Is there life beyond the ISI journals lists? the international impact of Spanish, Italian, French and German economics journals

This comparative study looks at the international impact of leading economics journals published in Spain, Italy, France and Germany. It also aims to establish whether they play a similar role in any of these 4 countries. For this purpose data were collected on the number of times that articles published in these journals are cited in international journals on the ISI Journals lists. The study focused on the number and characteristics of the citations received during the period 1996-2004 by articles published between 1995 and 1999 in a limited number of Spanish, Italian, French and German journals. The international impact of the Spanish journals was found to be similar in size and characteristics to that of the Italian publications. However, it differed sharply from the impact of the highest-ranking French and German journals. These last received a higher volume of citations, some of which also showed very different qualitative characteristics

Transient Behavior near Liquid-Gas Interface at Supercritical Pressure

Numerical heat and mass transfer analysis of a configuration where a cool liquid hydrocarbon is suddenly introduced to a hotter gas at supercritical pressure shows that a well-defined phase equilibrium can be established before substantial growth of typical hydrodynamic instabilities. The equilibrium values at the interface quickly reach near-steady values. Sufficiently thick diffusion layers form quickly around the liquid-gas interface (e.g., 3-10 microns for the liquid phase and 10-30 microns for the gas phase in 10-100 microseconds), where density variations become increasingly important with pressure as mixing of species is enhanced. While the hydrocarbon vaporizes and the gas condenses for all analyzed pressures, the net mass flux across the interface reverses as pressure is increased, showing that a clear vaporization-driven problem at low pressures may present condensation at higher pressures. This is achieved while heat still conducts from gas to liquid. Analysis of fundamental thermodynamic laws on a fixed-mass element containing the diffusion layers proves the thermodynamic viability of the obtained results.Comment: Submitted for publication in International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer. 29 pages, 18 figure

Effect of deficit irrigation and methyl jasmonate application on the composition of strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) fruit and leaves

Drought stress is among the most severe environmental risks threatening strawberry production. In the present study, the effect of deficit irrigation (DI; 50 mL/day) and/or elicitation with methyl jasmonate (MeJA; 0.1 mM) on the composition of secondary fruit and leaves from three strawberry pre-commercial cultivars (253/29, 279/4 and 279/5) was investigated and compared to plants kept at or near field capacity (200 mL/day). For certain cultivars (253/29), DI applied at green stage of fruit development resulted in a considerable reduction in berry size (1.7-fold). In other cultivars (279/4 and 279/5), fruit size was comparable in DI-treated and fully irrigated plants. Changes in the major sugars and organic acids of strawberry leaves and fruit were cultivar and organ dependent and were associated to an osmotic adjustment strategy within the plant to counteract the effects of drought. Overall, elicitation with MeJA had a minimal effect on plant growth and morphological traits. Nevertheless, MeJA increased fructose content of DI-treated leaves and palliated the differences in glucose content of fruit from different water treatments. The most pronounced effect of MeJA was related to an enchance synthesis and accumulation of pelargonidin-3-glucoside (nearly 2-fold) in red-ripe fruit from cultivar 279/5.The authors thank the Horticultural Development Company (CP 43) andGlaxoSmithKline for funding. Redeva, formerly the Summer Fruit Company, Total Berry (UK) is gratefully acknowledge for supplying the plants

Innovation and jobs: evidence from manufacturing firms

This paper is aimed at structurally assessing the employment effects of the innovative activities of firms. We estimate firm level displacement and compensation effects in a model in which the stock of knowledge capital raises firm relative efficiency through process innovations and firm demand through product innovations. Displacement is estimated from the elasticity of employment with respect to innovation in the (conditional or Hicksian) demand for labour. Compensation effects are estimated from a firm-specific demand relationship. We also assess the enlargement and weakening of these effects due to firm agents’ behaviour aimed at appropriating innovation rents. We find that the potential employment compensation effect of process innovations surpasses the displacement effect, both in the short and long run (when competitors react), and that product innovation doubles the expanding impact by unit of expenditure, but also that agents’ behaviour can seriously reduce these effects. The actual elasticity of employment to knowledge capital is estimated, however, not far from unity, while “passive” productivity growth is suggested to have null or negative employment effects

Chiral bound states in the continuum

We present a distinct mechanism for the formation of bound states in the continuum (BICs). In chiral quantum systems there appear zero-energy states in which the wave function has finite amplitude only in one of the subsystems defined by the chiral symmetry. When the system is coupled to leads with a continuum energy band, part of these states remain bound. We derive some algebraic rules for the number of these states depending on the dimensionality and rank of the total Hamiltonian. We examine the transport properties of such systems including the appearance of Fano resonances in some limiting cases. Finally, we discuss experimental setups based on microwave dielectric resonators and atoms in optical lattices where these predictions can be tested.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures. v2: includes results specific to honeycomb lattice; matches published versio

Bounded Rational Decision-Making in Changing Environments

A perfectly rational decision-maker chooses the best action with the highest utility gain from a set of possible actions. The optimality principles that describe such decision processes do not take into account the computational costs of finding the optimal action. Bounded rational decision-making addresses this problem by specifically trading off information-processing costs and expected utility. Interestingly, a similar trade-off between energy and entropy arises when describing changes in thermodynamic systems. This similarity has been recently used to describe bounded rational agents. Crucially, this framework assumes that the environment does not change while the decision-maker is computing the optimal policy. When this requirement is not fulfilled, the decision-maker will suffer inefficiencies in utility, that arise because the current policy is optimal for an environment in the past. Here we borrow concepts from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to quantify these inefficiencies and illustrate with simulations its relationship with computational resources.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, NIPS 2013 Workshop on Planning with Information Constraint

Chiral asymmetry during the EWPT from CP-violating scattering off bubble walls

We compute a net electric current during a first order EWPT arising from the asymmetric propagation of fermion chiral modes due to a CP-violating interaction with the Higgs. The interaction is quantified in terms of a CP-violating phase in the bubble wall that separate both false and true vacuum phases. We comment on the possibility of this current to generate a seed magnetic field and its implications for primordial magne- togenesis in the early Universe.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the XLVII of the International Symposium of Multiparticle Dynamics, Tlaxcala, Mexico, September 10-15, 201