Partnership law for the new millennium

Paper outlining the history of partnership law in the United Kingdom and suggested proposals from the Law Commission for England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission for reform to problem areas such as: the firm as equity, unnecessary closure of business and mechanisms for dissolution of solvent partnerships. Article taken from the introduction given by Professor Henning at the conference on partnership law reform staged on 4th June 2001 by the Centre for Corporate Law and Practice at the IALS, the Law Commission for England and Wales, and the Scottish Law Commission. Published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London

Efficient generation and optimization of stochastic template banks by a neighboring cell algorithm

Placing signal templates (grid points) as efficiently as possible to cover a multi-dimensional parameter space is crucial in computing-intensive matched-filtering searches for gravitational waves, but also in similar searches in other fields of astronomy. To generate efficient coverings of arbitrary parameter spaces, stochastic template banks have been advocated, where templates are placed at random while rejecting those too close to others. However, in this simple scheme, for each new random point its distance to every template in the existing bank is computed. This rapidly increasing number of distance computations can render the acceptance of new templates computationally prohibitive, particularly for wide parameter spaces or in large dimensions. This work presents a neighboring cell algorithm that can dramatically improve the efficiency of constructing a stochastic template bank. By dividing the parameter space into sub-volumes (cells), for an arbitrary point an efficient hashing technique is exploited to obtain the index of its enclosing cell along with the parameters of its neighboring templates. Hence only distances to these neighboring templates in the bank are computed, massively lowering the overall computing cost, as demonstrated in simple examples. Furthermore, we propose a novel method based on this technique to increase the fraction of covered parameter space solely by directed template shifts, without adding any templates. As is demonstrated in examples, this method can be highly effective..Comment: PRD accepte

Size distribution of dust grains: A problem of self-similarity

Distribution functions describing the results of natural processes frequently show the shape of power laws, e.g., mass functions of stars and molecular clouds, velocity spectrum of turbulence, size distributions of asteroids, micrometeorites and also interstellar dust grains. It is an open question whether this behavior is a result simply coming about by the chosen mathematical representation of the observational data or reflects a deep-seated principle of nature. The authors suppose the latter being the case. Using a dust model consisting of silicate and graphite grains Mathis et al. (1977) showed that the interstellar extinction curve can be represented by taking a grain radii distribution of power law type n(a) varies as a(exp -p) with 3.3 less than or equal to p less than or equal to 3.6 (example 1) as a basis. A different approach to understanding power laws like that in example 1 becomes possible by the theory of self-similar processes (scale invariance). The beta model of turbulence (Frisch et al., 1978) leads in an elementary way to the concept of the self-similarity dimension D, a special case of Mandelbrot's (1977) fractal dimension. In the frame of this beta model, it is supposed that on each stage of a cascade the system decays to N clumps and that only the portion beta N remains active further on. An important feature of this model is that the active eddies become less and less space-filling. In the following, the authors assume that grain-grain collisions are such a scale-invarient process and that the remaining grains are the inactive (frozen) clumps of the cascade. In this way, a size distribution n(a) da varies as a(exp -(D+1))da (example 2) results. It seems to be highly probable that the power law character of the size distribution of interstellar dust grains is the result of a self-similarity process. We can, however, not exclude that the process leading to the interstellar grain size distribution is not fragmentation at all. It could be, e.g., diffusion-limited growth discussed by Sander (1986), who applied the theory of fractal geometry to the classification of non-equilibrium growth processes. He received D=2.4 for diffusion-limited aggregation in 3d-space

Functional and structural brain differences associated with mirror-touch synaesthesia

