Sport and Crime

The publisher granted Brunel University London a permission to archive this article in BURA.Sport and crime possess the power to stir emotion and arouse debate; most people have opinions on both. Many believe a relationship exists between the two but as Francis and Braggins contend, the relationship between sport and crime is complex. For some, sport is a bastion of physical prowess and moral virtue; abiding by the rules and playing fair is considered a vehicle to encourage the wayward to veer from potential deviance or to rehabilitate offenders. A surfeit of programs designed to use sport as a method of crime control currently exist. However, sport itself contains many paradoxes and in some cases has become a realm for criminal behavior: corruption, bribery, doping, discrimination, violence, hooliganism, and a host of other undesirable behaviors are all evidenced in the delivery and practice of sport. Thus, the Hydra-headed character of sport makes the correlate between sport and crime a sometimes controversial milieu

Issues on Counting the Poor

A credible poverty measurement system is essential in order to develop the proper policy instruments for reducing poverty. Hence, the measurement and analysis of poverty statistics should be done with due care. This Notes discusses the steps--and issues--attendant to it.poverty measurement, poverty reduction, poverty statistics

Governing dynamics by squeezing in a system of cold trapped ions

We consider a system of laser-cooled ions in a linear harmonic trap and study the phenomenon of squeezing exchange between their internal and motional degrees of freedom. An interesting relation between the quantum noise reduction (squeezing) and the dynamical evolution is found when the internal and motional subsystems are prepared in properly squeezed (intelligent) states. Specifically, the evolution of the system is fully governed by the relative strengths of spectroscopic and motional squeezing, including the phenomenon of total cancellation of the interaction when the initial squeezing parameters are equal.Comment: REVTeX, 5 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Self-Gravitating Phase Transitions: Point Particles, Black Holes and Strings

We compute the quantum string entropy S_s(m,j) of the microscopic string states of mass m and spin j in two physically relevant backgrounds: Kerr (rotating) black holes and de Sitter (dS) space-time. We find a new formula for the quantum gravitational entropy S_{sem} (M, J), as a function of the usual Bekenstein-Hawking entropy S_{sem}^(0)(M, J). We compute the quantum string emission by a black hole in de Sitter space-time (bhdS). In all these cases: (i) strings with the highest spin, and (ii) in dS space-time, (iii) quantum rotating black holes, (iv) quantum dS regime, (v) late bhdS evaporation, we find a new gravitational phase transition with a common distinctive universal feature: A square root branch point singularity in any space-time dimensions. This is the same behavior as for the thermal self-gravitating gas of point particles (de Vega-Sanchez transition), thus describing a new universality class.Comment: Invited lecture at `Statistical Mechanics of Non-Extensive Systems', Observatoire de Paris, 24-25 October 2005, to be published in a Special issue of `Les Comptes rendus de l'Academie des sciences', Elsevie