119 research outputs found

    Leadership and Institutional Reform in Consensual Democracies: Dutch and Swedish Defence Organizations after the Cold War

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    Het einde van de Koude Oorlog betekende niet noodzakelijkerwijs het einde van de dienstplicht in Westerse democratie_n. De reactie van verschillende landen op het einde van de Koude Oorlog (of: de val van het IJzeren Gordijn) wordt gekenmerkt door een grote mate van variatie. Nederland en Zweden hebben ten opzichte van elkaar zeer verschillend gereageerd ten aanzien van de dienstplicht. Terwijl Nederland al in 1993 besloot de opkomstplicht op te schorten (wat de facto de afschaffing van de dienstplicht betekende) houdt Zweden tot op de dag van vandaag aan deze militaire institutie vast. De empirische vraag van dit onderzoek luidt dan ook: Waarom heeft Nederland de dienstplicht (vrij) snel na de Koude Oorlog afgeschaft en Zweden niet? De veronderstelling die in deze studie centraal staat is dat na de Koude Oorlog grote legers voor de landsverdediging overbodig werden. Dit stelde de defensieorganisaties voor grote uitdagingen. Daarom wordt het onderzoek in de bredere context van crises en hervormingsliteratuur geplaatst. De vraag is hoe de actoren binnen de organisaties op de veranderende veiligheidsomgeving hebben gereageerd. Het is de verwachting dat de beantwoording van de empirische vraag nieuwe inzichten verschaft in complexe hervormingen en beleidsveranderingen binnen consensus democratie _n. Een bijzondere rol binnen deze veranderingsprocessen wordt hierbij aan leiders toegeschreven. Het argument luidt dat de relatie tussen politieke en administratieve leiders een belangrijke factor is voor de timing, snelheid en omvang van hervormingen in de defensiesectoren van Nederland en Zweden. Bovendien wordt verondersteld dat de meeste leiders voor een conservatieve strategie kiezen. Dat wil zeggen dat zij de status-quo en de integriteit van een institutie zo lang mogelijk willen bewaren en hooguit incrementele verandering nastreven. Het onderzoek concentreert zich op de vragen waarom leiders hervormen, hoe zij het doen en wat de uitkomsten zijn, met betrekking tot beleidsveranderingen en de effectiviteit van crisismanagement.Departement BestuurskundeNetherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) my project number: 41560014The politics and administration of institutional change - ou

    Thermodynamics of non-local materials: extra fluxes and internal powers

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    The most usual formulation of the Laws of Thermodynamics turns out to be suitable for local or simple materials, while for non-local systems there are two different ways: either modify this usual formulation by introducing suitable extra fluxes or express the Laws of Thermodynamics in terms of internal powers directly, as we propose in this paper. The first choice is subject to the criticism that the vector fluxes must be introduced a posteriori in order to obtain the compatibility with the Laws of Thermodynamics. On the contrary, the formulation in terms of internal powers is more general, because it is a priori defined on the basis of the constitutive equations. Besides it allows to highlight, without ambiguity, the contribution of the internal powers in the variation of the thermodynamic potentials. Finally, in this paper, we consider some examples of non-local materials and derive the proper expressions of their internal powers from the power balance laws.Comment: 16 pages, in press on Continuum Mechanics and Thermodynamic

    Optically induced coherent intra-band dynamics in disordered semiconductors

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    On the basis of a tight-binding model for a strongly disordered semiconductor with correlated conduction- and valence band disorder a new coherent dynamical intra-band effect is analyzed. For systems that are excited by two, specially designed ultrashort light-pulse sequences delayed by tau relatively to each other echo-like phenomena are predicted to occur. In addition to the inter-band photon echo which shows up at exactly t=2*tau relative to the first pulse, the system responds with two spontaneous intra-band current pulses preceding and following the appearance of the photon echo. The temporal splitting depends on the electron-hole mass ratio. Calculating the population relaxation rate due to Coulomb scattering, it is concluded that the predicted new dynamical effect should be experimentally observable in an interacting and strongly disordered system, such as the Quantum-Coulomb-Glass.Comment: to be published in Physical Review B15 February 200

    Calorie restriction has no effect on bone marrow tumour burden in a Vk*MYC transplant model of multiple myeloma

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    Multiple myeloma (MM) is an incurable haematological malignancy, caused by the uncontrolled proliferation of plasma cells within the bone marrow (BM). Obesity is a known risk factor for MM, however, few studies have investigated the potential of dietary intervention to prevent MM progression. Calorie restriction (CR) is associated with many health benefits including reduced cancer incidence and progression. To investigate if CR could reduce MM progression, dietary regimes [30% CR, normal chow diet (NCD), or high fat diet (HFD)] were initiated in C57BL/6J mice. Diet-induced changes were assessed, followed by inoculation of mice with Vk*MYC MM cells (Vk14451-GFP) at 16 weeks of age. Tumour progression was monitored by serum paraprotein, and at endpoint, BM and splenic tumour burden was analysed by flow cytometry. 30% CR promoted weight loss, improved glucose tolerance, increased BM adiposity and elevated serum adiponectin compared to NCD-fed mice. Despite these metabolic changes, CR had no significant effect on serum paraprotein levels. Furthermore, endpoint analysis found that dietary changes were insufficient to affect BM tumour burden, however, HFD resulted in an average two-fold increase in splenic tumour burden. Overall, these findings suggest diet-induced BM changes may not be key drivers of MM progression in the Vk14451-GFP transplant model of myeloma.Alanah L. Bradey, Stephen Fitter, Jvaughn Duggan, VickiWilczek, Connor M. D. Williams, EmmaAJ. Cheney, Jacqueline E. Noll, PawanratTangseefa, Vasilios Panagopoulos, Andrew C. W. Zannettin

