Counting higher genus curves in a Calabi-Yau manifold

We explicitly evaluate the low energy coupling $F_g$ in a $d=4,\mathcal{N}=2$ compactification of the heterotic string. The holomorphic piece of this expression provides the information not encoded in the holomorphic anomaly equations, and we find that it is given by an elementary polylogarithm with index $3-2g$, thus generalizing in a natural way the known results for $g=0,1$. The heterotic model has a dual Calabi-Yau compactification of the type II string. We compare the answer with the general form expected from curve-counting formulae and find good agreement. As a corollary of this comparison we predict some numbers of higher genus curves in a specific Calabi-Yau, and extract some intersection numbers on the moduli space of genus $g$ Riemann surfaces.Comment: 26 pages, harvmac b mod

Noradrenaline release from permeabilized synaptosomes is inhibited by the light chain of tetanus toxin

Noradrenaline release from rat brain cortical synaptosomes permeabilized with streptolysin O can be triggered by μM concentrations of free Ca2+. This process was inhibited within minutes by tetanus toxin and its isolated light chain, but not by its heavy chain. The data demonstrate that the effect of tetanus toxin on NA release from purified synaptosomes is caused by the intraterminal action of its light chain

Duality and replicas for a unitary matrix model

In a generalized Airy matrix model, a power $p$ replaces the cubic term of the Airy model introduced by Kontsevich. The parameter $p$ corresponds to Witten's spin index in the theory of intersection numbers of moduli space of curves. A continuation in $p$ down to $p= -2$ yields a well studied unitary matrix model, which exhibits two different phases in the weak and strong coupling regions, with a third order critical point in-between. The application of duality and replica to the $p$-th Airy model allows one to recover both the weak and strong phases of the unitary model, and to establish some new results for these expansions. Therefore the unitary model is also indirectly a generating function for intersection numbers.Comment: 18 page, add referece

Traditional and Health-Related Philanthropy: The Role of Resources and Personality

I study the relationships of resources and personality characteristics to charitable giving, postmortem organ donation, and blood donation in a nationwide sample of persons in households in the Netherlands. I find that specific personality characteristics are related to specific types of giving: agreeableness to blood donation, empathic concern to charitable giving, and prosocial value orientation to postmortem organ donation. I find that giving has a consistently stronger relation to human and social capital than to personality. Human capital increases giving; social capital increases giving only when it is approved by others. Effects of prosocial personality characteristics decline at higher levels of these characteristics. Effects of empathic concern, helpfulness, and social value orientations on generosity are mediated by verbal proficiency and church attendance.

The resistance experiments: Morality, authority and obedience in Stanley Milgram's account

The paper seeks to re‐conceptualize Stanley Milgram's (in)famous experiments on willing obedience by drawing solely on Milgram's own contemporary account. It identifies a substantial incongruence between the findings Milgram presented (i.e., his description of the experiments) and the meaning he imputed to them (i.e., his interpretation of the exper iments). It argues that instead of operationalizing the concepts he claimed to operationalize – legitimate authority, embodied morality and willing obedience –, Milgram's description suggests that the operative forces in the experiments were an illegitimate authority and acts which in effect collude with that authority. As a result, the paper concludes that what the experimental findings represented was not so much obedience out of choice, but out of coercion. Thus, the paper seeks to redirect the conceptual‐moral focus of the findings from the participants who “shockingly” obeyed to those who managed to resist the coercive force of the total experimental situation

Synaptobrevin cleavage by the tetanus toxin light chain is linked to the inhibition of exocytosis in chromaffin cells

Exocytosis of secretory granules by adrenal chromaffin cells is blocked by the tetanus toxin light chain in a zinc specific manner. Here we show that cellular synaptobrevin is almost completely degraded by the tetanus toxin light chain within 15 min. We used highly purified adrenal secretory granules to show that synaptobrevin, which can be cleaved by the tetanus toxin light chain, is localized in the vesicular membrane. Proteolysis of synaptobrevin in cells and in secretory granules is reversibly inhibited by the zinc chelating agent dipicolinic acid. Moreover, cleavage of synaptobrevin present in secretory granules by the tetanus toxin light chain is blocked by the zinc peptidase inhibitor captopril and by synaptobrevin derived peptides. Our data indicate that the tetanus toxin light chain acts as a zinc dependent protease that cleaves synaptobrevin of secretory granules, an essential component of the exocytosis machinery in adrenal chromaffin cells

Complete Relativistic Description of the N*(1520)

A relativistic description of spin 3/2 resonances and their decay channels is presented by calculating their selfenergies and spectral functions. The full vector-spinor structure is taken into account. Special emphasis is put on the N*(1520) and its decay channels pi N, rho N and pi \Delta. All interactions are formulated such that only the correct number of degrees of freedom of a spin 3/2 state is propagated. The obtained results are compared with several approximations frequently used to avoid the complicated vector-spinor structure. Since this structure is taken fully into account here, the quality of the approximations can be judged.Comment: 32 pages, 40 figure