A call for resilience index for health and social systems in Africa

This repository item contains a single issue of Issues in Brief, a series of policy briefs that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. This paper is part of the Africa 2060 Project, a Pardee Center program of research, publications and symposia exploring African futures in various aspects related to development on continental and regional scales. The views expressed in this paper are strictly those of the author and should not be assumed to represent the views of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future or of Boston University.This policy brief explores the concept of resilience as it applies to health and social systems in Africa, and suggests that development of a multi-dimensional resilience index may help to understand and formulate policy in settings of complex emergencies. This paper is part of the Africa 2060 Project, a Pardee Center program of research, publications and symposia exploring African futures in various aspects related to development on continental and regional scales

Observational Evidence of the Accelerated Expansion of the Universe

The discovery of cosmic acceleration is one of the most important developments in modern cosmology. The observation, thirteen years ago, that type Ia supernovae appear dimmer that they would have been in a decelerating universe followed by a series of independent observations involving galaxies and cluster of galaxies as well as the cosmic microwave background, all point in the same direction: we seem to be living in a flat universe whose expansion is currently undergoing an acceleration phase. In this paper, we review the various observational evidences, most of them gathered in the last decade, and the improvements expected from projects currently collecting data or in preparation.Comment: Accepted review article to appear in a special volume of the "Comptes Rendus de l'Acad\'emie des Sciences" about Dark Energy and Dark Matte

A hermitian analogue of the Broecker-Prestel theorem

The Broecker-Prestel local-global principle characterizes weak isotropy of quadratic forms over a formally real field in terms of weak isotropy over the henselizations and isotropy over the real closures of that field. A hermitian analogue of this principle is presented for algebras of index at most two. An improved result is also presented for algebras with a decomposable involution, algebras of pythagorean index at most two, and algebras over SAP and ED fields.Comment: Final pre-publication versio

A Three-Flavor, Lorentz-Violating Solution to the LSND Anomaly

We investigate whether postulating the existence of Lorentz-violating, CPT-conserving interactions allows three-neutrino solutions to the LSND anomaly that are also consistent with all other neutrino data. We show that Lorentz-violating interactions that couple only to one of the active neutrinos have the right properties to explain all the data. The details of the data make this solution unattractive. We find, for example, that a highly non-trivial energy dependence of the Lorentz-violating interactions is required.Comment: 15 pages, two eps figures. V2 - Minor modification