    Fitting the integrated Spectral Energy Distributions of Galaxies

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    Fitting the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies is an almost universally used technique that has matured significantly in the last decade. Model predictions and fitting procedures have improved significantly over this time, attempting to keep up with the vastly increased volume and quality of available data. We review here the field of SED fitting, describing the modelling of ultraviolet to infrared galaxy SEDs, the creation of multiwavelength data sets, and the methods used to fit model SEDs to observed galaxy data sets. We touch upon the achievements and challenges in the major ingredients of SED fitting, with a special emphasis on describing the interplay between the quality of the available data, the quality of the available models, and the best fitting technique to use in order to obtain a realistic measurement as well as realistic uncertainties. We conclude that SED fitting can be used effectively to derive a range of physical properties of galaxies, such as redshift, stellar masses, star formation rates, dust masses, and metallicities, with care taken not to over-interpret the available data. Yet there still exist many issues such as estimating the age of the oldest stars in a galaxy, finer details ofdust properties and dust-star geometry, and the influences of poorly understood, luminous stellar types and phases. The challenge for the coming years will be to improve both the models and the observational data sets to resolve these uncertainties. The present review will be made available on an interactive, moderated web page (sedfitting.org), where the community can access and change the text. The intention is to expand the text and keep it up to date over the coming years.Comment: 54 pages, 26 figures, Accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Scienc

    Measurement of the azimuthal anisotropy of Y(1S) and Y(2S) mesons in PbPb collisions at √S^{S}NN = 5.02 TeV

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    The second-order Fourier coefficients (υ2_{2}) characterizing the azimuthal distributions of Υ(1S) and Υ(2S) mesons produced in PbPb collisions at sNN\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 5.02 TeV are studied. The Υmesons are reconstructed in their dimuon decay channel, as measured by the CMS detector. The collected data set corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 1.7 nb1^{-1}. The scalar product method is used to extract the υ2_{2} coefficients of the azimuthal distributions. Results are reported for the rapidity range |y| < 2.4, in the transverse momentum interval 0 < pT_{T} < 50 GeV/c, and in three centrality ranges of 10–30%, 30–50% and 50–90%. In contrast to the J/ψ mesons, the measured υ2_{2} values for the Υ mesons are found to be consistent with zero

    Measurement of prompt D0^{0} and D\overline{D}0^{0} meson azimuthal anisotropy and search for strong electric fields in PbPb collisions at root SNN\sqrt{S_{NN}} = 5.02 TeV

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    The strong Coulomb field created in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions is expected to produce a rapiditydependent difference (Av2) in the second Fourier coefficient of the azimuthal distribution (elliptic flow, v2) between D0 (uc) and D0 (uc) mesons. Motivated by the search for evidence of this field, the CMS detector at the LHC is used to perform the first measurement of Av2. The rapidity-averaged value is found to be (Av2) = 0.001 ? 0.001 (stat)? 0.003 (syst) in PbPb collisions at ?sNN = 5.02 TeV. In addition, the influence of the collision geometry is explored by measuring the D0 and D0mesons v2 and triangular flow coefficient (v3) as functions of rapidity, transverse momentum (pT), and event centrality (a measure of the overlap of the two Pb nuclei). A clear centrality dependence of prompt D0 meson v2 values is observed, while the v3 is largely independent of centrality. These trends are consistent with expectations of flow driven by the initial-state geometry. ? 2021 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY licens

    Studies of charm and beauty hadron long-range correlations in pp and pPb collisions at LHC energies

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    Measurement of the Y(1S) pair production cross section and search for resonances decaying to Y(1S)μ⁺μ⁻ in proton-proton collisions at √s = 13 TeV

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    The fiducial cross section for Y(1S)pair production in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13TeVin the region where both Y(1S)mesons have an absolute rapidity below 2.0 is measured to be 79 ± 11 (stat) ±6 (syst) ±3 (B)pbassuming the mesons are produced unpolarized. The last uncertainty corresponds to the uncertainty in the Y(1S)meson dimuon branching fraction. The measurement is performed in the final state with four muons using proton-proton collision data collected in 2016 by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9fb1^{-1}. This process serves as a standard model reference in a search for narrow resonances decaying to Y(1S)μ+^{+}μ^{-} in the same final state. Such a resonance could indicate the existence of a tetraquark that is a bound state of two bquarks and two b̅ antiquarks. The tetraquark search is performed for masses in the vicinity of four times the bottom quark mass, between 17.5 and 19.5GeV, while a generic search for other resonances is performed for masses between 16.5 and 27GeV. No significant excess of events compatible with a narrow resonance is observed in the data. Limits on the production cross section times branching fraction to four muons via an intermediate Y(1S)resonance are set as a function of the resonance mass
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