Governance, rational choice and new public management (npm): a general view (and some critics)

This article aims to study the New Public Management (NPM), one of the main trends associated to neoliberalism. It studies governance to show its general, wider and abstract scope. It also focuses on the Rational Choice as an important theory about governance, a basis for NPM. And it observes the neoliberal foundations of NPM, showing critical aspects of its real practice. Methodology: hypothetical deductive method of research, with a qualitative and critical approach and bibliographic-documental research technique. As results of this research, we can conclude that: i) the ideological usage of NPM has been expressed in a culture of minimal state and government - but in practice, such culture, when embossing implemented reforms, seldom reverted the role of the state, destroyed social safety nets, and placed the tax burden on the working majority rather than on the wealthy elite; ii) advocates for NPM have Western-shaped minds, generally making erroneous assumptions about institutions and cultures, which may be present in Anglo-American countries, but not in other culturally different ones; iii) in practice, NPM reforms were imposed to low-income countries by donor institutions to adjust their states for good governance - but those reforms did not solve problems with inefficiency and corruption. This work is original and valuable because it shows that even when public policies highlight the importance of less state intervention, solid norms and institutions are always necessary, and because it helps demystifying discourses that simply put that less state/more market politics can be valuable everywhere

Kardar-Parisi-Zhang growth on one-dimensional decreasing substrates

Recent experimental works on one-dimensional (1D) circular Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) systems whose radii decrease in time have reported controversial conclusions about the statistics of their interfaces. Motivated by this, we investigate here several 1D KPZ models on substrates whose size changes in time as $L(t)=L_0 + \omega t$, focusing on the case $\omega<0$. From extensive numerical simulations, we show that for $L_0 \gg 1$ there exists a transient regime in which the statistics is consistent with that of flat KPZ systems (the $\omega=0$ case), for both $\omega0$. Actually, for a given model, $L_0$ and $|\omega|$, we observe that a difference between ingrowing ($\omega0$) systems arises only at long times ($t \gtrsim t_c=L_0/|\omega|$), when the expanding surfaces cross over to the statistics of curved KPZ systems, whereas the shrinking ones become completely correlated. A generalization of the Family-Vicsek scaling for the roughness of ingrowing interfaces is presented. Our results demonstrate that a transient flat statistics is a general feature of systems starting with large initial sizes, regardless their curvature. This is consistent with their recent observation in ingrowing turbulent liquid crystal interfaces, but it is in contrast with the apparent observation of curved statistics in colloidal deposition at the edge of evaporating drops. A possible explanation for this last result, as a consequence of the very small number of monolayers analyzed in this experiment, is given. This is illustrated in a competitive growth model presenting a few-monolayer transient and an asymptotic behavior consistent, respectively, with the curved and flat statistics.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Width and extremal height distributions of fluctuating interfaces with window boundary conditions

We present a detailed study of squared local roughness (SLRDs) and local extremal height distributions (LEHDs), calculated in windows of lateral size $l$, for interfaces in several universality classes, in substrate dimensions $d_s = 1$ and $d_s = 2$. We show that their cumulants follow a Family-Vicsek type scaling, and, at early times, when $\xi \ll l$ ($\xi$ is the correlation length), the rescaled SLRDs are given by log-normal distributions, with their $n$th cumulant scaling as $(\xi/l)^{(n-1)d_s}$. This give rise to an interesting temporal scaling for such cumulants $\left\langle w_n \right\rangle_c \sim t^{\gamma_n}$, with $\gamma_n = 2 n \beta + {(n-1)d_s}/{z} = \left[ 2 n + {(n-1)d_s}/{\alpha} \right] \beta$. This scaling is analytically proved for the Edwards-Wilkinson (EW) and Random Deposition interfaces, and numerically confirmed for other classes. In general, it is featured by small corrections and, thus, it yields exponents $\gamma_n$'s (and, consequently, $\alpha$, $\beta$ and $z$) in nice agreement with their respective universality class. Thus, it is an useful framework for numerical and experimental investigations, where it is, usually, hard to estimate the dynamic $z$ and mainly the (global) roughness $\alpha$ exponents. The stationary (for $\xi \gg l$) SLRDs and LEHDs of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) class are also investigated and, for some models, strong finite-size corrections are found. However, we demonstrate that good evidences of their universality can be obtained through successive extrapolations of their cumulant ratios for long times and large $l$'s. We also show that SLRDs and LEHDs are the same for flat and curved KPZ interfaces.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 4 table

Scalar scattering from black holes with tidal charge

The cross sections of black holes with tidal charge predicted in the context of the Randall--Sundrum brane-world scenario are computed considering the massless scalar field. Results obtained for black holes with different tidal-charge intensities are compared in order to study how this charge modifies the black hole cross sections. Such results are also compared with the ones for Schwarzschild and extreme Reissner--Nordstr\"om black holes. The increase of the tidal-charge intensity makes the black hole absorb more and can also be measured by the narrowing of interference fringes of the differential scattering cross section. These results indicate that the effects of the tidal charge are very important in phenomena which take place near the black hole, but can be neglected in the far region. Analytical results are obtained in the high-frequency limit and are shown to excellently agree with the numeric results obtained via the partial-wave method. It is shown numerically that black holes with tidal charge obey the universality of the low-frequency absorption cross section of stationary black holes for the massless scalar field