The moral foundations of public engagement: does political science, as a discipline, have an ethics?

In recent years, the discipline of political science has been the focus of extensive criticism from observers based both within and beyond the academy. This is reflected in a sizable number of scholars who have called for the discipline to recognize its obligations to the public, and especially to supporting active citizenship, promoting democratic participation and addressing major social challenges. This emphasis on ‘making political science matter’ has also been stressed beyond the academy as funders, politicians and potential research-users place ever-greater emphasis on incentivizing and rewarding ‘impact’, ‘relevance’ and demonstrable ‘public value’. The central argument of this article is that what has been missing from this debate is any sense of clarity around whether what is being demanded is greater engagement by political science as a discipline or greater engagement by political scientists as individuals. This raises distinctive questions about the moral foundations and professional ethics of political science which we explore not through a traditional focus on defending or sustaining liberal democracy but through a deeper and more subtle emphasis on the praxis of ‘doing’ political science

Tensor Algebra: A Combinatorial Approach to the Projective Geometry of Figures

This paper explores the combinatorial aspects of symmetric and antisymmetric forms represented in tensor algebra. The development of geometric perspective gained from tensor algebra has resulted in the discovery of a novel projection operator for the Chow form of a curve in P3 with applications to computer vision

Text Line Segmentation of Historical Documents: a Survey

There is a huge amount of historical documents in libraries and in various National Archives that have not been exploited electronically. Although automatic reading of complete pages remains, in most cases, a long-term objective, tasks such as word spotting, text/image alignment, authentication and extraction of specific fields are in use today. For all these tasks, a major step is document segmentation into text lines. Because of the low quality and the complexity of these documents (background noise, artifacts due to aging, interfering lines),automatic text line segmentation remains an open research field. The objective of this paper is to present a survey of existing methods, developed during the last decade, and dedicated to documents of historical interest.Comment: 25 pages, submitted version, To appear in International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, On line version available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k2813176280456k3

Development of a gas chromatography - mass spectrometry method for the determination of carbon disulfide in the atmosphere

[EN] Carbon disulfide (CS2), a relevant reduced sulfur compound in air, is well-known for its malodor and its significant effect on global atmospheric chemistry. Therefore, a reliable method for determining CS2 in atmospheric samples has been developed based on solid-phase sampling and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Two types of solid-phase sampling supports (Orbo-32 and SKC) and the elution with organic solvents - hexane and toluene - were evaluated for low-volume outdoor sampling. Recovery studies and the standard addition method were carried out to demonstrate the proper determination of CS2 in the absence of the influence of interferences such as ozone, hydrogen sulfide or water - important atmospheric pollutants. The proposed methodology was validated by performing experiments in a high-volume smog chamber and by comparison with two reference optical methods, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) and Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) installed in these facilities. Satisfactory analytical parameters were reported: fast analysis, a correct repeatability of 6±1% and reproducibility of 14±3%, and low detection limits of 0.3-0.9pgm-3. Finally, the method was successfully applied to industrial samples near a pulp factory area, where a high correlation between industrial emissions and reported carbon disulfide concentrations were observed. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.The research leading to these results received funding from the Centro de Investigacion del Medio Ambiente (CIMA), Consejeria de Medio Ambiente, Gobierno de Cantabria. The Instituto Universitario CEAM-UMH is partly supported by Generalitat Valenciana, Fundacion Bancaja, and the projects GRACCIE (Consolider-Ingenio 2010) and FEEDBACKS (Prometeo - Generalitat Valenciana). We also acknowledged the European Community's Seventh Framework Program under the grant agreement no. 228335 (Eurochamp2), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, through INNPLANTA project: PCT-440000-2010-003 and the EUPHORE staff for their support in the chamber experiments. The authors also thank J.T.B. for his contribution.Borrás García, EM.; Ródenas, M.; Dieguez, J.; Pérez-García, M.; Lomba, R.; Lavin, J.; Tortajada-Genaro, LA. (2012). Development of a gas chromatography - mass spectrometry method for the determination of carbon disulfide in the atmosphere. Microchemical Journal. 101:37-42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.microc.2011.10.002S374210

