Public sector reforms, privatisation and regimes of control in a Chinese enterprise

The Chinese economic reform has recently become a major focus of attention around the world. The underlying rationale for the Chinese government's privatisation and public sector reforms is the view that reformed state enterprises and privately managed firms will demonstrate superior management control and better performance, and hence encourage economic growth and employment. There are very few intensive case studies published in English journals studying whether firms privatised in China have reversed previous losses and introduced better management controls, leading to increased investment, productivity, and overall organizational effectiveness and efficiency. The researchers do not seek to deny the control problems of Chinese SOEs, but question the consequences of the new controls installed during the post-privatisation period. The paper also reveals a declining tendency in employment; altered distributions of wealth ? especially to the state ? and labour, and a lack of improvements in the accountability of privatised companies. Overall, the paper argues, the aims of reform policies in China, including better control, increased profitability and an improved working life for Chinese people, have not materialized. The paper calls for more research on the above issues in the Chinese context

An examination of the precipitation delivery mechanisms for Dolleman Island, eastern Antarctic Peninsula

Copyright @ 2004 Wiley-BlackwellThe variability of size and source of significant precipitation events were studied at an Antarctic ice core drilling site: Dolleman Island (DI), located on the eastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Significant precipitation events that occur at DI were temporally located in the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) reanalysis data set, ERA-40. The annual and summer precipitation totals from ERA-40 at DI both show significant increases over the reanalysis period. Three-dimensional backwards air parcel trajectories were then run for 5 d using the ECMWF ERA-15 wind fields. Cluster analyses were performed on two sets of these backwards trajectories: all days in the range 1979–1992 (the climatological time-scale) and a subset of days when a significant precipitation event occurred. The principal air mass sources and delivery mechanisms were found to be the Weddell Sea via lee cyclogenesis, the South Atlantic when there was a weak circumpolar trough (CPT) and the South Pacific when the CPT was deep. The occurrence of precipitation bearing air masses arriving via a strong CPT was found to have a significant correlation with the southern annular mode (SAM); however, the arrival of air masses from the same region over the climatological time-scale showed no such correlation. Despite the dominance in both groups of back trajectories of the westerly circulation around Antarctica, some other key patterns were identified. Most notably there was a higher frequency of lee cyclogenesis events in the significant precipitation trajectories compared to the climatological time-scale. There was also a tendency for precipitation trajectories to come from more northerly latitudes, mostly from 50–70°S. The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was found to have a strong influence on the mechanism by which the precipitation was delivered; the frequency of occurrence of precipitation from the east (west) of DI increased during El Niño (La Niña) events

Design and operation of a prototype interaction point beam collision feedback system for the International Linear Collider

A high-resolution, intratrain position feedback system has been developed to achieve and maintain collisions at the proposed future electron-positron International Linear Collider (ILC). A prototype has been commissioned and tested with a beam in the extraction line of the Accelerator Test Facility at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan. It consists of a stripline beam position monitor (BPM) with analogue signal-processing electronics, a custom digital board to perform the feedback calculation, and a stripline kicker driven by a high-current amplifier. The closed-loop feedback latency is 148 ns. For a three-bunch train with 154 ns bunch spacing, the feedback system has been used to stabilize the third bunch to 450 nm. The kicker response is linear, and the feedback performance is maintained, over a correction range of over $\pm$60 {\mu}m. The propagation of the correction has been confirmed by using an independent stripline BPM located downstream of the feedback system. The system has been demonstrated to meet the BPM resolution, beam kick, and latency requirements for the ILC

Adventures of the Coupled Yang-Mills Oscillators: I. Semiclassical Expansion

We study the quantum mechanical motion in the $x^2y^2$ potentials with $n=2,3$, which arise in the spatially homogeneous limit of the Yang-Mills (YM) equations. These systems show strong stochasticity in the classical limit ($\hbar = 0$) and exhibit a quantum mechanical confinement feature. We calculate the partition function $Z(t)$ going beyond the Thomas-Fermi (TF) approximation by means of the semiclassical expansion using the Wigner-Kirkwood (WK) method. We derive a novel compact form of the differential equation for the WK function. After separating the motion in the channels of the equipotential surface from the motion in the central region, we show that the leading higher-order corrections to the TF term vanish up to eighth order in $\hbar$, if we treat the quantum motion in the hyperbolic channels correctly by adiabatic separation of the degrees of freedom. Finally, we obtain an asymptotic expansion of the partition function in terms of the parameter $g^2\hbar^4t^3$

