After the crisis and beyond the new constitutionalism? The case of the free movement of capital

This article examines the ‘new constitutionalism’ of the free movement of capital at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after the global economic crisis. It is argued that the concept of new constitutionalism, as developed by Stephen Gill, is an indispensable concept to understand the still growing institutionalization of neoliberal policies in constitutions, laws, institutions, and regulations. The latest attempt to further extend the constitutionalization of the free movement of capital, one of the pillars of neoliberalism, is the IMF’s newly developed ‘institutional view’ on capital flows. This approach, while more pragmatic than earlier attempts, can be understood as a renewed effort to prevent emerging markets and developing countries from installing capital controls and deviating significantly from neoliberal policies. However, emerging markets and developing countries have opposed this new IMF framework. As such, the ability to further extend the new constitutionalism of the free movement of capital is severely weakened

Effective dynamics of twisted and curved scroll waves using virtual filaments

Scroll waves are three-dimensional excitation patterns that rotate around a central filament curve; they occur in many physical, biological and chemical systems. We explicitly derive the equations of motion for scroll wave filaments in reaction-diffusion systems with isotropic diffusion up to third order in the filament's twist and curvature. The net drift components define at every instance of time a virtual filament which lies close to the instantaneous filament. Importantly, virtual filaments obey simpler, time-independent laws of motion which we analytically derive here and illustrate with numerical examples. Stability analysis of scroll waves is performed using virtual filaments, showing that filament curvature and twist add as quadratic terms to the nominal filament tension. Applications to oscillating chemical reactions and cardiac tissue are discussed.Comment: 28 page

Variational principle for non-linear wave propagation in dissipative systems

The dynamics of many natural systems is dominated by non-linear waves propagating through the medium. We show that the dynamics of non-linear wave fronts with positive surface tension can be formulated as a gradient system. The variational potential is simply given by a linear combination of the occupied volume and surface area of the wave front, and changes monotonically in time. Finally, we demonstrate that vortex filaments can be written as a gradient system only if their binormal velocity component vanishes, which occurs in chemical system with equal diffusion of reactants

Spiral wave chimeras in locally coupled oscillator systems

The recently discovered chimera state involves the coexistence of synchronized and desynchronized states for a group of identical oscillators. This fascinating chimera state has until now been found only in non-local or globally coupled oscillator systems. In this work, we for the first time show numerical evidence of the existence of spiral wave chimeras in reaction-diffusion systems where each element is locally coupled by diffusion. This spiral wave chimera rotates inwardly, i.e., coherent waves propagate toward the phase randomized core. A continuous transition from spiral waves with smooth core to spiral wave chimeras is found as we change the local dynamics of the system. Our findings on the spiral wave chimera in locally coupled oscillator systems largely improve our understanding of the chimera state and suggest that spiral chimera states may be found in natural systems which can be modeled by a set of oscillators indirectly coupled by a diffusive environment.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Transgender families

This chapter focuses on a specific type of transgender family, where one of the parents has come out as being transgender. It discusses the characteristics of these families, as well as some of the difficulties transgender families encounter following the coming out and social gender role transition of a partner and/or parent. The importance of involving partners, family members and the wider community in securing social support while transitioning is emphasized, as well as the value of peer support in various forms (individual and group, as well as face-to-face and on-line). It also highlights the lack of family support within transgender healthcare services and the need for professionals, coming into contact with members of transgender families, to be educated in this area

The positivity effect in older adults : the role of affective interference and inhibition

Objectives: Research shows that aging often involves a decrease in the experience of negative affect and might even be associated with a stabilization or an increase in experience concerning positive affect. As it has been suggested that these changes could be related to the processing of emotional information, the aim of this study was to investigate interference and inhibition toward sad and happy faces in healthy elderly people compared to a younger population. Method: We used an affective modification of the negative priming task. If interference is related to enhanced inhibition, reduced interference from negative stimuli and a related weakened inhibition toward negative stimuli in the elderly group would be in line with the positivity hypothesis. Results: As expected, the results indicated that interference from negative stimuli was significantly lower in older adults as compared to younger adults, whereas this was not the case for positive stimuli. Moreover, at inhibitory level a significantly reduced processing of negative stimuli was observed only in the older adult group, whereas there was no such effect in the case of positive material. Conclusion: These observations are indicative for a decreased negative bias in older adults at information processing level. This provides new insights with regard to age-related differences in emotion processing

Drift Laws for Spiral Waves on Curved Anisotropic Surfaces

Rotating spiral waves organize spatial patterns in chemical, physical and biological excitable systems. Factors affecting their dynamics such as spatiotemporal drift are of great interest for par- ticular applications. Here, we propose a quantitative description for spiral wave dynamics on curved surfaces which shows that for a wide class of systems, including the BZ reaction and anisotropic cardiac tissue, the Ricci curvature scalar of the surface is the main determinant of spiral wave drift. The theory provides explicit equations for spiral wave drift direction, drift velocity and the period of rotation. Depending on the parameters, the drift can be directed to the regions of either maximal or minimal Ricci scalar curvature, which was verified by direct numerical simulations.Comment: preprint before submission to Physical Review

Generalized minimal principle for rotor filaments

To a reaction-diffusion medium with an inhomogeneous anisotropic diffusion tensor D, we add a fourth spatial dimension such that the determinant of the diffusion tensor is constant in four dimensions. We propose a generalized minimal principle for rotor filaments, stating that the scroll wave filament strives to minimize its surface area in the higher-dimensional space. As a consequence, stationary scroll wave filaments in the original 3D medium are geodesic curves with respect to the metric tensor G = det(D)D-1. The theory is confirmed by numerical simulations for positive and negative filament tension and a model with a non-stationary spiral core. We conclude that filaments in cardiac tissue with positive tension preferentially reside or anchor in regions where cardiac cells are less interconnected, such as portions of the cardiac wall with a large number of cleavage planes

Fermionic Quasi-free States and Maps in Information Theory

This paper and the results therein are geared towards building a basic toolbox for calculations in quantum information theory of quasi-free fermionic systems. Various entropy and relative entropy measures are discussed and the calculation of these reduced to evaluating functions on the one-particle component of quasi-free states. The set of quasi-free affine maps on the state space is determined and fully characterized in terms of operations on one-particle subspaces. For a subclass of trace preserving completely positive maps and for their duals, Choi matrices and Jamiolkowski states are discussed.Comment: 19 page