A solution of the coincidence problem based on the recent galactic core black hole mass density increase

A mechanism capable to provide a natural solution to two major cosmological problems, i.e. the cosmic acceleration and the coincidence problem, is proposed. A specific brane-bulk energy exchange mechanism produces a total dark pressure, arising when adding all normal to the brane negative pressures in the interior of galactic core black holes. This astrophysically produced negative dark pressure explains cosmic acceleration and why the dark energy today is of the same order to the matter density for a wide range of the involved parameters. An exciting result of the analysis is that the recent rise of the galactic core black hole mass density causes the recent passage from cosmic deceleration to acceleration. Finally, it is worth mentioning that this work corrects a wide spread fallacy among brane cosmologists, i.e. that escaping gravitons result to positive dark pressure.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Expanding Universe: Thermodynamical Aspects From Different Models

The pivotal point of the paper is to discuss the behavior of temperature, pressure, energy density as a function of volume along with determination of caloric EoS from following two model: $w(z)=w_{0}+w_{1}\ln(1+z)$ & $w(z)=-1+\frac{(1+z)}{3}\frac{A_{1}+2A_{2}(1+z)}{A_{0}+2A_{1}(1+z)+A_{2}(1+z)^{2}}$. The time scale of instability for this two models is discussed. In the paper we then generalize our result and arrive at general expression for energy density irrespective of the model. The thermodynamical stability for both of the model and the general case is discussed from this viewpoint. We also arrive at a condition on the limiting behavior of thermodynamic parameter to validate the third law of thermodynamics and interpret the general mathematical expression of integration constant $U_{0}$ (what we get while integrating energy conservation equation) physically relating it to number of micro states. The constraint on the allowed values of the parameters of the models is discussed which ascertains stability of universe. The validity of thermodynamical laws within apparent and event horizon is discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures(Accepted for publication in "Astrophysics and Space Science"

Magnetized Particle Capture Cross Section for Braneworld Black Hole

Capture cross section of magnetized particle (with nonzero magnetic moment) by braneworld black hole in uniform magnetic field is considered. The magnetic moment of particle was chosen as it was done by \citet{rs99} and for the simplicity particle with zero electric charge is chosen. It is shown that the spin of particle as well as the brane parameter are to sustain the stability of particles circularly orbiting around the black hole in braneworld i.e. spin of particles and brane parameter try to prevent the capture by black hole.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, Accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Scienc

Measurement of the Bs0→J/ψKS0B_s^0\to J/\psi K_S^0 branching fraction

The $B_s^0\to J/\psi K_S^0$ branching fraction is measured in a data sample corresponding to 0.41$fb^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity collected with the LHCb detector at the LHC. This channel is sensitive to the penguin contributions affecting the sin2$\beta$ measurement from $B^0\to J/\psi K_S^0$ The time-integrated branching fraction is measured to be $BF(B_s^0\to J/\psi K_S^0)=(1.83\pm0.28)\times10^{-5}$. This is the most precise measurement to date

Model-independent search for CP violation in D0→K−K+π−π+ and D0→π−π+π+π− decays

A search for CP violation in the phase-space structures of D0 and View the MathML source decays to the final states K−K+π−π+ and π−π+π+π− is presented. The search is carried out with a data set corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb−1 collected in 2011 by the LHCb experiment in pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. For the K−K+π−π+ final state, the four-body phase space is divided into 32 bins, each bin with approximately 1800 decays. The p-value under the hypothesis of no CP violation is 9.1%, and in no bin is a CP asymmetry greater than 6.5% observed. The phase space of the π−π+π+π− final state is partitioned into 128 bins, each bin with approximately 2500 decays. The p-value under the hypothesis of no CP violation is 41%, and in no bin is a CP asymmetry greater than 5.5% observed. All results are consistent with the hypothesis of no CP violation at the current sensitivity