Observing touch is known to activate regions of the somatosensory cortex but the interpretation of this finding is controversial (e.g. does it reflect the simulated action of touching or the simulated reception of touch?). For most people, observing touch is not linked to reported experiences of feeling touch but in some people it is (mirror-touch synaesthetes). We conducted an fMRI study in which participants (mirror-touch synaesthetes, controls) watched movies of stimuli (face, dummy, object) being touched or approached. In addition we examined whether mirror touch synaesthesia is associated with local changes of grey and white matter volume in the brain using VBM (voxel-based morphometry). Both synaesthetes and controls activated the somatosensory system (primary and secondary somatosensory cortices, SI and SII) when viewing touch, and the same regions were activated (by a separate localiser) when feeling touch — i.e. there is a mirror system for touch. However, when comparing the two groups, we found evidence that SII seems to play a particular important role in mirror-touch synaesthesia: in synaesthetes, but not in controls, posterior SII was active for watching touch to a face (in addition to SI and posterior temporal lobe); activity in SII correlated with subjective intensity measures of mirror-touch synaesthesia (taken outside the scanner), and we observed an increase in grey matter volume within the SII of the synaesthetes' brains. In addition, the synaesthetes showed hypo-activity when watching touch to a dummy in posterior SII. We conclude that the secondary somatosensory cortex has a key role in this form of synaesthesia

Bogoliubov excitation spectrum of an elongated condensate from quasi-one-dimensional to three-dimensional transition

The quasiparticle excitation spectra of a Bose gas trapped in a highly anisotropic trap is studied with respect to varying total number of particles by numerically solving the effective one-dimensional (1D) Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation proposed recently by Mateo \textit{et al.}. We obtain the static properties and Bogoliubov spectra of the system in the high energy domain. This method is computationally efficient and highly accurate for a condensate system undergoing a 1D to three-dimensional (3D) cigar-shaped transition, as is shown through a comparison our results with both those calculated by the 3D-GP equation and analytical results obtained in limiting cases. We identify the applicable parameter space for the effective 1D-GP equation and find that this equation fails to describe a system with large number of atoms. We also identify that the description of the transition from 1D Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to 3D cigar-shaped BEC using this equation is not smooth, which highlights the fact that for a finite value of $a_\perp/a_s$ the junction between the 1D and 3D crossover is not perfect.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure

Quantum Andreev Map: A Paradigm of Quantum Chaos in Superconductivity. .

We introduce quantum maps with particle-hole conversion (Andreev reflection) and particle-hole symmetry, which exhibit the same excitation gap as quantum dots in the proximity to a superconductor. Computationally, the Andreev maps are much more efficient than billiard models of quantum dots. This makes it possible to test analytical predictions of random-matrix theory and semiclassical chaos that were previously out of reach of computer simulations. We have observed the universal distribution of the excitation gap for a large Lyapunov exponent and the logarithmic reduction of the gap when the Ehrenfest time becomes comparable to the quasiparticle dwell time

A rotating disk around the very young massive star AFGL 490

We observed the embedded, young 8--10 Msun star AFGL 490 at subarcsecond resolution with the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the C17O (2--1) transition and found convincing evidence that AFGL 490 is surrounded by a rotating disk. Using two-dimensional modeling of the physical and chemical disk structure coupled to line radiative transfer, we constrain its basic parameters. We obtain a relatively high disk mass of 1 Msun and a radius of ~ 1500 AU. A plausible explanation for the apparent asymmetry of the disk morphology is given.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Meson and Quark Degrees of Freedom and the Radius of the Deuteron

The existing experimental data for the deuteron charge radius are discussed. The data of elastic electron scattering are inconsistent with the value obtained in a recent atomic physics experiment. Theoretical predictions based on a nonrelativistic description of the deuteron with realistic nucleon-nucleon potentials and with a rather complete set of meson-exchange contributions to the charge operator are presented. Corrections arising from the quark-gluon substructure of the nucleon are explored in a nonrelativistic quark model; the quark-gluon corrections, not accounted for by meson exchange, are small. Our prediction for the deuteron charge radius favors the value of a recent atomic physics experiment.Comment: 20 pages, LaTeX, 4 Postscript figures, to appear in Few-Body-System