Vietnamese Women and Children Refugees in Hong Kong: An Argument against Arbitrary Detention

Anteckningar från Sundre, Gotland sydligaste socken. Onsdag 11 april 2012 Rivet, en smal udde av grus. Stark vind, öppen horisont. Vatten på nära nog alla håll. Här, längst ut, drabbades jag av fasa när havet ville döda mig, sluka min kropp. Letade efter gravarna men fann inget. Gick upp till Arendt i fyren. --- Mitt examensprojekt är min promenad tillsammans med historia, tempo, minne, tröghet, förflyttningar och förändringar, ruiner, myter samt högst personliga reflektioner. Det finns platser man verkligen tycker om, som man älskar. Jag vet flera platser som jag älskar att vara på, det här är en av dem. Få stannar till här, det är ett ställe man passerar. Jag vill vara ensam här. Vid mina besök, som på senare tid under projektets gång har varit mycket riktade, blir jag extremt fokuserad på platsen och bara platsen. Också som att kliva ur tjockan.Notes from the parish of Sundre, at the very south of Gotland. Wednesday April 11, 2012 Rivet, a small cpe of gravel. Strong wind, open horizon. Water in almost all directions. Here, at the nab, fright hit me when the sea wanted to liquidate me, swallow my body. Searched for the tombs but found nothing. Visited Arendt in the lighthouse. --- My degree project is my promenade together with history, tempo, memory, inertia, movements, ruins, myths and my very personal reflections. There are places you really like, that you love. There are several places that I love to be at, this is one of them. Few people halt here, this is a place you pass. I want to be alone here. At my visits, that during the project became more and more addressed, I become extremely focused at the place and the place only. Like stepping out of the mist

The Kinematic and Spatial Deployment of Compact, Isolated High-Velocity Clouds

We have identified a class of high-velocity clouds which are compact and apparently isolated. The clouds are compact in that they have angular sizes less than 2 degrees FWHM. They are isolated in that they are separated from neighboring emission by expanses where no emission is seen to the detection limit of the available data. Candidates for inclusion in this class were extracted from the Leiden/Dwingeloo HI survey of Hartmann & Burton and from the Wakker & van Woerden catalogue of high-velocity clouds. The candidates were subject to independent confirmation using either the 25-meter telescope in Dwingeloo or the 140-foot telescope in Green Bank. We argue that the resulting list, even if incomplete, is sufficiently representative of the ensemble of compact, isolated HVCs - CHVCs - that the characteristics of their disposition on the sky, and of their kinematics, are revealing of some physical aspects of the class. The CHVCs are in fact distributed quite uniformly across the sky. A global search for the reference frame which minimizes the velocity dispersion of the ensemble returns the Local Group Standard of Rest with high confidence. The CHVCs are not stationary with respect to this reference frame but have a mean infall velocity of 100 km/s. These properties are strongly suggestive of a population which has as yet had little interaction with the more massive Local Group members. At a typical distance of about 1 Mpc these objects would have sizes of about 15 kpc and gas masses, M_HI, of a few times 10^7 M_Sun, corresponding to those of (sub-)dwarf galaxies. (abridged)Comment: 13 page LaTeX, requires aa.cls and rotate.sty, 5 GIF figures. Accepted for publication in A&

Can environmental conditions experienced in early life influence future generations?

The consequences of early developmental conditions for performance in later life are now subjected to convergent interest from many different biological sub-disciplines. However, striking data, largely from the biomedical literature, show that environmental effects experienced even before conception can be transmissible to subsequent generations. Here, we review the growing evidence from natural systems for these cross-generational effects of early life conditions, showing that they can be generated by diverse environmental stressors, affect offspring in many ways and can be transmitted directly or indirectly by both parental lines for several generations. In doing so, we emphasize why early life might be so sensitive to the transmission of environmentally induced effects across generations. We also summarize recent theoretical advancements within the field of developmental plasticity, and discuss how parents might assemble different ‘internal’ and ‘external’ cues, even from the earliest stages of life, to instruct their investment decisions in offspring. In doing so, we provide a preliminary framework within the context of adaptive plasticity for understanding inter-generational phenomena that arise from early life conditions

HI Observations Towards the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy

We have measured the 21-cm line of Galactic HI over more than 50 square degrees in the direction of the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy. The data show no evidence of HI associated with the dwarf spheroidal which might be consider analogous to the Magellanic Stream as it is associated in both position and velocity with the Large Magellanic Cloud. Nor do the HI data show evidence for any disturbance in the Milky Way disk gas that can be unambiguously assigned to interaction with the dwarf galaxy. The data shown here limit the HI mass at the velocity of the Sagittarius dwarf to <7000 solar masses over some 18 square degrees between Galactic latitudes -13 degrees and -18 degrees.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

