82 research outputs found
Car traffic, habit persistence, cross-sectional dependence, and spatial heterogeneity:New insights using French departmental data
This paper adopts a dynamic general nesting spatial panel data model with common factors to explore the effect of population density, real household income per capita, car fleet per capita, and real price of gasoline on departmental traffic per light vehicle in France over the period 1990–2009. Spatial heterogeneity is modeled by a translog function in the first three explanatory variables, which are dominated by variation in the cross-sectional domain, while the real price of gasoline, which is dominated by variation in the time domain, is treated as an observable common factor. Additional unobservable common factors are controlled for by principal components with heterogenous coefficients, building on previous work of Shi and Lee (2017a), thereby, generalizing the dynamic spatial panel data model with spatial and time period fixed applied in recent studies. It is found that the spatial lag in the dependent variable becomes insignificant due to these extensions. This paper explains the wider implications of this finding for spatial econometric modeling of cross-sectional dependence. In addition, the elasticities of the first three explanatory variables are shown to vary across space and time and to follow a plausible structure. Among other, an important result is that the long run income elasticity of car traffic diminished from 1.0 in 1990 to 0.4 in 2003, and then remained almost constant until the end of our sample period in 2009, i.e., during the peak-car traffic period
Workshop Synthesis: Dealing with immobility and survey non-response
This paper discusses the related issues associated with dealing with immobility and survey non-response within survey design, sampling protocols and for different survey instruments and methodological approaches. How to develop new tools and methods to capture the travel under-surveyed, ‘hard to reach’ and ‘survey shy’ populations was discussed. Also, how to adapt standard survey designs and sampling approaches to include overlooked population sectors, such as young people, non-travellers and the residents of informal settlements in developing countries. The paper recommends that best known practice in this area is a long way from common practices, and that the academic, commercial consultancy and policy worlds are very different places. This raises the need to develop some minimum standards/checklists of survey inclusion protocols, together with basic training on sample composition, screening and proxy data recording
A sufficient condition for confinement in QCD
This letter is about confinement in QCD. At the moment we have pictures of
confinement to complete our understanding of the physics of strongly
interacting particles, interaction which asks for confinement.As it is said in
[1] : " In principle it should be possible to derive the confinement hypothesis
from the QCD Lagrangian. At this time, no rigorous derivation exists, so it is
not absolutely clear that the confinement hypothesis is a bone fide prediction
of QCD" . In this letter we show that a sufficient (of course not necessary)
condition for confinement is that topological structure of vacuum in Nature
does not correspond to the -vacuum. Therefore, if different vacua with
nontrivial winding number cannot be connected by tunneling, we obtain
confinement as a consequence.Comment: 10 page
Data Driven Flavour Model
A bottom-up approach has been adopted to identify a flavour model that agrees
with present experimental measurements. The charged fermion mass hierarchies
suggest that only the top Yukawa term should be present at the renormalisable
level. Similarly, describing the lightness of the active neutrinos through the
type-I Seesaw mechanism, right-handed neutrino mass terms should also be
present at the renormalisable level. The flavour symmetry of the Lagrangian
including the fermionic kinetic terms and only the top Yukawa is then a
combination of and factors. Once considering the Majorana
neutrino terms, the associated symmetry is . Lighter charged fermion and
active neutrino masses and quark and lepton mixings arise considering specific
spurion fields {\it \`a la} Minimal Flavour Violation. The associated
phenomenology is investigated and the model turns out to have almost the same
flavour protection as the Minimal Flavour Violation in both quark and lepton
sectors. Promoting the spurions to dynamical fields, the associated scalar
potential is also studied and a minimum is identified such that fermion masses
and mixings are correctly reproduced. Very precise predictions for the Majorana
phases follow from the minimisation of the scalar potential and thus the
neutrinoless-double-beta decay may represent a smoking gun for the model.Comment: 39 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in EPJ
Effective nonlinear Ehrenfest hybrid quantum-classical dynamics
The definition of a consistent evolution equation for statistical hybrid
quantum-classical systems is still an open problem. In this paper we analyze
the case of Ehrenfest dynamics on systems defined by a probability density and
identify the relations of the non-linearity of the dynamics with the
obstructions to define a consistent dynamics for the first quantum moment of
the distribution. This first quantum moment represents the physical states as a
family of classically-parametrized density matrices , for
a classical point; and it is the most common representation of hybrid systems
in the literature. Due to this obstruction, we consider higher order quantum
moments, and argue that only a finite number of them are physically measurable.
Because of this, we propose an effective solution for the hybrid dynamics
problem based on approximating the distribution by those moments and
representing the states by them.Comment: 21 pages. Minor correction in the list of affiliation
Hybrid Koopman C*-formalism and the hybrid quantum-classical master equation
Based on Koopman formalism for classical statistical mechanics, we propose a
formalism to define hybrid quantum-classical dynamical systems by defining
(outer) automorphisms of the C*-algebra of hybrid operators and realizing them
as linear transformations on the space of hybrid states. These hybrid states
are represented as density matrices on the Hilbert space obtained from the
hybrid C*-algebra by the GNS theorem. We also classify all possible dynamical
systems which are unitary and obtain the possible hybrid Hamiltonian operators.Comment: 20 page
Brain functional abnormality in schizo-affective disorder: an fMRI study.
Background.Schizo-affective disorder has not been studied to any significant extent using functional imaging. The aim of this study was to examine patterns of brain activation and deactivation in patients meeting strict diagnostic criteria for the disorder. METHOD: Thirty-two patients meeting research diagnostic criteria (RDC) for schizo-affective disorder (16 schizomanic and 16 schizodepressive) and 32 matched healthy controls underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during performance of the n-back task. Linear models were used to obtain maps of activations and deactivations in the groups. RESULTS: Controls showed activation in a network of frontal and other areas and also deactivation in the medial frontal cortex, the precuneus and the parietal cortex. Schizo-affective patients activated significantly less in prefrontal, parietal and temporal regions than the controls, and also showed failure of deactivation in the medial frontal cortex. When task performance was controlled for, the reduced activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the failure of deactivation of the medial frontal cortex remained significant. CONCLUSIONS: Schizo-affective disorder shows a similar pattern of reduced frontal activation to schizophrenia. The disorder is also characterized by failure of deactivation suggestive of default mode network dysfunction
Brain structural changes in schizoaffective disorder compared to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder
Brain structural changes in schizoaffective disorder, and how far they resemble those seen in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, have only been studied to a limited extent. Forty-five patients meeting - and criteria for schizoaffective disorder, groups of patients with 45 matched schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and 45 matched healthy controls were examined using voxel-based morphometry (). Analyses comparing each patient group with the healthy control subjects found that the patients with schizoaffective disorder and the patients with schizophrenia showed widespread and overlapping areas of significant volume reduction, but the patients with bipolar disorder did not. A subsequent analysis compared the combined group of patients with the controls followed by extraction of clusters. In regions where the patients differed significantly from the controls, no significant differences in mean volume between patients with schizoaffective disorder and patients with schizophrenia in any of five regions of volume reduction were found, but mean volumes in the patients with bipolar disorder were significantly smaller in three of five. The findings provide evidence that, in terms of structural gray matter brain abnormality, schizoaffective disorder resembles schizophrenia more than bipolar disorder
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