Sustainable development and institutions: The case of property rights

Property rights correspond to one of the central institutions in the debate on sustainability. Nowadays, and in the case of landed property rights, this importance has been worldwide increased by the concerns on food security and climate change. In fact, the control and use of important natural resources allowed by the institution of property are crucial to food production and the mitigation of climatic changes. The paper presents the institution of property rights considering the contribution of economic theory, namely Classical Political Economists and Institutionalism perspective. The revision of literature and conceptual approach on property rights is followed by the analysis of crucial norms regarding the definition of landed property rights in the Portuguese case, providing the base to critically address this institution within the debate on sustainability.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Mack : A Comedy Television Pilot

My Capstone project is titled Mack. The project entails writing, producing, casting, budgeting, scheduling, directing and editing an original dark, observational television pilot. Mack explores the world, inner thoughts and expectations of college junior Mack Green, as he navigates school, romance, and everyday life. The project is broken up into three stand-alone narratives: “Smoking,” “Chivalry,” and “Advice.

Towards a political economy of land: reciprocal rights and duties in private property

The paper explores some fundamental aspects of a Political Economy of Land such as the definition of rights and duties in legal and ethical terms. The increasing demands of sustainability introduces the need of a critical analysis of this institution with the purpose to explain and improve the present discussion that pursue alternative forms of appropriation and use of natural resources such as land. The responsibility involved in property rights and, thus, its conception in reciprocal terms, is present in some of the most important works of economic thought, namely Classical Political Economy and Old Institutionalism. These theories present important insights to the conception of land and its exploitation. The analysis of the legal rules that define property rights in the Portuguese case stresses the rights and duties involved in property. Besides Law, a Political Economy of Land should consider Ethics, namely Land Ethics. Therefore, the paper presents an essay for the analysis of property rights trough economic, legal and ethical concerns envisaging the design of a Political Economy of Land.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Land and law: reciprocal rights and duties in private property

The paper aims to explore the property concept as one which includes the definition of rights and duties. It is important to discuss this concept in an attempt to improve the present discussion about the appropriation and exploitation of natural resources such as land in general and farm land in particular. The responsibility associated with rights and, thus, its conception in reciprocal terms, is present in some of the main works of economic thought. In developed societies legal rules play an important role in the definition of rights and reciprocal duties. This importance justifies the contact with and the analysis of the legal rules that define property rights in a specific case – that of Portugal. The previous considerations reveal the approach adopted in property rights study and can be summed up in three words: memory, plurality and (legal) reality. These options offer an essay for the analysis of rights in its human dimension, including, as a final note, some ethical considerations that involve man-nature relations

Local Anomalies, Local Equivariant Cohomology and the Variational Bicomplex

The locality conditions for the vanishing of local anomalies in field theory are shown to admit a geometrical interpretation in terms of local equivariant cohomology, thus providing a method to deal with the problem of locality in the geometrical approaches to the study of local anomalies based on the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. The local cohomology is shown to be related to the cohomology of jet bundles by means of the variational bicomplex theory. Using these results and the techniques for the computation of the cohomology of invariant variational bicomplexes in terms of relative Gel'fand-Fuks cohomology introduced in [6], we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the cancellation of local gravitational and mixed anomalies.Comment: 36 pages. The paper is divided in two part

Aspects of the Unitarized Soft Multipomeron Approach in DIS and Diffraction

We study in detail the main features of the unitarized Regge model (CFKS), recently proposed to describe the small-$Q^2$ domain. It takes into account a two-component description with two types of unitarized contributions: one is the multiple pomeron exchange contribution, interacting with the large dipole configurations, and the other one consists of a unitarized dipole cross section, describing the interaction with the small size dipoles. We analyze the ratio between soft and hard pieces as a function of the virtuality, and also compare the resulting dipole cross section to that from the saturation model. Diffraction dissociation is also considered, showing the scaling violations in diffractive DIS and estimating the corresponding logarithmic slope.Comment: 14 pages, 5 postscript figures. Version to be published in Eur. Phys. J.

Capturing coevolutionary signals in repeat proteins

The analysis of correlations of amino acid occurrences in globular proteins has led to the development of statistical tools that can identify native contacts -- portions of the chains that come to close distance in folded structural ensembles. Here we introduce a statistical coupling analysis for repeat proteins -- natural systems for which the identification of domains remains challenging. We show that the inherent translational symmetry of repeat protein sequences introduces a strong bias in the pair correlations at precisely the length scale of the repeat-unit. Equalizing for this bias reveals true co-evolutionary signals from which local native-contacts can be identified. Importantly, parameter values obtained for all other interactions are not significantly affected by the equalization. We quantify the robustness of the procedure and assign confidence levels to the interactions, identifying the minimum number of sequences needed to extract evolutionary information in several repeat protein families. The overall procedure can be used to reconstruct the interactions at long distances, identifying the characteristics of the strongest couplings in each family, and can be applied to any system that appears translationally symmetric

Electron degeneracy and intrinsic magnetic properties of epitaxial Nb:SrTiO3_3 thin-films controlled by defects

We report thermoelectric power experiments in e-doped thin films of SrTiO$_3$ (STO) which demonstrate that the electronic band degeneracy can be lifted through defect management during growth. We show that even small amounts of cationic vacancies, combined with epitaxial stress, produce a homogeneous tetragonal distortion of the films, resulting in a Kondo-like resistance upturn at low temperature, large anisotropic magnetoresistance, and non-linear Hall effect. Ab-initio calculations confirm a different occupation of each band depending on the degree of tetragonal distortion. The phenomenology reported in this paper for tetragonally distorted e-doped STO thin films, is similarto that observed in LaAlO$_3$/STO interfaces and magnetic STO quantum wells.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure