Paradoxes of Public Sector Reform: The Mexican Experience (2000-2007)

During the last few years, many public sector reform efforts have taken place in Mexico. Without question, President Vicente Fox’s government (2000-2006) has been one of the most active administrative reformers in the history of our country (Pardo, 1991, 2007; Sánchez, 2006). The 2001-2006 National Program Against Corruption and for Transparency and Administrative Development (NPCT), and the Good Government Agenda (GGA) set a wide range of reform issues in the public sector agenda. These sought to change the structures, procedures and technologies of public organizations, as well as the behaviors and ethical standards of federal public servants. Besides, compared to previous modernization programs, it could be said that this six-year long reform agenda did not stay just as a collection of good wishes. On the contrary, during the last presidential term, numerous and diverse actions focused on building a more professional, honest, transparent, digitalized, and top-qualified government were implemented (Pardo, 2007). The question to be answered in the following years will be related to the adequacy and outcomes of these reform efforts

Quantum simulation of non-trivial topology

We propose several designs to simulate quantum many-body systems in manifolds with a non-trivial topology. The key idea is to create a synthetic lattice combining real-space and internal degrees of freedom via a suitable use of induced hoppings. The simplest example is the conversion of an open spin-ladder into a closed spin-chain with arbitrary boundary conditions. Further exploitation of the idea leads to the conversion of open chains with internal degrees of freedom into artificial tori and M\"obius strips of different kinds. We show that in synthetic lattices the Hubbard model on sharp and scalable manifolds with non-Euclidean topologies may be realized. We provide a few examples of the effect that a change of topology can have on quantum systems amenable to simulation, both at the single-particle and at the many-body level.Comment: 12 pages, 15 figure

Editorial

Víctor Orera was our first teacher and scientific father in the laboratory. With him we also learned that research, like any human activity, must be honest and contribute to improving the world around us. He was very passionate about science, dedicated and naturally optimistic. When we were having a bad day at the lab, he had a knack for finding the silver lining in an apparently unsuccessful outcome. Until retirement, he was the leader of our Research Group, Processing and Characterization of Structural and Functional Ceramics, PROCACEF, at the Institute of Materials Science of Aragon, ICMA, an institute that he contributed to found and develop. ICMA has recently become part of the Aragon Institute of Nanoscience and Materials (INMA), from where we write these words..