107 research outputs found
Foreign direct investment and exchange rate uncertainty in imperfectly competitive industries
World cities and peripheral development: The interplay of gateways and subordinate places in Argentina and Ghanaâs upstream oil and gas sector
Serving as âgatewaysâ, some world cities tie their wider hinterlands to global networks. The article revisits gatewayâhinterland relations against the backdrop of assessments that lead to opposed conclusions on the benefits and shortcomings of integration into the world economy. Referring to the oil and gas sector in Argentina and Ghana, it answers the question of how gateways interact with subordinate places and also uncovers obstacles to peripheral development. The author finds that Accra and Buenos Aires concentrate corporate control. Argentina's capital serves as a gateway for knowledge generation and logistics too. Opportunities for peripheral development in both countries are considerable, albeit largely limited to generic services. Besides a certain concentration of business activities in the gateway cities, more important challenges to peripheral development are typical for small and medium enterprises (insufficient finance and management capabilities, unawareness of business opportunities, and the like). They include rent seeking and subcontracting. The latter leaves local companies in a particularly weak position visâĂ âvis lead firms. The author argues that while integration into the world economy allows for peripheral development, the corresponding outcomes may not meet everyone's expectations. Related expectations must, therefore, be more downâtoâearth than overly optimistic statements frequently made by politicians
Convergence properties of decays in chiral perturbation theory
Theoretical efforts to describe and explain the decays reach
far back in time. Even today, the convergence of the decay widths and some of
the Dalitz plot parameters seems problematic in low energy QCD. In the
framework of resummed CHPT, we explore the question of compatibility of
experimental data with a reasonable convergence of a carefully defined chiral
series, where NNLO remainders are assumed to be small. By treating the
uncertainties in the higher orders statistically, we numerically generate a
large set of theoretical predictions, which are then confronted with
experimental information. In the case of the decay widths, the experimental
values can be reconstructed for a reasonable range of the free parameters and
thus no tension is observed, in spite of what some of the traditional
calculations suggest. The Dalitz plot parameters and can be described
very well too. When the parameters and are concerned, we find a
mild tension for the whole range of the free parameters, at less than 2
C.L. This can be interpreted in two ways - either some of the higher order
corrections are indeed unexpectedly large or there is a specific configuration
of the remainders, which is, however, not completely improbable. Also, the
distribution of the theoretical uncertainties is found to be significantly
non-gaussian, so the consistency cannot be simply judged by the 1 error
bars.Comment: 57 pages, 5 figure
Process pi p -> pi pi N at high energies and moderate momenta transferred to the nucleon and the determination of parameters of the f_0(980) and f_0(1300)
We present the results of simultaneous analysis of the S-wave pi pi-spectra
in the reactions pi^- p -> (pi^0 pi^0)_S n at p_{lab}=38 GeV/c (GAMS) and pi^-
p -> (pi^+ pi^-)_S n at p_{lab}=18 GeV/c (E852 Collaboration) at moderate
momenta transferred to the nucleon, |t| < 1.5 (GeV/c)^2. The t-distributions
are described by the reggeized pi- and a_1-exchanges provided by the leading
and daughter trajectories, while the M_{pi pi}-spectra are determined by a set
of scalar-isoscalar resonances. With M_{pi pi}-distributions averaged over
t-intervals, we have found several solutions given by different t-channel
exchange mechanisms at |t| ~ (0.5-1.5) (GeV/c)^2, with resonance parameters
close to each other. We conclude that despite a poor knowledge of the structure
of the t-exchange, the characteristics of resonances such as masses and widths
can be reliably determined using the processes under discussion. As to pole
positions, we have found (1031 +/- 10) - i(35 +/- 6) MeV for f_0(980) and (1315
+/- 20) - i(150 +/- 30) MeV for f_0(1300).Comment: 17 pages, RevTeX, 10 EPS figures, misprints correcte
Tests of the fundamental symmetries in eta meson decays
Patterns of chiral symmetry violation and tests of the conservation of the
fundamental C, P and CP symmetries are key physics issues in studies of the
pi0, eta and eta' meson decays. These tests include searches for rare or
forbidden decays and searches for asymmetries among the decay products in the
not-so-rare decays. Some examples for the rare decays are eta-->2pi, eta-->4pi0
(CP tests), decays into an odd number of photons (e.g., eta-->3g) and the decay
eta-->pi0e+e- (C tests). The experimental studies of the pi0, eta and eta'
meson decays are carried out at four European accelerator research facilities:
KLOE/KLOE-2 at DAFNE (Frascati), Crystal Ball at MAMI (Mainz), WASA at COSY
(J\"ulich), Crystal Barrel at ELSA (Bonn).Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, proceedings of Symposium on Prospects in the
Physics of Discrete Symmetries, DISCRETE 2010, 6 - 11 December, Rome; v2:
added reference
The impact of the 2004 EU enlargement on the performance of service enterprises in Germanyâs eastern border region
Surface exposure dating in the Holocene - Precise Be-10 technique for very young surfaces
Fiscal policy, real exchange rates and monetary union
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Biblioteca Centrale - P.le Aldo Moro, 7, Rome / CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle RichercheSIGLEITItal
An illustrative application example: cargo state monitoring
This chapter describes a real self-adaptive system carried out using the DEMANES tool chain. This chapter focuses on the design and implementation stages of a real use case development. The use case\u3cbr/\u3eunder study is a subsystem, called Cargo Monitoring System (CMS) , that monitors the state of the container cargo and push all the data to a back office infrastructure for further processing. The containers can be on a truck, a train, or any other appropriate transportation means, or stacked in a container terminal or a cargo ship. A WSN will measure physical magnitudes (temperature, humidity and so on) inside a container and will forward data to others processing nodes in the CMS network. The CMS has to meet several self-adaptive requirements. For instance, the parameters of the CMS elements that monitor the container cargo state are reconfigured accordingly to adapt to internal or external changes (e.g. a low battery level or a container temperature out\u3cbr/\u3eof the adequate bounds), and the CMS adapts the WSN nodes power transmission to save energy while providing an acceptable quality of service
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