Amitav Ghosh and the Aesthetic Turn in Postcolonial Studies

This essay explores the aesthetic turn in postcolonial studies in light of the literary works of Indo-Burmese author Amitav Ghosh. While a renewed interest in aesthetic theories is apparent throughout the humanities in the past decade, it is particularly striking in postcolonial studies, where it holds out the possibility of blending the materialist/historicist and culturalist/textualist strands of postcolonial scholarship. Recent studies by Deepika Bahri, Nicholas Brown, Ato Quayson and others have been enormously promising; this essay argues for bringing their Frankfurt School-influenced aesthetic theories into conversation with other theories of aesthetics. Particular attention in this essay is given to the quasi-Kantian conception of beauty that emerges in Ghosh\u27s The Glass Palace (2001), which seeks to balance the desire for universal norms with the need to respect cultural differences

Beauty and the Beastly Prime Minister

This essay examines the so-called “turn to beauty” in British fiction since the 1990s as a response to the political and social consequences of Thatcherism. Focusing primarily on four texts—Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! (1994), Julian Barnes’s England, England, (1998), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005)—this essay argues that conceptions of beauty and beastliness delineate possible boundaries to the neoliberalism with which Thatcherism is associated. Two distinct phases of the beauty/beastliness rhetoric are identified: an ironized utopianism in the 1990s; an ambivalent embrace of global humanism in the 2000s

Time-reversal of rank-one quantum strategy functions

The quantum strategy (or quantum combs) framework is a useful tool for reasoning about interactions among entities that process and exchange quantum information over the course of multiple turns. We prove a time-reversal property for a class of linear functions, defined on quantum strategy representations within this framework, that corresponds to the set of rank-one positive semidefinite operators on a certain space. This time-reversal property states that the maximum value obtained by such a function over all valid quantum strategies is also obtained when the direction of time for the function is reversed, despite the fact that the strategies themselves are generally not time reversible. An application of this fact is an alternative proof of a known relationship between the conditional min- and max-entropy of bipartite quantum states, along with generalizations of this relationship.Comment: 17 page

Two-player envy-free multi-cake division

We introduce a generalized cake-cutting problem in which we seek to divide multiple cakes so that two players may get their most-preferred piece selections: a choice of one piece from each cake, allowing for the possibility of linked preferences over the cakes. For two players, we show that disjoint envy-free piece selections may not exist for two cakes cut into two pieces each, and they may not exist for three cakes cut into three pieces each. However, there do exist such divisions for two cakes cut into three pieces each, and for three cakes cut into four pieces each. The resulting allocations of pieces to players are Pareto-optimal with respect to the division. We use a generalization of Sperner's lemma on the polytope of divisions to locate solutions to our generalized cake-cutting problem.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, see related work at http://www.math.hmc.edu/~su/papers.htm

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Use of Drug Therapy

The purpose of this research is to explain the variation in the utilization of drug therapy for the medical conditions of depression, high cholesterol, and hypertension between Hispanics, non-Hispanic blacks, and non-Hispanics whites using Oaxaca-type decomposition analysis based on logit estimates. We find that almost the entire share of the utilization differences in drug therapy between blacks and whites can be explained by the differences in the coefficients of observable characteristics, while the sources of the utilization difference between the whites and Hispanics are split between the differences in the observable characteristics and the coefficient estimates. This result implies that strategies to improve racial and ethnic disparities need to be tailored to each group by focusing on the specific factors that are attributed to causing the disparity.high cholesterol, depression, drug therapy, racial and ethnic disparities, hypertension, Oaxaca decomposition

Non-synaptic inhibition between grouped neurons in an olfactory circuit.

Diverse sensory organs, including mammalian taste buds and insect chemosensory sensilla, show a marked compartmentalization of receptor cells; however, the functional impact of this organization remains unclear. Here we show that compartmentalized Drosophila olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) communicate with each other directly. The sustained response of one ORN is inhibited by the transient activation of a neighbouring ORN. Mechanistically, such lateral inhibition does not depend on synapses and is probably mediated by ephaptic coupling. Moreover, lateral inhibition in the periphery can modulate olfactory behaviour. Together, the results show that integration of olfactory information can occur via lateral interactions between ORNs. Inhibition of a sustained response by a transient response may provide a means of encoding salience. Finally, a CO(2)-sensitive ORN in the malaria mosquito Anopheles can also be inhibited by excitation of an adjacent ORN, suggesting a broad occurrence of lateral inhibition in insects and possible applications in insect control

Does the REIT Stock Market Resemble the General Stock Market?

Gyourko and Keim (1993) point out that the continued growth of the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) market depends critically on the stock market's ability to provide fair and accurate valuations of real estate. Given the recent surge of REIT initial public offerings (more than $15 billion in the 1993-1994 period), it is important to know whether the stock market provides the REIT market with the same level of information dissemination, monitoring activities, and pricing mechanisms as that for other stocks. This study demonstrates that, when compared with the general stock market, REIT stocks tend to have a smaller turnover ratio, a lower level of institutional investor participation, and are followed by fewer security analysts. Furthermore, the level of financial analysts coverage and stock turnover intensity are higher when the REIT stock market is "hot." The lack of attention from financial analysts and institutional investors in the REIT stock market may have some implications for the well-documented anomalous REIT stock performance.