering via dd->pp n_spectator n_spectator reactions. The excitation functions determined independently for the measured reactions do not reveal a structure which could be interpreted as a narrow mesic nucleus. Therefore, the upper limits of the total cross sections for the bound state production and decay in dd->(4He-eta)_bound->3He n pi0 and dd->(4He-eta)_bound->3He p pi- processes were determined taking into account the isospin relation between both the channels considered. The results of the analysis depend on the assumptions of the N* momentum distribution in the anticipated mesic-4He. Assuming as in the previous works, that this is identical with the distribution of nucleons bound with 20 MeV in 4He, we determined that (for the mesic bound state width in the range from 5 MeV to 50 MeV) the upper limits at 90% confidence level are about 3 nb and about 6 nb for npi0 and ppi- channels, respectively. However, based on the recent theoretical findings of the N*(1535) momentum distribution in the N*-3He nucleus bound by 3.6 MeV, we find that the WASA-at-COSY detector acceptance decreases and hence the corresponding upper limits are 5 nb and 10 nb for npi0 and ppi- channels respectively.Comment: This article will be submitted to JHE

Charge Symmetry Breaking in dd->4He{\pi}0 with WASA-at-COSY

Charge symmetry breaking (CSB) observables are a suitable experimental tool to examine effects induced by quark masses on the nuclear level. Previous high precision data from TRIUMF and IUCF are currently used to develop a consistent description of CSB within the framework of chiral perturbation theory. In this work the experimental studies on the reaction dd->4He{\pi}0 have been extended towards higher excess energies in order to provide information on the contribution of p-waves in the final state. For this, an exclusive measurement has been carried out at a beam momentum of p=1.2 GeV/c using the WASA-at-COSY facility. The total cross section amounts to sigma(tot) = (118 +- 18(stat) +- 13(sys) +- 8(ext)) pb and first data on the differential cross section are consistent with s-wave pion production.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

ABC Effect and Resonance Structure in the Double-Pionic Fusion to 3^3He

Exclusive and kinematically complete measurements of the double pionic fusion to $^3$He have been performed in the energy region of the so-called ABC effect, which denotes a pronounced low-mass enhancement in the $\pi\pi$-invariant mass spectrum. The experiments were carried out with the WASA detector setup at COSY. Similar to the observations in the basic $pn \to d \pi^0\pi^0$ reaction and in the $dd \to ^4$He$\pi^0\pi^0$ reaction, the data reveal a correlation between the ABC effect and a resonance-like energy dependence in the total cross section. Differential cross sections are well described by the hypothesis of $d^*$ resonance formation during the reaction process in addition to the conventional $t$-channel $\Delta\Delta$ mechanism. The deduced $d^*$ resonance width can be understood from collision broadening due to Fermi motion of the nucleons in initial and final nuclei