30,063 research outputs found
Party finance reform as constitutional engineering? The effectiveness and unintended consequences of party finance reform in France and Britain
In both Britain and France, party funding was traditionally characterized by a laissez faire approach and a conspicuous lack of regulation. In France, this was tantamount to a 'legislative vacuum'. In the last two decades, however, both countries have sought to fundamentally reform their political finance regulation regimes. This prompted, in Britain, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, and in France a bout of 'legislative incontinence' — profoundly transforming the political finance regime between 1988 and 1995. This article seeks to explore and compare the impacts of the reforms in each country in a bid to explain the unintended consequences of the alternative paths taken and the effectiveness of the new party finance regime in each country. It finds that constitutional engineering through party finance reform is a singularly inexact science, largely due to the imperfect nature of information, the limited predictability of cause and effect, and the constraining influence of non-party actors, such as the Constitutional Council in France, and the Electoral Commission in Britain
Configuration-Space Location of the Entanglement between Two Subsystems
In this paper we address the question: where in configuration space is the
entanglement between two particles located? We present a thought-experiment,
equally applicable to discrete or continuous-variable systems, in which one or
both parties makes a preliminary measurement of the state with only enough
resolution to determine whether or not the particle resides in a chosen region,
before attempting to make use of the entanglement. We argue that this provides
an operational answer to the question of how much entanglement was originally
located within the chosen region. We illustrate the approach in a spin system,
and also in a pair of coupled harmonic oscillators. Our approach is
particularly simple to implement for pure states, since in this case the
sub-ensemble in which the system is definitely located in the restricted region
after the measurement is also pure, and hence its entanglement can be simply
characterised by the entropy of the reduced density operators. For our spin
example we present results showing how the entanglement varies as a function of
the parameters of the initial state; for the continuous case, we find also how
it depends on the location and size of the chosen regions. Hence we show that
the distribution of entanglement is very different from the distribution of the
classical correlations.Comment: RevTex, 12 pages, 9 figures (28 files). Modifications in response to
journal referee
Long period polytype boundaries in silicon carbide
A significant gap in our understanding of polytypism exists, caused partly by the lack of experimental data on the spatial distribution of polytype coalescence and knowledge of the regions between adjoining polytypes. Few observations, Takei & Francombe (1967) apart, of the relative location of different polytypes have been reported. A phenomenological description of the boundaries, exact position of one-dimensional disorder (1DD) and long period polytypes (LPP’s) has been made possible by synchrotron X-ray diffraction topography (XRDT)
Maximum-Likelihood Comparisons of Tully-Fisher and Redshift Data: Constraints on Omega and Biasing
We compare Tully-Fisher (TF) data for 838 galaxies within cz=3000 km/sec from
the Mark III catalog to the peculiar velocity and density fields predicted from
the 1.2 Jy IRAS redshift survey. Our goal is to test the relation between the
galaxy density and velocity fields predicted by gravitational instability
theory and linear biasing, and thereby to estimate where is the linear bias parameter for IRAS galaxies.
Adopting the IRAS velocity and density fields as a prior model, we maximize the
likelihood of the raw TF observables, taking into account the full range of
selection effects and properly treating triple-valued zones in the
redshift-distance relation. Extensive tests with realistic simulated galaxy
catalogs demonstrate that the method produces unbiased estimates of
and its error. When we apply the method to the real data, we model the presence
of a small but significant velocity quadrupole residual (~3.3% of Hubble flow),
which we argue is due to density fluctuations incompletely sampled by IRAS. The
method then yields a maximum likelihood estimate
(1-sigma error). We discuss the constraints on and biasing that follow
if we assume a COBE-normalized CDM power spectrum. Our model also yields the
1-D noise noise in the velocity field, including IRAS prediction errors, which
we find to be be 125 +/- 20 km/sec.Comment: 53 pages, 20 encapsulated figures, two tables. Submitted to the
Astrophysical Journal. Also available at http://astro.stanford.edu/jeff
Series Analysis of Tricritical Behavior: Mean-Field Model and Slicewise Pade Approximants
A mean-field model is proposed as a test case for tricritical series analyses
methods. Derivation of the 50th order series for the magnetization is reported.
As the first application this series is analyzed by the traditional slicewise
Pade approximant method popular in earlier studies of tricriticality.Comment: 22 pages in plain TeX; 7 PostScript figs available by e-mai
Resistive Anomalies at Ferromagnetic Transitions Revisited: the case of SrRuO_3
We show that recent resistivity data on SrRuO_3 for T->T_c are consistent
with conventional theory when corrections to scaling are included and a small
shift in T_c is allowed.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure; revte
Finite-Size Scaling and Universality in the Spin 1 Quantum XY Chain
The spin-1 XY chain in a transverse field is studied using finite-size
scaling. The ground state phase diagram displays a paramagnetic, an ordered
ferromagnetic and an ordered oscillatory phase. The paramagnetic-ferromagnetic
transition line belongs to the universality class of the 2D Ising model. Along
this line, universality is confirmed for the finite-size scaling functions of
several correlation lengths and for the conformal operator content.Comment: Latex 8 pages, 2 uucompressed figure
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