Phantastes Chapter 16: Life and the Ideal

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) was a German writer, primarily known as a dramatist, poet, and literary critic. Das Ideal und das Leben (Life and the Ideal, 1795) is a philosophical poem. The Oxford Reference reports that the poem was “first published in 1795 in No. 9 of Die Horen, with the title ‘Das Reich der Schatten’. Schiller changed this in 1800 to ‘Das Reich der Formen’, and adopted the present title in 1804.” Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), writer and politician, translated the poem in 1844 as Ideal and Actual Life. Bulwer-Lytton began his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the lines: “It was a dark and stormy night,” which is the name of the annual conference for bad opening lines. Madeleine L’Engle, who was inspired by MacDonald, begins her 1962 fantasy A Wrinkle in Time with these words, as does Snoopy when he plays the World Famous Author in the comic strip Peanuts

Sediment Respiration Pulses in Intermittent Rivers and Ephemeral Streams

Intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES) may represent over half the global stream network, but their contribution to respiration and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is largely undetermined. In particular, little is known about the variability and drivers of respiration in IRES sediments upon rewetting, which could result in large pulses of CO2. We present a global study examining sediments from 200 dry IRES reaches spanning multiple biomes. Results from standardized assays show that mean respiration increased 32-fold to 66-fold upon sediment rewetting. Structural equation modeling indicates that this response was driven by sediment texture and organic matter quantity and quality, which, in turn, were influenced by climate, land use, and riparian plant cover. Our estimates suggest that respiration pulses resulting from rewetting of IRES sediments could contribute significantly to annual CO2 emissions from the global stream network, with a single respiration pulse potentially increasing emission by 0.2-0.7%. As the spatial and temporal extent of IRES increases globally, our results highlight the importance of recognizing the influence of wetting-drying cycles on respiration and CO2 emissions in stream network

The importance of consent : the politics of progressive taxation in developing countries

Developing countries are far more successful in increasing tax pressure on the poor than on the wealthy. To explain this difference, I argue that taxing the wealthy is more prominently a problem of credibility than of coercion. The poor can be forced to pay taxes. Given weak administrative capacities and de facto political power distributions, governments in many developing countries cannot force the wealthy to the same degree. In this line, I examine the conditions under which wealthy taxpayers consent to taxation in developing countries from different methodological angles. The second chapter analyses the Peruvian and the Colombian tax history between 1970 and 2010 using a comparative case study framework. The analysis provides evidence suggesting that stable party systems and strong business organizations increase the capacity of collective action between political actors and wealthy taxpayers. Thereby these factors also enable the definition of fiscal contracts involving higher tax contributions by the latter group. The third chapter examines the effect of institutional trust on the support for progressive taxation using public opinion data from the Latin American Opinion Project (LAPOP). The results show that trust in political institutions strongly mitigates the opposition of wealthy taxpayers to progressive taxation. The fourth chapter four uses panel data for over 90 countries to explore the relationship between party system institutionalisation and reliance on the personal income tax. The analysis indicates that administrative capacity mitigates the effect of party system institutionalization: where the level of administrative capacity is low, party system institutionalisation has a positive and highly significant effect. At high levels of administrative capacity this effect disappears. Overall, the findings support the notion that especially in developing countries taxing the wealthy is best understood as a political challenge. The good news is that contrary to what is commonly assumed, wealthy taxpayers are not a priori opposed to higher taxes on them. There is scope for wealthy taxpayers to support taxation but this demands reliable political and institutional systems that are able to credibly commit to not misusing the tax contributions. The analysis has major implications for development cooperation active in this field as it demands that the approaches employed balance better the technical and the political dimensions of taxation

Frequency tuning of the whispering gallery modes of silica microspheres for CQED and spectroscopy

We have tuned the whispering gallery modes of a fused silica microresonator over nearly 1 nm at 800 nm, i.e. over 0.5 FSR or 10^6 linewidths of the resonator. This has been achieved by a new method based on the stretching of a two-stem microsphere. The devices described below will permit new Cavity-QED experiments with this high-Q optical resonator when it is desirable to optimize its coupling to emitters with given transition frequencies. The tuning capability demonstrated here is compatible with both UHV and low temperature operation, which should be useful for future experiments with laser cooled atoms or single quantum dots.Comment: ReVTeX, 4 pages, 3 figure

Why did I participate in the MIINT competition?

I joined the MIINT competition, because I believe that impact investing offers a great chance/opportunity for a synergistic collaboration with the public sector. Impact investing has enormous potential to help address development challenges in emerging economies. It can also act as a strategic partner of governments in advanced economies to tackle social issues; especially now when it is critical to adapt to existing structures

Thermal and electromagnetic properties of 166-Er and 167-Er

The primary gamma-ray spectra of 166-Er and 167-Er are deduced from the (3-He,alpha gamma) and (3-He,3-He' gamma) reaction, respectively, enabling a simultaneous extraction of the level density and the gamma-ray strength function. Entropy, temperature and heat capacity are deduced from the level density within the micro-canonical and the canonical ensemble, displaying signals of a phase-like transition from the pair-correlated ground state to an uncorrelated state at Tc=0.5 MeV. The gamma-ray strength function displays a bump around E-gamma=3 MeV, interpreted as the pygmy resonance.Comment: 21 pages including 2 tables and 11 figure

Landau gauge ghost and gluon propagators and the Faddeev-Popov operator spectrum

In this talk we report on a recent lattice investigation of the Landau gauge gluon and ghost propagators in pure SU(3) lattice gauge theory with a special emphasis on the Gribov copy problem. In the (infrared) region of momenta $q^2 \le 0.3 \mathrm{GeV}^2$ we find the corresponding MOM scheme running coupling $\alpha_s(q^2)$ to rise in $q$. We also report on a first SU(3) computation of the ghost-gluon vertex function showing that it deviates only weakly from being constant. In addition we study the spectrum of low-lying eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Faddeev-Popov operator as well as the spectral representation of the ghost propagator.Comment: talk given by M. M.-P. at the Workshop on Computational Hadron Physics, Cyprus, September 200

Short-term effects of a large dam decommissioning on biofilm structure and functioning

Aging dams and the rising efforts to restore stream ecosystems are increasing the number of dam decommissioning programs. Although dam decommissioning aims at improving in-stream habitat, biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning in the long term, it might also cause ecological impacts in the short term due to the mobilization of the sediment accumulated in the reservoir. Benthic biofilm in particular can be impaired by episodes of high turbidity and scouring. We conducted a multiple before-after/control-impact experiment to assess the effects of the drawdown of a large dam (42 m tall), a first step to its decommissioning, on biofilm structure (biomass and chlorophyll-a) and functioning (metabolism, nutrient uptake, and organic matter breakdown). Our results show that the reservoir drawdown reduced the autotrophic biofilm biomass (chlorophyll-a) downstream from the dam, which in turn lowered metabolism. However, nitrogen and phosphorus uptake by the biofilm was not affected. Organic matter breakdown was slower below the dam than in nearby undammed reaches before and during drawdown. All drawdown effects quickly disappeared and reaches downstream from the dam approached values found in nearby undammed reaches. Thus, our results indicate that the effects of reservoir drawdown on stream biofilms exist but may be small and disappear rapidly.This research was supported by the Fundación BBVA (064-17). The authors also acknowledge the financial support from the Basque Government (Consolidated Research Group: Stream Ecology 7-CA-18/10) predoctoral fellowships from the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU (M.A.). The authors are especially grateful to the municipality of Donostia-San Sebastian and the staff of Artikutza for their continuous support during the experiment