The 'Parekh Report' - national identities with nations and nationalism

‘Multiculturalists’ often advocate national identities. Yet few study the ways in which ‘multiculturalists’ do so and in this article I will help to fill this gap. I will show that the Commission for Multi-Ethnic Britain’s report reflects a previously unnoticed way of thinking about the nature and worth of national identities that the Commission’s chair, and prominent political theorist, Bhikhu Parekh, had been developing since the 1970s. This way of thinking will be shown to avoid the questionable ways in which conservative and liberal nationalists discuss the nature and worth of national identities while offering an alternative way to do so. I will thus show that a report that was once criticised for the way it discussed national identities reflects how ‘multiculturalists’ think about national identities in a distinct and valuable way that has gone unrecognised

Sustainable risk management of emerging contaminants in municipal wastewaters

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ 2009 The Royal Society.The presence of emerging contaminants in municipal wastewaters, particularly endocrine-disrupting compounds such as oestrogenic substances, has been the focus of much public concern and scientific attention in recent years. Due to the scientific uncertainty still surrounding their effects, the Precautionary Principle could be invoked for the interim management of potential risks. Therefore, precautionary prevention risk-management measures could be employed to reduce human exposure to the compounds of concern. Steroid oestrogens are generally recognized as the most significant oestrogenically active substances in domestic sewage effluent. As a result, the UK Environment Agency has championed a ‘Demonstration Programme’ to investigate the potential for removal of steroid oestrogens and alkylphenol ethoxylates during sewage treatment. Ecological and human health risks are interdependent, and ecological injuries may result in increased human exposures to contaminants or other stressors. In this context of limiting exposure to potential contaminants, examining the relative contribution of various compounds and pathways should be taken into account when identifying effective risk-management measures. In addition, the explicit use of ecological objectives within the scope of the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive poses new challenges and necessitates the development of ecosystem-based decision tools. This paper addresses some of these issues and proposes a species sensitivity distribution approach to support the decision-making process related to the need and implications of sewage treatment work upgrade as risk-management measures to the presence of oestrogenic compounds in sewage effluent

Anthropics and Myopics: Conditional Probabilities and the Cosmological Constant

We re-examine claims that anthropic arguments provide an explanation for the observed smallness of the cosmological constant, and argue that correlations between the cosmological constant value and the existence of life can be demonstrated only under restrictive assumptions. Causal effects are more subtle to uncover.Comment: revised to PRL format, additional references and discussion to related work revise

Pygmies, Giants, and Skins

Understanding the equation of state (EOS) of neutron-rich matter is a central goal of nuclear physics that cuts across a variety of disciplines. Indeed, the limits of nuclear existence, the collision of energetic heavy ions, the structure of neutron stars, and the dynamics of core-collapse supernova all depend critically on the nuclear-matter EOS. In this contribution I focus on the EOS of cold baryonic matter with special emphasis on its impact on the structure, dynamics, and composition of neutron stars. In particular, I discuss how laboratory experiments on neutron skins as well as on Pygmy and Giant resonances can help us elucidate the structure of these fascinating objects.Comment: Invited Talk given at the 11th International Conference on Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (NN2012), San Antonio, Texas, USA, May 27-June 1, 2012. To appear in the NN2012 Proceedings in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS

Quark mixing from softly broken symmetries

Quark flavor mixing may originate in the soft breaking of horizontal symmetries. Those symmetries, which in the simplest case are three family U(1) groups, are obeyed only by the dimension-4 Yukawa couplings and lead, when unbroken, to the absence of mixing. Their breaking may arise from the dimension-3 mass terms of SU(2)-singlet vector-like quarks. Those gauge-singlet mass terms break the horizontal symmetries at a scale much higher than the Fermi scale, yet softly, leading to quark mixing while the quark masses remain unsuppressed.Comment: 9 pages, plain Latex, no figure

Whither Capitalism? Financial externalities and crisis

As with global warming, so with financial crises – externalities have a lot to answer for. We look at three of them. First the financial accelerator due to ‘fire sales’ of collateral assets -- a form of pecuniary externality that leads to liquidity being undervalued. Second the ‘risk- shifting’ behaviour of highly-levered financial institutions who keep the upside of risky investment while passing the downside to others thanks to limited liability. Finally, the network externality where the structure of the financial industry helps propagate shocks around the system unless this is checked by some form of circuit breaker, or ‘ring-fence’. The contrast between crisis-induced Great Recession and its aftermath of slow growth in the West and the rapid - and (so far) sustained - growth in the East suggests that successful economic progress may depend on how well these externalities are managed

Clone flow analysis for a theory inspired Neutrino Experiment planning

The presence of several clone solutions in the simultaneous measurement of ($\theta_{13},\delta$) has been widely discussed in literature. In this letter we write the analytical formulae of the clones location in the ($\theta_{13},\delta$) plane as a function of the physical input pair ($\bar\theta_{13},\bar\delta$). We show how the clones move with changing $\bar\theta_{13}$. The "clone flow" can be significantly different if computed (naively) from the oscillation probabilities or (exactly) from the probabilities integrated over the neutrino flux and cross-section. Using our complete computation we compare the clone flow of a set of possible future neutrino experiments: the CERN SuperBeam, BetaBeam and Neutrino Factory proposals. We show that the combination of these specific BetaBeam and SuperBeam does not help in solving the degeneracies. On the contrary, the combination of one of them with the Neutrino Factory Golden and Silver channel can be used, from a theoretical point of view, to solve completely the eightfold degeneracy.Comment: 23 pages, using epsfi

Validation of Aura Microwave Limb Sounder O-3 and CO observations in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere

International audienceGlobal satellite observations of ozone and carbon monoxide from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) on the EOS Aura spacecraft are discussed with emphasis on those observations in the 215–100 hPa region (the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere). The precision, resolution and accuracy of the data produced by the MLS “version 2.2” processing algorithms are discussed and quantified. O3 accuracy is estimated at ~40 ppbv +5% (~20 ppbv +20% at 215 hPa) while the CO accuracy is estimated at ~30 ppbv +30% for pressures of 147 hPa and less. Comparisons with expectations and other observations show good agreements for the O3 product, generally consistent with the systematic errors quoted above. In the case of CO, a persistent factor of ~2 high bias is seen at 215 hPa. However, the morphology is shown to be realistic, consistent with raw MLS radiance data, and useful for scientific study. The MLS CO data at higher altitudes are shown to be consistent with other observations