Ultra-Peripheral Collisons in CMS

Coherent peripheral collisions of atomic nuclei involve electromagnetic or long range hadronic interactions at impact parameters, where both nuclei survive intact. Recently such ultra-peripheral collisions were observed at RHIC. The effect of the electromagnetic field can be interpreted as a photon-photon collision with an effective center of mass energy up to a few GeV at RHIC. At the Large Hadron Collider the effective center of mass energy will be increased by more than an order of magnitude. This opens new opportunities, ranging from the study of non-perturbative QCD to the search for new physics

Investing in infrastructure : what is needed from 2000 to 2010?

The authors estimate demand for infrastructure services over the first decade of the new millennium based on a model that relates demand for infrastructure with the structural change and growth in income the world is expected to undergo between now and 2010. It should be noted that predictions are based on estimated demand rather than on any absolute measure of"need"such as those developed in the Millenium Development Goals. The authors also provide estimates of associated investment and maintenance expenditures and predict total required resource flows to satisfy new demand while maintaining service for existing infrastructure.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Decentralization,Urban Services to the Poor,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Urban Services to the Poor,Urban Services to the Poor

Is cost recovery a feasible objective for water and electricity ? The Latin American experience

Given the relatively small segment of the population that faces genuine affordability problems in Latin America, there appears to be a promising case for using targeted subsidies to reconcile the cost recovery objective with social protection concerns. Social tariff schemes of various kinds are already widespread in Latin America, but they suffer from a number of design flaws. Increasing block tariff (IBT) structures are the most prevalent form of social tariffs in the region. These are likely to be more successful in the electricity sector than in the water sector because the correlation between consumption and income is much stronger in the case of electricity than water. Moreover, IBT structures in electricity tend to be much better designed than in the case of water, with lower fixed charges, lower subsistence blocks, and steeper gradients. A number of more sophisticated social tariff schemes are also being applied that combine consumption criteria with some form of socioeconomic screening. These are generally found to perform better than IBTs, although they also present significant room for improvement.Infrastructure Economics,Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Public Sector Management and Reform,Regional Governance,Urban Governance and Management

Constrained Local UniversE Simulations (CLUES)

The local universe is the best known part of our universe. Within the CLUES project (http://clues-project.org - Constrained Local UniversE Simulations) we perform numerical simulations of the evolution of the local universe. For these simulations we construct initial conditions based on observational data of the galaxy distribution in the local universe. Here we review the technique of these constrained simulations. In the second part we summarize our predictions of a possible Warm Dark Matter cosmology for the observed local distribution of galaxies and the local spectrum of mini-voids as well as a study of the satellite dynamics in a simulated Local Group.Comment: High resolution version on http://clues-project.org To be published in: Proceedings of "High Performance Computing in Science and Engineering, Garching/Munich 2009", Springer-Verlag, 201