Report on the Workshop on Refugee and Asylum Policy in Practice in Europe and North America

Western nations have struggled to accomplish the dual goals of refugee and asylum policies: (1) identifying and protecting Convention refugees as well as those fleeing civil conflict; and (2) controlling for abuse. The Workshop on Refugee and Asylum Policy in Practice in Europe and North America was organized to facilitate a transatlantic dialogue to explore just how well these asylum systems are balancing the dual goals. The workshop exa!llined key elements of the U.S. and European asylum systems: decision making on claims, deterrence of abuse, independent review, return of rejected asylum seekers, scope of the refugee concept, social rights and employment, international cooperation, and data and evaluation. The Workshop was convened by the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) of Georgetown University and the Center for the Study of Immigration, Integration and Citizenship Policies (CEPIC) of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, with the support of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. It was held on July 1-3, 1999, at Oxford University. Workshop participants included government officials, scholars, and representatives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) actively involved in analyzing and implementing refugee and asylum policies. This report outlines the major points of discussion and the areas of consensus at the Workshop, and emphasizes the issues in need of further analysis and agreement. Through this report, the Workshop seeks to encourage further discussion on refugee and asylum policies in practice in order to clarify, develop, and improve the existing mechanisms for protection

On the Stability of Compactified D=11 Supermembranes

We prove D=11 supermembrane theories wrapping around in an irreducible way over $S^{1} \times S^{1}\times M^{9}$ on the target manifold, have a hamiltonian with strict minima and without infinite dimensional valleys at the minima for the bosonic sector. The minima occur at monopole connections of an associated U(1) bundle over topologically non trivial Riemann surfaces of arbitrary genus. Explicit expressions for the minimal connections in terms of membrane maps are presented. The minimal maps and corresponding connections satisfy the BPS condition with half SUSY.Comment: 15 pages, latex. Added comments in conclusions and more reference

Wind-tunnel Tests of the 0.15-scale Powered Model of the Fleetwings XBTK-1 Airplane : Longitudinal Stability and Control

An investigation was made of the static longitudinal stability, and control and stall characteristics of XBTK-1 dive bomber. Results indicate that the longitudinal stability will probably be satisfactory for all contemplated flight conditions at the rear-most CG location with elevator both fixed and free. Power effects were small. Sufficient elevator control will be available to trim in any flight condition above the ground. Increasing the slotted flap deflection above 30 degrees only slightly increased the max. lift coefficient

On integration of the Kowalevski gyrostat and the Clebsch problems

For the Kowalevski gyrostat change of variables similar to that of the Kowalevski top is done. We establish one to one correspondence between the Kowalevski gyrostat and the Clebsch system and demonstrate that Kowalevski variables for the gyrostat practically coincide with elliptic coordinates on sphere for the Clebsch case. Equivalence of considered integrable systems allows to construct two Lax matrices for the gyrostat using known rational and elliptic Lax matrices for the Clebsch model. Associated with these matrices solutions of the Clebsch system and, therefore, of the Kowalevski gyrostat problem are discussed. The Kotter solution of the Clebsch system in modern notation is presented in detail.Comment: LaTeX, 24 page

On compression of Bruhat-Tits buildings

We obtain an analog of the compression of angles theorem in symmetric spaces for Bruhat--Tits buildings of the type $A$. More precisely, consider a $p$-adic linear space $V$ and the set $Lat(V)$ of all lattices in $V$. The complex distance in $Lat(V)$ is a complete system of invariants of a pair of points of $Lat(V)$ under the action of the complete linear group. An element of a Nazarov semigroup is a lattice in the duplicated linear space $V\oplus V$. We investigate behavior of the complex distance under the action of the Nazarov semigroup on the set $Lat(V)$.Comment: 6 page

On the Minimum Degree up to Local Complementation: Bounds and Complexity

The local minimum degree of a graph is the minimum degree reached by means of a series of local complementations. In this paper, we investigate on this quantity which plays an important role in quantum computation and quantum error correcting codes. First, we show that the local minimum degree of the Paley graph of order p is greater than sqrt{p} - 3/2, which is, up to our knowledge, the highest known bound on an explicit family of graphs. Probabilistic methods allows us to derive the existence of an infinite number of graphs whose local minimum degree is linear in their order with constant 0.189 for graphs in general and 0.110 for bipartite graphs. As regards the computational complexity of the decision problem associated with the local minimum degree, we show that it is NP-complete and that there exists no k-approximation algorithm for this problem for any constant k unless P = NP.Comment: 11 page

Ratings of The Investment Projects of Arbitrary Durations: New Methodology

In this paper we develop for the first time a new approach to ratings of the investment projects of arbitrary durations, which could be applied to investments of any area of economy and in particular to energy projects.The ratings of such energy projects, as "Turkish stream", "Nord stream-2", energy projects relating to clean, renewable and sustainable energy, as well as relating to pricing carbon emissions (McAleer et al., 2018a,b,c; 2019) could be done using developed here new rating methodologies. In our previous papers the new approach to the ratings of the long–term investment projects has been developed (Filatova et al., 2018). The important features of that consideration are as following: 1) The incorporation of rating parameters (financial "ratios"), used in project rating and playing a major role in it, into modern long–term investment models, 2) The adequate use of discounting of financial flows virtually not used in existing project rating methodologies. Here, for the first time, we incorporate the rating parameters (financial "ratios"), used in project rating, into modern investment models, describing the investment projects of arbitrary durations. This was much more difficult task then in case of the long–term investment projects, considered by us in previous papers. We work within investment models, created by authors. One of them describes the effectiveness of investment project from perspective of equity capital owners, while other model describes the effectiveness of investment project from perspective of equity capital and debt capital owners. New approach allows use the powerful instruments of modern theory of capital cost and capital structure (BFO theory) (Brusov et al., 2015, 2018) and modern investment models, created by the authors and well tested in the real economy to evaluate investment project performance, including energy projects.In our calculations we use Excel technique in two aspects: 1) we calculate WACC at different values of equity costs k0, different values of debt costs kd and different values of leverage level L=D/S, using the famous BFO formula; 2) we calculate the dependences of NPV on coverage ratios as well as leverage ratios at different values of equity costs k0, different values of debt costs kd and different values of leverage level L