Are creative cities good places for creative people? notes on the social conditions for cultural production in contemporary economy

Purpose: This paper discusses the social conditions for cultural production in contemporary cities, in the context of a globalized economy, with rising importance of the integration of cognitive, symbolic and emotional elements into tradable products and services. Although the agglomeration dynamics of creative activities in urban contexts and the social or spatial inequalities related to processes of urban reorganization in Post-Fordist societies have been analysed in the last years, the interrelations between these aspects still lack adequate investigation and empirical analysis. Methodology/Approach: By synthetizing diverse theoretical contributions related to different levels and interactions arising from creative activities, their transformations into tradable products (commodification) and some of their spatial implications in the urban context (agglomeration, externalities, identity, place branding and gentrification), the article emphasizes the different benefits obtained by the agents involved in this process, potentially contributing for increasing social conflicts and to a process of cultural homogenization with negative implications on the uniqueness and authenticity of places. Findings: Benefits arising from the externalities generated by the agglomeration of cultural production and creative activities can be framed within the "Common Pool of Resources" approach, suggesting that a more balanced share of the benefits can be obtained by means of participatory processes for city planning and development. Research Limitation/implication:The paper is based on a conceptual approach and further empirical research can be useful in order to test the formulations proposed. Originality/Value of paper: This analysis leads to the identification of different questions for further research, by combining quantitative analysis for the measurement of cultural and creative externalities and modelling processes for the distribution of benefits arising from cultural production, with qualitative analysis related to participatory processes of urban planning and monitoring

Dynamics of CP^1 lumps on a cylinder

The slow dynamics of topological solitons in the CP^1 sigma-model, known as lumps, can be approximated by the geodesic flow of the L^2 metric on certain moduli spaces of holomorphic maps. In the present work, we consider the dynamics of lumps on an infinite flat cylinder, and we show that in this case the approximation can be formulated naturally in terms of regular Kaehler metrics. We prove that these metrics are incomplete exactly in the multilump (interacting) case. The metric for two-lumps can be computed in closed form on certain totally geodesic submanifolds using elliptic integrals; particular geodesics are determined and discussed in terms of the dynamics of interacting lumps.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figure

Phenomenology of Supersymmetric Theories with and without R-Parity

We review supersymmetry models with and without R-parity. After briefly describing the Minimal Supersymetric Standard Model and its particle content we move to models where R-parity is broken, either spontaneously or explicitly. In this last case we consider the situation where R-parity is broken via bilinear terms in the superpotential. The radiative breaking of these models is described in the context of $b$--$\tau$ and $b$--$\tau$--$t$ unification. Finally we review the phenomenology of these R-parity violating models.Comment: 9 pages, 5 Figures in Postscript. Talk given at the EuroConference on Frontiers in Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, San Feliu de Guixols, Spain, 30 September - 5 October, 200

Cultural heritage appraisal by visitors to global cities: the use of social media and urban analytics in urban buzz research

An attractive cultural heritage is an important magnet for visitors to many cities nowadays. The present paper aims to trace the constituents of the destination attractiveness of 40 global cities from the perspective of historical-cultural amenities, based on a merger of extensive systematic databases on these cities. The concept of cultural heritage buzz is introduced to highlight: (i) the importance of a varied collection of urban cultural amenities; (ii) the influence of urban cultural magnetism on foreign visitors, residents and artists; and (iii) the appreciation for a large set of local historical-cultural amenities by travelers collected from a systematic big data set (emerging from the global TripAdvisor platform). A multivariate and econometric analysis is undertaken to validate and test the quantitative picture of the above conceptual framework, with a view to assess the significance of historical-cultural assets and socio-cultural diversity in large urban agglomerations in the world as attraction factors for visitors. The results confirm our proposition on the significance of urban cultural heritage as a gravity factor for destination choices in international tourism in relation to a high appreciation for historical-cultural amenities.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Gauged vortices in a background

We discuss the statistical mechanics of a gas of gauged vortices in the canonical formalism. At critical self-coupling, and for low temperatures, it has been argued that the configuration space for vortex dynamics in each topological class of the abelian Higgs model approximately truncates to a finite-dimensional moduli space with a Kaehler structure. For the case where the vortices live on a 2-sphere, we explain how localisation formulas on the moduli spaces can be used to compute explicitly the partition function of the vortex gas interacting with a background potential. The coefficients of this analytic function provide geometrical data about the Kaehler structures, the simplest of which being their symplectic volume (computed previously by Manton using an alternative argument). We use the partition function to deduce simple results on the thermodynamics of the vortex system; in particular, the average height on the sphere is computed and provides an interesting effective picture of the ground state.Comment: Final version: 22 pages, LaTeX, 1 eps figur

h→Zγh \rightarrow Z \gamma in the complex two Higgs doublet model

The latest LHC data confirmed the existence of a Higgs-like particle and made interesting measurements on its decays into $\gamma \gamma$, $Z Z^\ast$, $W W^\ast$, $\tau^+ \tau^-$, and $b \bar{b}$. It is expected that a decay into $Z \gamma$ might be measured at the next LHC round, for which there already exists an upper bound. The Higgs-like particle could be a mixture of scalar with a relatively large component of pseudoscalar. We compute the decay of such a mixed state into $Z \gamma$, and we study its properties in the context of the complex two Higgs doublet model, analysing the effect of the current measurements on the four versions of this model. We show that a measurement of the $h \rightarrow Z \gamma$ rate at a level consistent with the SM can be used to place interesting constraints on the pseudoscalar component. We also comment on the issue of a wrong sign Yukawa coupling for the bottom in Type II models.Comment: 31 pages, 15 figure

Combining evolutionary strategies and novelty detection to go beyond the alignment limit of the Z3 3HDM

We present a novel artificial intelligence approach for beyond the Standard Model parameter space scans by augmenting an evolutionary strategy with novelty detection. Our approach leverages the power of evolutionary strategies, previously shown to quickly converge to the valid regions of the parameter space, with a novelty reward to continue exploration once converged. Taking the Z3 3HDM as our physics case, we show how our methodology allows us to quickly explore highly constrained multidimensional parameter spaces, providing up to eight orders of magnitude higher sampling efficiency when compared with pure random sampling and up to four orders of magnitude when compared to random sampling aroundthe alignment limit. In turn, this enables us to explore regions of the parameter space that have been hitherto overlooked, leading to the possibility of novel phenomenological realizations of the Z3 three Higgs doublet model that had not been considered before