426 research outputs found
Modern financial tools that can be used by municipalities : an empirical investigation from Greece
Present-day municipalities constitute important, dynamic, administrative and institutional entities which aim at developing local communities, tackling problems of peripherality and social cohesion and lifting exclusion. The primary aim of this survey is to investigate issues concerning Greek municipalities, such as the financial problems they face and which is the funding scheme they prefer. More specifically, the questionnaire - that was sent to the entire sample of Greek municipalities - examined the views of Mayors in each Municipality as regards: (a) What are the modern financial tools that can be used by municipalities? How they evaluate them? What they suggest what and what they prefer? The aim of the empirical analyses carried out is to draw useful and representative conclusions on issues concerning sources of funding in municipalities.peer-reviewe
Analysis of key obstacles and problems faced by municipalities and their citizens : an empirical investigation in the municipalities of Greece
The primary aim of this research is to investigate and observe phenomena and views related to issues concerning Greek municipalities, such as the problems they face and how they tackle them. So this study presents the descriptive measures of questions in a questionnaire that was sent to the entire sample of Greek municipalities – characterized in this way with considerable heterogeneity - and an attempt is made to locate differences as well as similarities between them. The questionnaire used to collect data is made up of closed-ended questions. More specifically, the questionnaire examined the views of Mayors in each Municipality as regards: (a) the biggest problems faced by the citizens in their Municipality, (b) the biggest personnel problems faced by their Municipality, and (c) the biggest administrative problems faced by their Municipality. The aim of the empirical analyses carried out is to draw useful and representative conclusions on issues concerning deficiencies and problems in municipalities.peer-reviewe
Non-Minimal Chaotic Inflation, Peccei-Quinn Phase Transition and non-Thermal Leptogenesis
We consider a phenomenological extension of the minimal supersymmetric
standard model (MSSM) which incorporates non-minimal chaotic inflation, driven
by a quadratic potential in conjunction with a linear term in the frame
function. Inflation is followed by a Peccei-Quinn phase transition, based on
renormalizable superpotential terms, which resolves the strong CP and mu
problems of MSSM and provide masses lower than about 10^12 GeV for the
right-handed (RH) (s)neutrinos. Baryogenesis occurs via non-thermal
leptogenesis, realized by the out-of-equilibrium decay of the RH sneutrinos
which are produced by the inflaton's decay. Confronting our scenario with the
current observational data on the inflationary observables, the light neutrino
masses, the baryon asymmetry of the universe and the gravitino limit on the
reheat temperature, we constrain the strength of the gravitational coupling to
rather large values (~45-2950) and the Dirac neutrino masses to values between
about 1 and 10 GeV.Comment: Final versio
Tracking Quintessence and Cold Dark Matter Candidates
We study the generation of a kination-dominated phase in the context of a
quintessential model with an inverse-power-law potential and a Hubble-induced
mass term for the quintessence field. The presence of kination is associated
with an oscillating evolution of the quintessence field and the barotropic
index. We find that, in sizeable regions of the parameter space, a tracker
scaling solution can be reached sufficiently early to alleviate the coincidence
problem. Other observational constraints originating from nucleosynthesis, the
inflationary scale, the present acceleration of the universe and the
dark-energy-density parameter can be also met. The impact of this modified
kination-dominated phase on the thermal abundance of cold dark matter
candidates is investigated too. We find that: (i) the enhancement of the relic
abundance of the WIMPs with respect to the standard paradigm, crucially depends
on the hierarchy between the freeze-out temperature and the temperature at
which the extrema in the evolution of the quintessence field are encountered,
and (ii) the relic abundance of e-WIMPs takes its present value close to the
temperature at which the earliest extremum of the evolution of the quintessence
field occurs and, as a consequence, both gravitinos and axinos arise as natural
cold dark matter candidates. In the case of unstable gravitinos, the gravitino
constraint can be satisfied for values of the initial temperature well above
those required in the standard cosmology.Comment: Final versio
The liberalisation of maritime transport and the island regions in EU. Evidence from Greece
The liberalisation of maritime transport constitutes a substantial and vital progress not only in the
maritime transport market but also in influencing the development of distant island regions. In the
European Union (EU), the establishment of the legal framework and policy regarding the liberalisation is
standing from the year of 1992. In Greece, the first attempt to harmonize the inevitable political and state
framework was in 2001 (2932/2001 Act). Prevailing factors encumbered the liberalisation planning and
implementing, mainly because of the incoherent procedures applied and the partial cover of principal
issues regarding impingement of public interests and goods relative to island development.
