16,596 research outputs found
The London bombings and racial prejudice: evidence from housing and labour markets
This paper investigates the impact of the London bombings on attitudes towards ethnic minorities, examining outcomes in housing and labour markets across London boroughs. We use a difference-in-differences approach, specifying `treated' boroughs as those with the highest concentration of Asian residents. Our results indicate that house prices in treated boroughs fell by approximately 2.3% in the two years after the bombings relative to other boroughs, with sales declining by approximately 5.7%. Furthermore, we present evidence of a rise in the unemployment rate in treated compared to control boroughs, as well as a rise in racial segregation. These results are robust to several `falsification' checks with respect to the definition and timing of treatment
Diffusive Boundary Layers in the Free-Surface Excitable Medium Spiral
Spiral waves are a ubiquitous feature of the nonequilibrium dynamics of a
great variety of excitable systems. In the limit of a large separation in
timescale between fast excitation and slow recovery, one can reduce the spiral
problem to one involving the motion of a free surface separating the excited
and quiescent phases. In this work, we study the free surface problem in the
limit of small diffusivity for the slow field variable. Specifically, we show
that a previously found spiral solution in the diffusionless limit can be
extended to finite diffusivity, without significant alteration. This extension
involves the creation of a variety of boundary layers which cure all the
undesirable singularities of the aforementioned solution. The implications of
our results for the study of spiral stability are briefly discussed.Comment: 6 pages, submitted to PRE Rapid Com
Microscopic Selection of Fluid Fingering Pattern
We study the issue of the selection of viscous fingering patterns in the
limit of small surface tension. Through detailed simulations of anisotropic
fingering, we demonstrate conclusively that no selection independent of the
small-scale cutoff (macroscopic selection) occurs in this system. Rather, the
small-scale cutoff completely controls the pattern, even on short time scales,
in accord with the theory of microscopic solvability. We demonstrate that
ordered patterns are dynamically selected only for not too small surface
tensions. For extremely small surface tensions, the system exhibits chaotic
behavior and no regular pattern is realized.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
Nonlinear lattice model of viscoelastic Mode III fracture
We study the effect of general nonlinear force laws in viscoelastic lattice
models of fracture, focusing on the existence and stability of steady-state
Mode III cracks. We show that the hysteretic behavior at small driving is very
sensitive to the smoothness of the force law. At large driving, we find a Hopf
bifurcation to a straight crack whose velocity is periodic in time. The
frequency of the unstable bifurcating mode depends on the smoothness of the
potential, but is very close to an exact period-doubling instability. Slightly
above the onset of the instability, the system settles into a exactly
period-doubled state, presumably connected to the aforementioned bifurcation
structure. We explicitly solve for this new state and map out its
velocity-driving relation
The Universal Gaussian in Soliton Tails
We show that in a large class of equations, solitons formed from generic
initial conditions do not have infinitely long exponential tails, but are
truncated by a region of Gaussian decay. This phenomenon makes it possible to
treat solitons as localized, individual objects. For the case of the KdV
equation, we show how the Gaussian decay emerges in the inverse scattering
formalism.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, revtex with eps
Mechanisms underlying sequence-independent beta-sheet formation
We investigate the formation of beta-sheet structures in proteins without
taking into account specific sequence-dependent hydrophobic interactions. To
accomplish this, we introduce a model which explicitly incorporates both
solvation effects and the angular dependence (on the protein backbone) of
hydrogen bond formation. The thermodynamics of this model is studied by
comparing the restricted partition functions obtained by "unfreezing"
successively larger segments of the native beta-sheet structure. Our results
suggest that solvation dynamics together with the aforementioned angular
dependence gives rise to a generic cooperativity in this class of systems; this
result explains why pathological aggregates involving beta-sheet cores can form
from many different proteins. Our work provides the foundation for the
construction of phenomenological models to investigate the competition between
native folding and non-specific aggregation.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, Revtex4, simulation mpeg movie available at
http://www-physics.ucsd.edu/~guochin/Images/sheet1.mp
Taylor dispersion of gyrotactic swimming micro-organisms in a linear flow
The theory of generalized Taylor dispersion for suspensions of Brownian particles is developed to study the dispersion of gyrotactic swimming micro-organisms in a linear shear flow. Such creatures are bottom-heavy and experience a gravitational torque which acts to right them when they are tipped away from the vertical. They also suffer a net viscous torque in the presence of a local vorticity field. The orientation of the cells is intrinsically random but the balance of the two torques results in a bias toward a preferred swimming direction. The micro-organisms are sufficiently large that Brownian motion is negligible but their random swimming across streamlines results in a mean velocity together with diffusion. As an example, we consider the case of vertical shear flow and calculate the diffusion coefficients for a suspension of the alga <i>Chlamydomonas nivalis</i>. This rational derivation is compared with earlier approximations for the diffusivity
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