146 research outputs found
Reframing Kurtz’s Painting: Colonial Legacies and Minority Rights in Ethnically Divided Societies
Minority rights constitute some of the most normatively and economically important human rights. Although the political science and legal literatures have proffered a number of constitutional and institutional design solutions to address the protection of minority rights, these solutions are characterized by a noticeable neglect of, and lack of sensitivity to, historical processes. This Article addresses that gap in the literature by developing a causal argument that explains diverging practices of minority rights protections as functions of colonial governments’ variegated institutional practices with respect to particular ethnic groups. Specifically, this Article argues that in instances where colonial governments politicize and institutionalize ethnic hegemony in the pre-independence period, an institutional legacy is created that leads to lower levels of minority rights protections. Conversely, a uniform treatment and depoliticization of ethnicity prior to independence ultimately minimizes ethnic cleavages post-independence and consequently causes higher levels of minority rights protections. Through a highly structured comparative historical analysis of Botswana and Ghana, this Article builds on a new and exciting research agenda that focuses on the role of long-term historio-structural and institutional influences on human rights performance and makes important empirical contributions by eschewing traditional methodologies that focus on single case studies that are largely descriptive in their analyses. Ultimately, this Article highlights both the strength of a historical approach to understanding current variations in minority rights protections and the varied institutional responses within a specific colonial government
The Clustering of Galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Including Covariance Matrix Errors
We present improved methodology for including covariance matrices in the error budget of Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) galaxy clustering measurements, revisiting Data Release 9 (DR9) analyses, and describing a method that is used in DR10/11 analyses presented in companion papers. The precise analysis method adopted is becoming increasingly important, due to the precision that BOSS can now reach: even using as many as 600 mock catalogues to estimate covariance of two-point clustering measurements can still lead to an increase in the errors of ~20 per cent, depending on how the cosmological parameters of interest are measured. In this paper, we extend previous work on this contribution to the error budget, deriving formulae for errors measured by integrating over the likelihood, and to the distribution of recovered best-fitting parameters fitting the simulations also used to estimate the covariance matrix. Both are situations that previous analyses of BOSS have considered. We apply the formulae derived to baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) and redshift-space distortion (RSD) measurements from BOSS in our companion papers. To further aid these analyses, we consider the optimum number of bins to use for two-point measurements using the monopole power spectrum or correlation function for BAO, and the monopole and quadrupole moments of the correlation function for anisotropic-BAO and RSD measurements
Modified Gravity via Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
We construct effective field theories in which gravity is modified via
spontaneous breaking of local Lorentz invariance. This is a gravitational
analogue of the Higgs mechanism. These theories possess additional graviton
modes and modified dispersion relations. They are manifestly well-behaved in
the UV and free of discontinuities of the van Dam-Veltman-Zakharov type,
ensuring compatibility with standard tests of gravity. They may have important
phenomenological effects on large distance scales, offering an alternative to
dark energy. For the case in which the symmetry is broken by a vector field
with the wrong sign mass term, we identify four massless graviton modes (all
with positive-definite norm for a suitable choice of a parameter) and show the
absence of the discontinuity.Comment: 5 pages; revised versio
Cosmology from Moduli Dynamics
We investigate moduli field dynamics in supergravity/M-theory like set ups
where we turn on fluxes along some or all of the extra dimensions. As has been
argued in the context of string theory, we observe that the fluxes tend to
stabilize the squashing (or shape) modes. Generically we find that at late
times the shape is frozen while the radion evolves as a quintessence field. At
earlier times we have a phase of radiation domination where both the volume and
the shape moduli are slowly evolving. However, depending on the initial
conditions and the parameters of the theory, like the value of the fluxes,
curvature of the internal manifold and so on, the dynamics of the internal
manifold can be richer with interesting cosmological consequences, including
inflation.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figures; references adde
Quantum Physics and Human Language
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties
of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed
properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or
precise properties of all the physical situations allowed by fundamental
physics. In brief, human languages contain `excess baggage' that must be
qualified, discarded, or otherwise reformed to give a clear account in the
context of fundamental physics of even the everyday phenomena that the
languages evolved to describe. The surest route to clarity is to express the
constructions of human languages in the language of fundamental physical
theory, not the other way around. These ideas are illustrated by an analysis of
the verb `to happen' and the word `reality' in special relativity and the
modern quantum mechanics of closed systems.Comment: Contribution to the festschrift for G.C. Ghirardi on his 70th
Birthday, minor correction
Invited Review: Decoding the pathophysiological mechanisms that underlie RNA dysregulation in neurodegenerative disorders: a review of the current state of the art
Altered RNA metabolism is a key pathophysiological component causing several neurodegenerative diseases. Genetic mutations causing neurodegeneration occur in coding and noncoding regions of seemingly unrelated genes whose products do not always contribute to the gene expression process. Several pathogenic mechanisms may coexist within a single neuronal cell, including RNA/protein toxic gain-of-function and/or protein loss-of-function. Genetic mutations that cause neurodegenerative disorders disrupt healthy gene expression at diverse levels, from chromatin remodelling, transcription, splicing, through to axonal transport and repeat-associated non-ATG (RAN) translation. We address neurodegeneration in repeat expansion disorders [Huntington's disease, spinocerebellar ataxias, C9ORF72-related amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)] and in diseases caused by deletions or point mutations (spinal muscular atrophy, most subtypes of familial ALS). Some neurodegenerative disorders exhibit broad dysregulation of gene expression with the synthesis of hundreds to thousands of abnormal messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules. However, the number and identity of aberrant mRNAs that are translated into proteins – and how these lead to neurodegeneration – remain unknown. The field of RNA biology research faces the challenge of identifying pathophysiological events of dysregulated gene expression. In conclusion, we discuss current research limitations and future directions to improve our characterization of pathological mechanisms that trigger disease onset and progression
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