Improving ice core interpretation using in situ and reanalysis data

Back trajectory analysis, provided by the British Atmospheric Data Centre using meteorological parameters from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis ERA-40 (1980-2001) and operational analysis (2002-2006), is used to investigate transport pathways and source regions of climate proxies preserved in a new ice core (Gomez) from the southwestern Antarctic Peninsula. The ECMWF data are compared with automatic weather station data and ice core annual accumulation records to demonstrate that the ECMWF data capture a large proportion of the annual and subseasonal precipitation variability at the site. The back trajectories reveal that precipitation preserved in the ice core accumulation record, and hence climate proxies contained therein, originate from the low-pressure systems from the Bellingshausen Sea transported via circumpolar westerly winds. Hence, precipitation-dependent ice core proxies, such as isotopic composition, will be influenced by both localized sea ice extent and large-scale circulation changes, such as the Southern Annular Mode. Sea ice proxies from the ice core are expected to be dominated by sea ice extent in the Bellingshausen Sea but also influenced by sea ice in the Weddell Sea, with a small proportion of air mass trajectories originating from this region during the summer. Comparison with other ice core sites reveals a stronger influence of easterly transport at more northerly locations, thus explaining the observed differences in snow accumulation records between ice cores and the poor correlation with instrumental records at these sites

Robust isothermal electric switching of interface magnetization: A route to voltage-controlled spintronics

Roughness-insensitive and electrically controllable magnetization at the (0001) surface of antiferromagnetic chromia is observed using magnetometry and spin-resolved photoemission measurements and explained by the interplay of surface termination and magnetic ordering. Further, this surface in placed in proximity with a ferromagnetic Co/Pd multilayer film. Exchange coupling across the interface between chromia and Co/Pd induces an electrically controllable exchange bias in the Co/Pd film, which enables a reversible isothermal (at room temperature) shift of the global magnetic hysteresis loop of the Co/Pd film along the magnetic field axis between negative and positive values. These results reveal the potential of magnetoelectric chromia for spintronic applications requiring non-volatile electric control of magnetization.Comment: Single PDF file: 27 pages, 6 figures; version of 12/30/09; submitted to Nature Material

Scattering From a Two Dimensional Array of Flux Tubes: A Study of The Validity of Mean Field Theory

Mean Field Theory has been extensively used in the study of systems of anyons in two spatial dimensions. In this paper we study the physical grounds for the validity of this approximation by considering the Quantum Mechanical scattering of a charged particle from a two dimensional array of magnetic flux tubes. The flux tubes are arranged on a regular lattice which is infinitely long in the ``$y$'' direction but which has a (small) finite number of columns in the ``$x$'' direction. Their physical size is assumed to be infinitesimally small. We develop a method for computing the scattering angle as well as the reflection and transmission coefficients to lowest order in the Aharonov--Bohm interaction. The results of our calculation are compared to the scattering of the same particle from a region of constant magnetic field whose magnitude is equal to the mean field of all the flux tubes. For an incident plane wave, the Mean Field approximation is shown to be valid provided the flux in each tube is much less than a single flux quantum. This is precisely the regime in which Mean Field Theory for anyons is expected to be valid. When the flux per tube becomes of order 1, Mean Field Theory is no longer valid.Comment: 23 pages, University of British Columbia Preprint UBCTP93-01

Spherical Universe topology and the Casimir effect

The mode problem on the factored 3--sphere is applied to field theory calculations for massless fields of spin 0, 1/2 and 1. The degeneracies on the factors, including lens spaces, are neatly derived in a geometric fashion. Vacuum energies are expressed in terms of the polyhedral degrees and equivalent expressions given using the cyclic decomposition of the covering group. Scalar functional determinants are calculated and the spectral asymmetry function treated by the same approach with explicit forms on one-sided lens spaces.Comment: 33 pages, 1 figure. Typos corrected and one reference adde

In-situ characterization of the Hamamatsu R5912-HQE photomultiplier tubes used in the DEAP-3600 experiment

The Hamamatsu R5912-HQE photomultiplier-tube (PMT) is a novel high-quantum efficiency PMT. It is currently used in the DEAP-3600 dark matter detector and is of significant interest for future dark matter and neutrino experiments where high signal yields are needed. We report on the methods developed for in-situ characterization and monitoring of DEAP's 255 R5912-HQE PMTs. This includes a detailed discussion of typical measured single-photoelectron charge distributions, correlated noise (afterpulsing), dark noise, double, and late pulsing characteristics. The characterization is performed during the detector commissioning phase using laser light injected through a light diffusing sphere and during normal detector operation using LED light injected through optical fibres