Enlarging a security community: cooperation in the high north

The paper outlines the foundations of the "Nordic balance" as a Scandinavian neutrality zone in the bi-polar Europe during the Cold War. The co-operation in regional "security community", as perceived by Karl Deutsch shares certain common feelings and practices closely related to the orientation of peaceful change. Such "community" was created as both effective and natural, and this process was not imposed through a formal framework of supranational institutions. However, after the events of 1989-91 the Nordic balance was destroyed while the security community was preserved. These events transformed the North European security situation creating two pillars of "parallel action", one consisting of Denmark, Sweden and Finland, and the other of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania

The city of the future

In the face of the complexity of the interconnected processes involved in the relationships between cities and climate change this report researches the carbon-neutral city through a Bacchi-inspired governmentality lens, where the focus lies on how the physical structure and the technological choices are shaped and made in and through discursive problem representations. The field of carbon-neutral strategies lies in an intersection of physical and technological realities and an administration of social relations. Particular visions of the future are a momentary equilibrium of cultural, historical, and physical relations. Specific socio-technical choices are made as a result of underlying rationales, assumptions and conceptual premises in the strategies shape frame and the understood realm of possibilities for the imagined carbon neutral cities. It is this relation which I seek to scrutinise how the representation of the problem as global, together with premises of ‘future technology’, ‘compensation’ and the ‘limitless growing city’ lays the building block for the visualised futures and thus also for the inherently omitted and silenced elements. I conclude that the choiced trajectories of the Nordic cities towards practical initiatives for a carbon-neutral city are formed within the conjunction of historical, social and geographical situations and the conceptual world constructed by the international and national governed frame

Quantum state tomography of molecular rotation

We show how the rotational quantum state of a linear or symmetric top rotor can be reconstructed from finite time observations of the polar angular distribution under certain conditions. The presented tomographic method can reconstruct the complete rotational quantum state in many non-adiabatic alignment experiments. Our analysis applies for measurement data available with existing measurement techniques.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Tomographic reconstruction of quantum correlations in excited Bose-Einstein condensates

We propose to use quantum tomography to characterize the state of a perturbed Bose-Einstein condensate. We assume knowledge of the number of particles in the zero-wave number mode and of density distributions in space at different times, and we treat the condensate in the Bogoliubov approximation. For states that can be treated with the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we find that the reconstructed density operator gives excellent predictions of the second moments of the atomic creation- and annihilation operators, including the one-body density matrix. Additional inclusion of the momentum distribution at one point of time enables somewhat reliable predictions to be made for the second moments for mixed states, making it possible to distinguish between coherent and thermal perturbations of the condensate. Finally, we find that with observation of the zero-wave number mode's anomalous second moment the reconstructed density operator gives reliable predictions of the second moments of locally amplitude squeezed states.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Municipal size and local electoral participation

The issue of the appropriate scale for local government has regularly appeared on the agenda of public sector reformers. In the empirical work devoted to this issue, the principal focus has been on the implications of size for efficiency in local service provision. Relatively less emphasis has been placed on the implications of size for the character and vitality of local democracy. This paper summarizes findings from a comparative research project which has sought to redress this imbalance by means of undertaking a closer inspection of relationships between municipal size and a set of indicators regarding the character of local democracy in four European countries, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. The investigation draws upon cross-section interview data collected by means of a nested sample design consistent with the hierarchical nature of the issues involved. Empirical analyses are based on a strategy whereby theoretical models are developed and investigated for several different indicators of local democracy in a successive, cumulative fashion using a ‘funnel of causality logic’. This paper reports on results concerning local electoral political participation. We conclude that with the exception of the Dutch case there is no clear evidence of significant direct or indirect effects of municipal size on the likelihood of voting in local elections