Prerequisites for Successful Fiscal Reform: Some Preliminary Results

Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting and Financial Management, Winter 1998.Refereed Journal ArticleThis paper examines whether any relationship exists between success or failure of policy reform on the one hand, and various political/economic conditions in place at the time of reform on the other. Nineteen countries were scored using three financial variables to measure the degree of success or failure of the reform. The independent variables were country scores for ten different economic and political conditions. The independent variables were used to try and predict a priori which of the nineteen countries would succeed and which would fail. Eighteen of the nineteen countries were correctly placed into their respective success group. However only three of the ten conditions appeared important in predicting success: a visionary leader, a crisis, and a comprehensive program. Other writers have suggested different sets of predicting variables

Encoding dynamics for multiscale community detection: Markov time sweeping for the Map equation

The detection of community structure in networks is intimately related to finding a concise description of the network in terms of its modules. This notion has been recently exploited by the Map equation formalism (M. Rosvall and C.T. Bergstrom, PNAS, 105(4), pp.1118--1123, 2008) through an information-theoretic description of the process of coding inter- and intra-community transitions of a random walker in the network at stationarity. However, a thorough study of the relationship between the full Markov dynamics and the coding mechanism is still lacking. We show here that the original Map coding scheme, which is both block-averaged and one-step, neglects the internal structure of the communities and introduces an upper scale, the `field-of-view' limit, in the communities it can detect. As a consequence, Map is well tuned to detect clique-like communities but can lead to undesirable overpartitioning when communities are far from clique-like. We show that a signature of this behavior is a large compression gap: the Map description length is far from its ideal limit. To address this issue, we propose a simple dynamic approach that introduces time explicitly into the Map coding through the analysis of the weighted adjacency matrix of the time-dependent multistep transition matrix of the Markov process. The resulting Markov time sweeping induces a dynamical zooming across scales that can reveal (potentially multiscale) community structure above the field-of-view limit, with the relevant partitions indicated by a small compression gap.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Anaesthetics and cardiac preconditioning. Part II. Clinical implications

There is compelling evidence that preconditioning occurs in humans. Experimental studies with potential clinical implications as well as clinical studies evaluating ischaemic, pharmacological and anaesthetic cardiac preconditioning in the perioperative setting are reviewed. These studies reveal promising results. However, there are conflicting reports on the efficacy of preconditioning in the diseased and aged myocardium. In addition, many anaesthetics and a significant number of perioperatively administered drugs affect the activity of cardiac sarcolemmal and mitochondrial KATP channels, the end‐effectors of cardiac preconditioning, and thereby markedly modulate preconditioning effects in myocardial tissue. Although these modulatory effects on KATP channels have been investigated almost exclusively in laboratory investigations, they may have potential implications in clinical medicine. Important questions regarding the clinical utility and applicability of perioperative cardiac preconditioning remain unresolved and need more experimental work and randomized controlled clinical trials. Br J Anaesth 2003; 91: 566-7

Strong electron correlations in the normal state of FeSe0.42Te0.58

We investigate the normal state of the '11' iron-based superconductor FeSe0.42Te0.58 by angle resolved photoemission. Our data reveal a highly renormalized quasiparticle dispersion characteristic of a strongly correlated metal. We find sheet dependent effective carrier masses between ~ 3 - 16 m_e corresponding to a mass enhancement over band structure values of m*/m_band ~ 6 - 20. This is nearly an order of magnitude higher than the renormalization reported previously for iron-arsenide superconductors of the '1111' and '122' families but fully consistent with the bulk specific heat.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Oxygen vacancies as active sites for water dissociation on rutile TiO₂(110)

Through an interplay between scanning tunneling microscopy experiments and density functional theory calculations, we determine unambiguously the active surface site responsible for the dissociation of water molecules adsorbed on rutile TiO2(110). Oxygen vacancies in the surface layer are shown to dissociate H2O through the transfer of one proton to a nearby oxygen atom, forming two hydroxyl groups for every vacancy. The amount of water dissociation is limited by the density of oxygen vacancies present on the clean surface exclusively. The dissociation process sets in as soon as molecular water is able to diffuse to the active site

Antiferromagnetic interlayer exchange coupling across an amorphous metallic spacer layer

By means of magneto-optical Kerr effect we observe for the first time antiferromagnetic coupling between ferromagnetic layers across an amorphous metallic spacer layer. Biquadratic coupling occurs at the transition from a ferromagnetically to an antiferromagnetically coupled region. Scanning tunneling microscopy images of all involved layers are used to extract thickness fluctuations and to verify the amorphous state of the spacer. The observed antiferromagnetic coupling behavior is explained by RKKY interaction taking into account the amorphous structure of the spacer material.Comment: Typset using RevTex, 4 pages with 4 figures (.eps

A Default Logic Patch for Default Logic

International audienceThis paper is about the fusion of multiple information sources represented using default logic. More precisely, the focus is on solving the problem that occurs when the standard-logic knowledge parts of the sources are contradictory, as default theories trivialize in this case. To overcome this problem, it is shown that replacing each formula belonging to Minimally Unsatisfiable Subformulas by a corresponding supernormal default allows appealing features. Moreover, it is investigated how these additional defaults interact with the initial defaults of the theory. Interestingly, this approach allows us to handle the problem of default theories containing inconsistent standard-logic knowledge, using the default logic framework itself

Political realism as ideology critique

This paper outlines an account of political realism as a form of ideology critique. We defend the normative edge of this critical-theoretic project against the common charge that there is a problematic trade-off between a theory’s groundedness in facts about the political status quo and its ability to envisage radical departures from the status quo. To overcome that problem, we combine insights from theories of legitimacy by Bernard Williams and other realists, Critical Theory, and analytic epistemological and metaphysical theories of cognitive bias, ideology and social construction. The upshot is an account of realism as empirically informed critique of social and political phenomena. We reject a sharp divide between descriptive and normative theory, and so provide an alternative to the anti-empiricism of some approaches to Critical Theory as well as to the complacency towards existing power structures found within liberal realism, let alone mainstream normative political philosophy, liberal or otherwise

Dynamics of heteropolymers in dilute solution: effective equation of motion and relaxation spectrum

The dynamics of a heteropolymer chain in solution is studied in the limit of long chain length. Using functional integral representation we derive an effective equation of motion, in which the heterogeneity of the chain manifests itself as a time-dependent excluded volume effect. At the mean field level, the heteropolymer chain is therefore dynamically equivalent to a homopolymer chain with both time-independent and time-dependent excluded volume effects. The perturbed relaxation spectrum is also calculated. We find that heterogeneity also renormalizes the relaxation spectrum. However, we find, to the lowest order in heterogeneity, that the relaxation spectrum does not exhibit any dynamic freezing, at the point when static (equilibrium) ``freezing'' transition occurs in heteropolymer. Namely, the breaking of fluctuation-dissipation theorem (FDT) proposed for spin glass dynamics does not have dynamic effect in heteropolymer, as far as relaxation spectrum is concerned. The implication of this result is discussed