184 research outputs found
Can De-Growth Be Considered a Policy Option? A Historical Note on Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the Club of Rome
At a few months' interval, Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) and Meadows et al. Limits to Growth (1972) were published. Both emphasized the dangers of economic growth, and both drew negative reactions from mainstream economists. Relying on archival evidence, we show that Georgescu-Roegen and the Club of Rome developed strategies of mutual support, which would present them at first view as natural allies. Georgescu-Roegen actually became a member of the Club of Rome, while Dennis Meadows acknowledged the influence of Georgescu-Roegen's ideas on the founding members of the Club. But in the late 70's, the gap widened between Georgescu-Roegen's adamant defense of de-growth, and the Club of Rome's less firm view of "sustainable growth." This paper explores the process leading to the self-isolation of Georgescu-Roegen, by showing that beyond a shared acknowledgment that economic and biologic systems were interdependent, technological optimism and ambitions for the global management of growth were central to the Club of Rome, while Georgescu-Roegenâs personal history led him to ignore those practicalities and judge that de-growth was inescapable
One Analogy Can Hide Another: Physics and Biology in Alchianâs âEconomic Natural Selectionâ
Today, Alchian's "Uncertainty, evolution and economic theory" (1950) is hailed by evolutionary economists as a most important piece, which resumed an evolutionary brand of theorizing in economics after the eclipse of the interwar period. On the other hand, Alchian's article is also cherished by standard economists who consider it to be a powerful defense of the maximization principle in the theory of the firm. Our examination of the early intellectual life of Alchian shows that it was his involvement in military systems analysis at the Rand Corporation that led him to reckon that uncertainty was a fundamental obstacle to marginal analysis. We then demonstrate that Alchian's economic natural selection is a statistical argument which, if phrased in biological parlance, owes its logic to statistical mechanics. This invites to reconsider the strong opposition usually made between evolutionist and mechanist modes of thinking
Why Were Biological Analogies in Economics âa Bad Thingâ? Edith Penroseâs battles against social Darwinism and McCarthyism
The heuristic value of evolutionary biology for economics is still much under debate. We suggest that in addition to analytical considerations, socio-cultural values can well be at stake in this issue. To demonstrate it, we use a historical case and focus on the criticism of biological analogies in the theory of the firm formulated by economist Edith Penrose in post-war United States. We find that in addition to the analytical arguments developed in her paper, she perceived that biological analogies were suspect of a conservative bias â as in social Darwinism. We explain this perception by documenting the broader context of Edith Penroseâs personal and professional evolution, from her student days at Berkeley to her defense of Owen Lattimore against McCarthyism. We conclude that in the case under study at least, science and values were certainly intertwined in accounting for her skepticism towards biological analogies â insight we develop in the conclusion about todayâs relationships between biology and economics
Umigon: Sentiment analysis for tweets based on lexicons and heuristics
Umigon is developed since December 2012 as a web application providing a service of sentiment detection in tweets. It has been designed to be fast and scalable. Umigon also provides indications for additional semantic features present in the tweets, such as time indications or markers of subjectivity.
Umigon is in continuous development, it can be tried freely at www.umigon.com.