In our paper, we provide strongly support to the argument that the major initiative considering the
development of island regions throughout European territory is that European Policy for the liberalisation
of maritime transport should be oriented to the distinctive needs of island regions. Moreover, we provide
a “road map” for completion of the liberalisation procedures. Hence, we address specific proposals and
measures towards the healing of the inadequate regional development
Quintessential Kination and Leptogenesis
Thermal leptogenesis induced by the CP-violating decay of a right-handed
neutrino (RHN) is discussed in the background of quintessential kination, i.e.,
in a cosmological model where the energy density of the early Universe is
assumed to be dominated by the kinetic term of a quintessence field during some
epoch of its evolution. This assumption may lead to very different
observational consequences compared to the case of a standard cosmology where
the energy density of the Universe is dominated by radiation. We show that,
depending on the choice of the temperature T_r above which kination dominates
over radiation, any situation between the strong and the super--weak wash--out
regime are equally viable for leptogenesis, even with the RHN Yukawa coupling
fixed to provide the observed atmospheric neutrino mass scale ~ 0.05 eV. For M<
T_r < M/100, i.e., when kination stops to dominate at a time which is not much
later than when leptogenesis takes place, the efficiency of the process,
defined as the ratio between the produced lepton asymmetry and the amount of CP
violation in the RHN decay, can be larger than in the standard scenario of
radiation domination. This possibility is limited to the case when the neutrino
mass scale is larger than about 0.01 eV. The super--weak wash--out regime is
obtained for T_r << M/100, and includes the case when T_r is close to the
nucleosynthesis temperature ~ 1 MeV. Irrespective of T_r, we always find a
sufficient window above the electroweak temperature T ~ 100 GeV for the
sphaleron transition to thermalize, so that the lepton asymmetry can always be
converted to the observed baryon asymmetry.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure
Early changes in rpS6 phosphorylation and BH3 profiling predict response to chemotherapy in AML cells
Blasts from different patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) vary in the agent(s) to which they are most responsive. With a myriad of novel agents to evaluate, there is a lack of predictive biomarkers to precisely assign targeted therapies to individual patients. Primary AML cells often survive poorly in vitro, thus confounding conventional cytotoxicity assays. The purpose of this work was to assess the potential of two same-day functional predictive assays in AML cell lines to predict long-term response to chemotherapy. (i) Ribosomal protein S6 (rpS6) is a downstream substrate of PI3K/akt/mTOR/ kinase and MAPK kinase pathways and its dephosphorylation is also triggered by DNA double strand breaks. Phospho-rpS6 is reliably measurable by flow cytometry and thus has the potential to function as a biomarker of responsiveness to several therapeutic agents. (ii) A cell’s propensity for apoptosis can be interrogated via a functional assay termed “Dynamic BH3 Profiling” in which mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization in drug-treated cells can be driven by pro-apoptotic BH3 domain peptides such as PUMA-BH3. The extent to which a particular cell is primed for apoptosis by the drug can be determined by measuring the amount of cytochrome C released on addition of BH3 peptide. We demonstrate that phospho-rpS6 expression and PUMA-BH3 peptide-induced cytochrome C release after 4 hours both predict long term chemoresponsiveness to tyrosine kinase inhibitors and DNA double strand break inducers in AML cell lines. We also describe changes in expression levels of the prosurvival BCL-2 family member Mcl-1 and the pro-apoptotic protein BIM after short term drug culture
Comments on SUSY inflation models on the brane
In this paper we consider a class of inflation models on the brane where the
dominant part of the inflaton scalar potential does not depend on the inflaton
field value during inflation. In particular, we consider supernatural
inflation, its hilltop version, A-term inflation, and supersymmetric (SUSY) D-
and F-term hybrid inflation on the brane. We show that the parameter space can
be broadened, the inflation scale generally can be lowered, and still possible
to have the spectral index .Comment: 7 page
Determining Reheating Temperature at Colliders with Axino or Gravitino Dark Matter
After a period of inflationary expansion, the
Universe reheated and reached full thermal equilibrium at the reheating
temperature T_R. In this work we point out that, in the context of effective
low-energy supersymmetric models, LHC measurements may allow one to determine
T_R as a function of the mass of the dark matter particle assumed to be either
an axino or a gravitino. An upper bound on their mass may also be derived.Comment: 19 pages, some improvements, JHEP versio
Quintessential Kination and Cold Dark Matter Abundance
The generation of a kination-dominated phase by a quintessential exponential
model is investigated and the parameters of the model are restricted so that a
number of observational constraints (originating from nucleosynthesis, the
present acceleration of the universe and the dark-energy-density parameter) are
satisfied. The decoupling of a thermal cold dark matter particle during the
period of kination is analyzed, the relic density is calculated both
numerically and semi-analytically and the results are compared with each other.
It is argued that the enhancement, with respect to the standard paradigm, of
the cold dark matter abundance can be expressed as a function of the
quintessential density parameter at the onset of nucleosynthesis. We find that
values of the latter quantity close to its upper bound require the
thermal-averaged cross section times the velocity of the cold relic to be
almost three orders of magnitude larger than this needed in the standard
scenario so as compatibility with the cold dark matter constraint is achieved.Comment: Published versio
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