The Determinants of Credit Ratings in the United Kingdom Insurance Industry

Executive Summary The Determinants of Credit Ratings in the United Kingdom Insurance Industry Academic researchers have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the activities of credit rating agencies over the past 20 years, focusing in particular on the agencies’ potential role in overseeing corporate financial strength and promoting the efficient operation of financial markets. Examinations of credit rating practices has recently extended to the insurance industry, where the complex technical nature of market transactions leads to policyholders, investors and others facing particularly acute information asymmetries at the point-of-sale. Published credit ratings are therefore seen as helping to alleviate imperfections in insurance markets by providing a third party opinion on the adequacy of an insurer’s financial health and the likelihood of it meeting obligations to policyholders and others in the future. Although the United Kingdom (UK) insurance market is now one of the five largest in the world, relatively little is known about the practices of the major firms and policy-makers which influence its operations. In particular, whilst the determinants of rating agencies’ assessments of United States (US) insurers is well documented, published studies have yet to provide comprehensive evidence about insurance company ratings in the UK. This study attempts to fill this gap by examining the ratings awarded by two of the world’s leading agencies – A.M. Best and Standard and Poor (S&P) – and establishing the extent to which organizational variables can help predict: (i) insurance firms’ decision to be rated; and (ii) the assigned ratings themselves. Our sample of UK data comprises ratings made by A.M. Best and S&P over the period 1993-1997 for both life and property-liability insurers. The panel data we use is ordinal in nature and is therefore analysed using an ordered probit model. However, because neither A.M. Best or S&P rate the full population of UK insurance firms our data set is potentially subject to selfselection bias and we therefore extend the model to correct for such problems. In particular, the paper examines the effect of eight firm-specific variables (namely, capital adequacy, profitability, liquidity, growth, size, mutual/stockowner status, reinsurance level, and short/long-term nature of business) on the ratings awarded by the two agencies, as well as on insurance firms’ decisions to volunteer for the ratings in the first place. In general terms, our evidence concurs with earlier US findings, and suggests that although the decision to be rated by either of the agencies is largely influenced by a common set of factors, the determinants of the ratings themselves appear to differ. Specifically, our first main finding is that insurers’ decisions to be rated by either A.M. Best or S&P is positively related to surplus growth, profitability and leverage. Second, while we find that A.M. Best’s ratings are positively linked to profitability and liquidity, as well as being generally higher for mutual insurers, the findings for S&P differ substantially. Although liquidity again exerted a positive influence on assigned ratings, the only other statistically significant variable was financial leverage, which had a negative sign. We believe that the results of our research are of potential importance for companies operating in insurance markets as well as for policy-makers, brokers and others. For example, the evidence that mutual insurers are generally assigned higher ratings than stock insurers suggests that certain publicly-traded insurers, in particular new entrants, might not possess sound financial strength and may require closer regulatory scrutiny than other, more established, insurance firms. In addition, the finding that liquidity has a significantly positive effect on ratings assigned by two of the world’s leading credit agencies should provide a measure of confidence about the robustness of the ratings to industry regulators, policyholders and investors in the UK. This could imply that external ratings might eventually play a role in substituting for costly industry regulation. The study concludes that although the factors influencing the decision to be rated by A.M. Best or S&P are broadly the same, a degree of variability exists in the variables which influence the actual ratings themselves. Insurance company managers should be aware of this when contemplating whether to seek an independent rating and which agency to choose for the assessment. We therefore believe that this study fills an important gap in the literature about key players in the important UK insurance market and provides a basis for the conduct of future research

On the stability of travelling waves with vorticity obtained by minimisation

We modify the approach of Burton and Toland [Comm. Pure Appl. Math. (2011)] to show the existence of periodic surface water waves with vorticity in order that it becomes suited to a stability analysis. This is achieved by enlarging the function space to a class of stream functions that do not correspond necessarily to travelling profiles. In particular, for smooth profiles and smooth stream functions, the normal component of the velocity field at the free boundary is not required a priori to vanish in some Galilean coordinate system. Travelling periodic waves are obtained by a direct minimisation of a functional that corresponds to the total energy and that is therefore preserved by the time-dependent evolutionary problem (this minimisation appears in Burton and Toland after a first maximisation). In addition, we not only use the circulation along the upper boundary as a constraint, but also the total horizontal impulse (the velocity becoming a Lagrange multiplier). This allows us to preclude parallel flows by choosing appropriately the values of these two constraints and the sign of the vorticity. By stability, we mean conditional energetic stability of the set of minimizers as a whole, the perturbations being spatially periodic of given period.Comment: NoDEA Nonlinear Differential Equations and Applications, to appea

Face pairing graphs and 3-manifold enumeration

The face pairing graph of a 3-manifold triangulation is a 4-valent graph denoting which tetrahedron faces are identified with which others. We present a series of properties that must be satisfied by the face pairing graph of a closed minimal P^2-irreducible triangulation. In addition we present constraints upon the combinatorial structure of such a triangulation that can be deduced from its face pairing graph. These results are then applied to the enumeration of closed minimal P^2-irreducible 3-manifold triangulations, leading to a significant improvement in the performance of the enumeration algorithm. Results are offered for both orientable and non-orientable triangulations.Comment: 30 pages, 57 figures; v2: clarified some passages and generalised the final theorem to the non-orientable case; v3: fixed a flaw in the proof of the conical face lemm