Future wishes and constraints from the experiments at the LHC for the Proton-Proton programme

Hosting six different experiments at four different interaction points and widely different requirements for the running conditions, the LHC machine has been faced with a long list of challenges in the first three years of luminosity production (2010-2012, Run 1), many of which were potentially capable of limiting the performance due to instabilities resulting from the extremely high bunch brightness. Nonetheless, LHC met the challenges and performed extremely well at high efficiency and routinely with beam brightness at twice the design, well over one-third of the time in collision for physics, average luminosity lifetimes in excess of 10 h and extremely good background conditions in the experiments. While the experimental running configurations remain largely the same for the future high luminosity proton-proton operational mode, the energy and the luminosity should increase significantly, making a prior assessment of related beam-beam effects extremely important to guarantee high performance. Of particular interest is the need for levelling the luminosity individually in the different experiments. Luminosity control as the more general version of 'levelling' has been at the heart of the success for LHCb, and to a large extent also for ALICE, throughout Run 1. With the increasing energy and potential luminosity, luminosity control may be required by all the experiments at some point in the future as a means of controlling the pileup conditions and trigger rates, but possibly also as a way of optimizing the integrated luminosity. This paper reviews the various motivations and possibilities for controlling the luminosity from the experiments' point of view, and outlines the future running conditions and desiderata for the experiments as they are viewed currently, with the aim of giving guidelines for different options.Comment: 10 pages, contribution to the ICFA Mini-Workshop on Beam-Beam Effects in Hadron Colliders, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18-22 Mar 201

Radiocarbon evidence for the pace of the M-/L-PPNB transition in the 8th millennium BC south-west Asia

The transition from the Middle to Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) happened throughout southwest Asia in the mid-8th millennium cal BC. It entailed the abandonment of a number of sites, rapid growth of others, as well as the wide spread of morphologically domestic caprines. What remains an unknown is how rapid these processes were in real time. Over the period when the transition was taking place, the calibration curve has two shallow sections divided by a sudden drop, which for many of the older dates creates an illusion of a sudden cultural break around 7600–7500 cal BC. Yet a more detailed study presented in this paper suggests that the transition event could have been spread over a more extended period of time. This, however, is still far from certain due to risks of old wood effects and complexities of site formation

Political Media Contests and Confirmatory Bias

This paper models a two-period media contest between two political candidates campaigning to win an election. Two main cases are examined. In the first case voters behave as unbiased Bayesian updaters when assessing political information. The second case considers voters suffering from confirmatory bias. In the first case I find that candidates spend equal amounts of their campaign funds in both periods in equilibrium. In the second case, candidates spend more in period one. A candidate with better media access (in period one) does, however, better if voters suffer from confirmatory bias than if they do not.Election campaigns; voting behavior; confirmatory bias. Election campaigns; voting behavior; confirmatory bias. Election campaigns; voting behavior; confirmatory bias. Election campaigns; voting behavior; confirmatory bias

The Relation of Federal and State Securities Laws

   This paper presents a framework for guiding policy-makers intervening in emerging innovation systems in 'catching-up' countries. The process whereby the central policy issues are identified rests on the notion that there are seven key processes, or 'functions', involved in the formation of such systems and that these processes can be empirically studied. A 'functional approach' is argued to be helpful in finding 'system weaknesses' that can act as focusing mechanisms for policy-makers. An illustrative case from Germany is followed by an analysis of emerging innovation systems in catching-up countries, in particular Brazil, Korea and Chile.This is an electronic version of an article published in:Staffan Jacobsson and Anna Bergek, A framework for guiding policy makers intervening in emerging innovation systems in 'catching up' countries, 2007, European Journal of Development Research, (18), 4, 687-707.European Journal of Development Research is available online at informaworldTM: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09578810601094902Copyright: Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/default.as

Universal Robots as ‘Solutions’ to Wicked Problems: Debunking a Robotic Myth, Late breaking abstract, HRI’11, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Mobile Life CentreLIRE

Cultural Competency in a Post-Model Rule 8.4(g) World

Självmord är en av de vanligaste dödsorsakerna i Sverige. Personer som begått självmord lämnar efter sig närstående med en stor sorg. Syftet med studien var att undersöka huruvida närstående till personer som begått självmord får det stöd som de önskar. Studien är baserad på en kvantitativ metod genom ett webb-baserat frågeformulär med 66 deltagare. Urvalet utgår ifrån en kontakt med en ansvarig för anhörigorganisationen SPES (Riksförbundet för SuicidPrevention och Efterlevandes Stöd). Resultatet analyserades sedan med en kvantitativ deskriptiv statistik och kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Studiens resultat visade att 30% av deltagarna var det mer än sex år sedan självmordet skett. Nästan alla av deltagarna söktes upp eller blev erbjudna, på ett eller annat sätt, minst ett slags stöd. Majoriteten av deltagarna sökte i första hand stöd hos sin familj, släkt, vänner eller arbetskamrater. Av de närstående svarade 33% att de var nöjda med det stödet. Hälften av de närstående som fått något slags professionellt stöd upplevde att stödet var bra. Behov av att få stöd i vardagen påtalades av 29%. Studien visade sammanfattningsvis att många av deltagarna är missnöjda med det professionella stöd de erhållit. Deltagarna har ett stort behov av att uttrycka sina tankar och känslor trots att det gått lång tid sedan självmordet skett

Comics, robots, fashion and programming: outlining the concept of actDresses

This paper concerns the design of physical languages for controlling and programming robotic consumer products. For this purpose we explore basic theories of semiotics represented in the two separate fields of comics and fashion, and how these could be used as resources in the development of new physical languages. Based on these theories, the design concept of actDresses is defined, and supplemented by three example scenarios of how the concept can be used for controlling, programming, and predicting the behaviour of robotic systems

Nonsense and the Freedom of Speech: What Meaning Means for the First Amendment

A great deal of everyday expression is, strictly speaking, nonsense. But courts and scholars have done little to consider whether or why such meaningless speech, like nonrepresentational art, falls within “the freedom of speech.” If, as many suggest, meaning is what separates speech from sound and expression from conduct, then the constitutional case for nonsense is complicated. And because nonsense is so common, the case is also important — artists like Lewis Carroll and Jackson Pollock are not the only putative “speakers” who should be concerned about the outcome. This Article is the first to explore thoroughly the relationship between nonsense and the freedom of speech; in doing so, it suggests ways to determine what “meaning” means for First Amendment purposes. The Article begins by demonstrating the scope and constitutional salience of meaningless speech, showing that nonsense is multifarious, widespread, and sometimes intertwined with traditional First Amendment values like autonomy, the marketplace of ideas, and democracy. The second part of the Article argues that exploring nonsense can illuminate the meaning of meaning itself. This, too, is an important task, for although free speech discourse often relies on the concept of meaning to chart the Amendment’s scope, courts and scholars have done relatively little to establish what it entails. Analytic philosophers, meanwhile, have spent the past century doing little else. Their efforts — echoes of which can already be heard in First Amendment doctrine — suggest that free speech doctrine is best served by finding meaning in the way words are used, rather than in their relationship to extra-linguistic concepts