Art theft, art vandalism, and guardianship in U.S. art institutions.

Art crime scholars and art world professionals constantly grapple with determining the most effective methods by which to reduce and prevent victimization by art thieves and art vandals. Despite the numerous accounts of this form of criminality, there is a dearth of empirical studies focused on the security and care of art collections. Using Routine Activities Theory to guide the research, the present study explores the relationship between social and physical guardianship practices and the prevalence of art theft and art vandalism using questionnaire data collected from 111 American art museums and art galleries. The results indicate an overwhelming lack of statistically significant association between the majority of the guardianship measures and art theft and art vandalism victimization, a pattern consistent with the possibility that social and physical guardianship practices are not implemented until after an act of vandalism has already occurred

AIDS Is Risky Business: Examining the Effect of the AIDS Crisis on Publicly Traded Companies in South Africa and the Implications for Both South African and U.S. Investors

The Author explores the implications of the AIDS epidemic for South African businesses. She discusses the financial impact of the disease on shareholder investments and what measures can, and should, be taken by South African businesses to assess the extent of the financial damage and to help prevent and treat infected individuals. The Author focuses on a new listing requirement recently passed by the Johannesburg Securities Exchange in South Africa that requires companies to implement corporate governance and responsible HIV/AIDS policies as a prerequisite for listing on the Exchange. In addition, she discusses a new Socially Responsible Investment index that the Exchange has launched in an effort to enhance corporate social accountability with regard to the disease. The Author further analyzes the discourse surrounding social disclosure regulations in the United States and the potential impact the proposed regulation may have on this discussion. She addresses the current materiality standard imposed by the SEC and discusses how the new AIDS regulation crosses the lines of both financial and social materiality. Finally, the Author argues that the SEC can require companies to engage in social disclosure on matters that would be considered material to both fiscally and socially responsible investors. In particular, AIDS reporting is a matter of the utmost concern for the investor in international corporations and meets the SEC\u27s materiality standard. The Author concludes that the SEC should require international corporations in countries with high AIDS infection rates to disclose their AIDS policies

A quasi-pure Bose-Einstein condensate immersed in a Fermi sea

We report the observation of co-existing Bose-Einstein condensate and Fermi gas in a magnetic trap. With a very small fraction of thermal atoms, the 7Li condensate is quasi-pure and in thermal contact with a 6Li Fermi gas. The lowest common temperature is 0.28 muK = 0.2(1) T_C = 0.2(1) T_F where T_C is the BEC critical temperature and T_F the Fermi temperature. Behaving as an ideal gas in the radial trap dimension, the condensate is one-dimensional.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Firms'responses to relative price changes in Cote d'Ivoire : the implications for export subsidies and devaluations

Since the early 1980s, export subsidies have been proposed as a way to counteract the adverse effects of an exchange rate overvaluation among member countries of the West African Monetary Union. It was felt that one way to alter the relative price of traded to nontraded goods was to attempt to mimic devaluation by raising import tariffs and export subsidies by the same proportion. This paper models the short-run response of firms to exogenous changes in export and import prices, taking into account the possibility that firms may sell to both domestic and foreign markets. The results suggest that firms in Cote d'Ivoire do sell more to the foreign market when it is more profitable to do so. Exports respond positively to increases in export prices and negatively to increases in import prices. But the fact that exports would be lower if an export subsidy were combined with an import tariff is not an argument for introducing an export subsidy alone because it would be insufficient to increase output in the tradable goods sector. The combination of an export subsidy with an import tariff, which comes closer to mimicking the effects of devaluation, would serve to counteract some of the adverse effects on output of an overvalued exchange rate.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Access to Markets,Markets and Market Access,Consumption

Formation of a Matter-Wave Bright Soliton

We report the production of matter-wave solitons in an ultracold lithium 7 gas. The effective interaction between atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate is tuned with a Feshbach resonance from repulsive to attractive before release in a one-dimensional optical waveguide. Propagation of the soliton without dispersion over a macroscopic distance of 1.1 mm is observed. A simple theoretical model explains the stability region of the soliton. These matter-wave solitons open fascinating possibilities for future applications in coherent atom optics, atom interferometry and atom transport.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Collective Oscillations of an Imbalanced Fermi Gas: Axial Compression Modes and Polaron Effective Mass

We investigate the low-lying compression modes of a unitary Fermi gas with imbalanced spin populations. For low polarization, the strong coupling between the two spin components leads to a hydrodynamic behavior of the cloud. For large population imbalance we observe a decoupling of the oscillations of the two spin components, giving access to the effective mass of the Fermi polaron, a quasi-particle composed of an impurity dressed by particle-hole pair excitations in a surrounding Fermi sea. We find $m^*/m=1.17(10)$, in agreement with the most recent theoretical predictions.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PR

Engaging Students Through Social Media

Students use social media to seek out, collaborate, and obtain information from their classmates and academic peers. Even if students are not currently interacting with the library using social media, they are open to doing so. Social media sites also have uses for organizing research and sharing it with others. Enabling and fostering that use is an ideal role for libraries. However, social media is not considered an appropriate information source for research. In this day and age of oversaturation of marketing messages on social networking sites, it could be worthwhile for a library to explore smaller social networks