Its code is open sourced at: https://github.com/seinecle/Umigon
On the destruction of the hidden order in URuSi by a strong magnetic field
We present a study of transport properties of the heavy fermion URuSi
in pulsed magnetic field. The large Nernst response of the hidden order state
is found to be suppressed when the magnetic field exceeds 35 T. The combination
of resistivity, Hall and Nernst data outlines the reconstruction of the Fermi
surface in the temperature-field phase diagram. The zero-field ground state is
a compensated heavy-electron semi-metal, which is destroyed by magnetic field
through a cascade of field-induced transitions. Above 40 T, URuSi
appears to be a polarized heavy fermions metal with a large density of carriers
whose effective mass rapidly decreases with increasing magnetic polarization.Comment: published versio
ID-based user-centric data usage auditing scheme for distributed environments
Recent years have witnessed the trend of increasingly relying on remote and distributed infrastructures, mainly owned and managed by third parties. This increased the number of reported incidents of security breaches compromising users' personal data, where involved entities may massively collect and process massive amounts of such data. Toward these challenges, this paper combines hierarchical Identity Based Cryptographic (IBC) mechanisms with emerging blockchain technologies and introduces a blockchain-based data usage auditing architecture ensuring availability and accountability in a personal data-preserving fashion. The proposed approach relies on smart auditable contracts deployed in blockchain infrastructures. Thus, it offers transparent and controlled data access, sharing and processing, so that unauthorized entities cannot process data without data subjects' consent. Moreover, thanks to the usage of hierarchical ID-based encryption and signature schemes, the proposed solution protects and ensures the confidentiality of users' personal data shared with multiple data controllers and processors. It also provides auditing capacities with tamper-proof evidences for data usage compliance, supported by the intrinsic properties of the blockchain technology
Fermi-surface reconstruction and two-carrier model for the Hall effect in YBa2Cu4O8
Pulsed field measurements of the Hall resistivity and magnetoresistance of
underdoped YBa2Cu4O8 are analyzed self-consistently using a simple model based
on coexisting electron and hole carriers. The resultant mobilities and Hall
numbers are found to vary markedly with temperature. The conductivity of the
hole carriers drops by one order of magnitude below 30 K, explaining the
absence of quantum oscillations from these particular pockets. Meanwhile the
Hall coefficient of the electron carriers becomes strongly negative below 50 K.
The overall quality of the fits not only provides strong evidence for
Fermi-surface reconstruction in Y-based cuprates, it also strongly constrains
the type of reconstruction that might be occurring.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, updated after publication in Physical Review B
(Rapid Communication
The emergence of neuromarketing investigated through online public communications (2002â2008)
âNeuromarketingâ designates both a developing industry and an academic research field. This study documents the emergence of neuromarketing through the first mention of the term in traditional and new media until the stabilization of the field. Our main interest is to establish whether neuromarketing developed separately as an academic field and as an industry (with knowledge transfer from the former to the latter), or whether it was an act of co-creation. Based on a corpus gathered from a systematic search on the Web, we trace the multiple forms of engagement between academic and commercial communities, echoed but also shaped by reports in traditional and new media. We find that neuromarketing developed an identity through a set of practices and a series of debates which involved intertwined communities of academic researchers and practitioners. This result offers an alternative to the narrative of âknowledge transferâ between academia and the industry and offers a contribution on how to use new kinds of digital sources in business history.Merit, Expertise and Measuremen
Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in YBa_2Cu_4O_8
We report the observation of Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in the underdoped
cuprate superconductor YBaCuO (Y124). For field aligned along the
c-axis, the frequency of the oscillations is T, which corresponds
to % of the total area of the first Brillouin zone. The effective
mass of the quasiparticles on this orbit is measured to be times
the free electron mass. Both the frequency and mass are comparable to those
recently observed for ortho-II YBaCuO (Y123-II). We show that
although small Fermi surface pockets may be expected from band structure
calculations in Y123-II, no such pockets are predicted for Y124. Our results
therefore imply that these small pockets are a generic feature of the copper
oxide plane in underdoped cuprates.Comment: v2: Version of paper accepted for publication in Physical Review
Letters. Only minor changes to the text and reference
Skutterudite Results Shed Light on Heavy Fermion Physics
Only few selected examples among the great diversity of anomalous rare earth
skutterudite are reviewed. Focus is first given on PrFe4P12 in comparison with
URu2Si2. For PrFe4P12, great progress has been made on determining the nature
of the order parameter (OP). A non magnetic order parameter with a multipolar
component emerges here while for URu2Si2 the nature of the so-called hidden
order remains mysterious. The two systems have several similarities in their
temperature--pressure (T, P) and magnetic field--temperature (H, T) phase
diagrams, in their spin dynamics, in their nesting character and in their high
sensitivity to impurities. Advances on one side must stimulate new views on the
other. Besides general considerations on the choice of the OP, a simple basic
problem is the treatment of the Kondo coupling in a system with low charge
carrier number for the cases of uncompensated and compensated semi-metal. An
interesting problem is also the possible decoupling between exciton modes and
itinerant carriers.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, proceedings of International Conference on "New
Quantum Phenomena in Skutterudite and Related Systems
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