The Silicon Valley Imaginary: US Corporate Tax Reform in the 1980s

How do policy paradigms change? This article demonstrates that changing social imaginaries about economic growth enabled paradigmatic changes in USA corporate tax policy in the 1980s. Based on archival sources, it reconstructs how policy makers switched from focused support for capital-intensive smoke-stack industries towards support for emerging high tech-sectors between two major tax-bills in 1981 and 1986. This switch was made possible by the emergence of what we call the Silicon Valley imaginary—the idea that sound economic policies stimulate the reallocation of society’s resources towards new economic fields. The emergence of this social imaginary resulted from political realignments and changing notions of economic growth and justice. The search for sources of future economic growth and societal coalitions led policy-makers to appropriate ideas about the promises of new industries.1. Introduction 2. Prior state of the art, theory and research design 3. Changing imaginaries and the politics of the 1981 and 1986 tax policies 4. Conclusion Footnotes Reference

Emerging applications of nanotechnology for diagnosis and therapy of disease: a review

Nanotechnology is of increasing interest in the fields of medicine and physiology over recent years. Its application could considerably improve disease detection and therapy, and although the potential is considerable, there are still many challenges, which need to be addressed before it is accepted in routine clinical use. This review focuses on emerging applications that nanotechnology could enhance or provide new approaches in diagnoses and therapy. The main focus of recent research centres on targeted therapies and enhancing imaging; however, the introduction of nanomaterial into the human body must be controlled, as there are many issues with possible toxicity and long-term effects. Despite these issues, the potential for nanotechnology to provide new methods of combating cancer and other disease conditions is considerable. There are still key challenges for researchers in this field, including the means of delivery and targetting in the body to provide effective treatment for specific disease conditions. Nanoparticles are difficult to measure due to the size and physical properties; hence there is still a great need to improve physiological measurements method in the field to ascertain how effective their use is in the human subject. This review is a brief snapshot into the fast changing research field of measurement and physiological links to nanoparticle use and its potential in the future

Relocating croplands could drastically reduce the environmental impacts of global food production

Agricultural production has replaced natural ecosystems across the planet, becoming a major driver of carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, and freshwater consumption. Here we combined global crop yield and environmental data in a ~1-million-dimensional mathematical optimisation framework to determine how optimising the spatial distribution of global croplands could reduce environmental impacts whilst maintaining current crop production levels. We estimate that relocating current croplands to optimal locations, whilst allowing ecosystems in then-abandoned areas to regenerate, could simultaneously decrease the current carbon, biodiversity, and irrigation water footprint of global crop production by 71%, 87%, and 100%, respectively, assuming high-input farming on newly established sites. The optimal global distribution of crops is largely similar for current and end-of-century climatic conditions across emission scenarios. Substantial impact reductions could already be achieved by relocating only a small proportion of worldwide crop production, relocating croplands only within national borders, and assuming less intensive farming systems. © 2022, The Author(s)R.M.B. and A.M. were supported by ERC Consolidator Grant 647797 “LocalAdaptation”. This work benefited from conversations with América P. Durán, Catherine Tayleur, Sharon E. Brooks, David Coomes, Paul F. Donald, and Fiona J. Sanderson during a separate research projec

Water use and productivity of poplar and willow in SRC plantations in NE Germany along gradients of groundwater depth

PosterFast-growing tree species planted as short rotation coppice (SRC) may provide multiple ecosystem services, particularly in agroforestry systems, such as wind and soil erosion control, soil fertility protection, carbon sequestration, increasing landscape structural richness and biodiversity, on top of supplying a renewable source of biomass and energy. In the federal state of Brandenburg, NE Germany, a large proportion of the arable land is characterized by sandy soils and relatively shallow groundwater levels of 1–2 m. Besides, precipitation during the growing season is typically scarce (? 300 mm). Therefore, a deep-rooting, woody plant cover in SRC systems may sustain dry spells with only minor or no reductions in yield and additionally offer benefits to adjacent annual crops. However, the productivity of SRC may vary greatly depending on soil type, nutrient and soil water availability. We studied water use and productivity of willow and poplar trees in SRC plantations in northeastern Brandenburg in relation to soil water availability, atmospheric conditions and stand structure on sites with gradients in groundwater depth. Water use was measured directly as xylem sap flow on up to 20 trees per site and species. Daily water use of poplar and willow shoots averaged over the growing season was 0.4–8.7 and 0.2–3.1 kg d-1, respectively, for trees aged 3–5 years. Water use was reduced on drier sites during summer drought. Preliminary results for the water use efficiency, the amount of woody aboveground biomass produced per kg of water used, ranged from 1.2 to 10 (poplar) and from 4 to 13 g kg-1 (willow shoots). The diameter increment of trees with access to groundwater lasted up to 7 weeks longer than for trees without access to groundwater. These and further results will be discussed in terms of water availability and tree and stand structure

The Lyapunov exponent in the Sinai billiard in the small scatterer limit

We show that Lyapunov exponent for the Sinai billiard is $\lambda = -2\log(R)+C+O(R\log^2 R)$ with $C=1-4\log 2+27/(2\pi^2)\cdot \zeta(3)$ where $R$ is the radius of the circular scatterer. We consider the disk-to-disk-map of the standard configuration where the disks is centered inside a unit square.Comment: 15 pages LaTeX, 3 (useful) figures available from the autho

Further Evidence for the Conformal Structure of a Schwarzschild Black Hole in an Algebraic Approach

We study the excitations of a massive Schwarzschild black hole of mass M resulting from the capture of infalling matter described by a massless scalar field. The near-horizon dynamics of this system is governed by a Hamiltonian which is related to the Virasoro algebra and admits a one-parameter family of self-adjoint extensions described by a parameter z \in R . The density of states of the black hole can be expressed equivalently in terms of z or M, leading to a consistent relation between these two parameters. The corresponding black hole entropy is obtained as S = S(0) - 3/2 log S(0) + C, where S(0) is the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, C is a constant with other subleading corrections exponentially suppressed. The appearance of this precise form of the black hole entropy within our formalism, which is expected on general grounds in any conformal field theoretic description, provides strong evidence for the near-horizon conformal structure in this system.Comment: 9 pages, Latex, minor changes in the text, references adde

Level density of a Fermi gas: average growth and fluctuations

We compute the level density of a two--component Fermi gas as a function of the number of particles, angular momentum and excitation energy. The result includes smooth low--energy corrections to the leading Bethe term (connected to a generalization of the partition problem and Hardy--Ramanujan formula) plus oscillatory corrections that describe shell effects. When applied to nuclear level densities, the theory provides a unified formulation valid from low--lying states up to levels entering the continuum. The comparison with experimental data from neutron resonances gives excellent results.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Quantum Invariants, Modular Forms, and Lattice Points II

We study the SU(2) Witten--Reshetikhin--Turaev invariant for the Seifert fibered homology spheres with M-exceptional fibers. We show that the WRT invariant can be written in terms of (differential of) the Eichler integrals of modular forms with weight 1/2 and 3/2. By use of nearly modular property of the Eichler integrals we shall obtain asymptotic expansions of the WRT invariant in the large-N limit. We further reveal that the number of the gauge equivalent classes of flat connections, which dominate the asymptotics of the WRT invariant in N ->\infinity, is related to the number of integral lattice points inside the M-dimensional tetrahedron