Moveable worlds/digital scenographies

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ Intellect Ltd 2010.The mixed reality choreographic installation UKIYO explored in this article reflects an interest in scenographic practices that connect physical space to virtual worlds and explore how performers can move between material and immaterial spaces. The spatial design for UKIYO is inspired by Japanese hanamichi and western fashion runways, emphasizing the research production company's commitment to various creative crossovers between movement languages, innovative wearable design for interactive performance, acoustic and electronic sound processing and digital image objects that have a plastic as well as an immaterial/virtual dimension. The work integrates various forms of making art in order to visualize things that are not in themselves visual, or which connect visual and kinaesthetic/tactile/auditory experiences. The ‘Moveable Worlds’ in this essay are also reflections of the narrative spaces, subtexts and auditory relationships in the mutating matrix of an installation-space inviting the audience to move around and follow its sensorial experiences, drawn near to the bodies of the dancers.Brunel University, the British Council, and the Japan Foundation

Politicians' Outside Earnings and Electoral Competition

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians' outside earnings. We propose a simple theoretical model with politicians facing a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The model has a testable implication stating that the amount of time spent on outside work is negatively related to the degree of electoral competition. We test this implication using a new dataset on outside earnings of members of the German federal assembly. Taking into account the potential endogeneity of measures of political competition that depend on past election outcomes, we find that politicians facing low competition have substantially higher outside earnings

Utility Maximization, Risk Aversion, and Stochastic Dominance

Consider an investor trading dynamically to maximize expected utility from terminal wealth. Our aim is to study the dependence between her risk aversion and the distribution of the optimal terminal payoff. Economic intuition suggests that high risk aversion leads to a rather concentrated distribution, whereas lower risk aversion results in a higher average payoff at the expense of a more widespread distribution. Dybvig and Wang [J. Econ. Theory, 2011, to appear] find that this idea can indeed be turned into a rigorous mathematical statement in one-period models. More specifically, they show that lower risk aversion leads to a payoff which is larger in terms of second order stochastic dominance. In the present study, we extend their results to (weakly) complete continuous-time models. We also complement an ad-hoc counterexample of Dybvig and Wang, by showing that these results are "fragile", in the sense that they fail in essentially any model, if the latter is perturbed on a set of arbitrarily small probability. On the other hand, we establish that they hold for power investors in models with (conditionally) independent increments.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure, to appear in Mathematics and Financial Economic

A brief introduction to Luttinger liquids

I give a brief introduction to Luttinger liquids. Luttinger liquids are paramagnetic one-dimensional metals without Landau quasi-particle excitations. The elementary excitations are collective charge and spin modes, leading to charge-spin separation. Correlation functions exhibit power-law behavior. All physical properties can be calculated, e.g. by bosonization, and depend on three parameters only: the renormalized coupling constant $K_{\rho}$, and the charge and spin velocities. I also discuss the stability of Luttinger liquids with respect to temperature, interchain coupling, lattice effects and phonons, and list important open problems.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, to be published in the Proceedings of the International Winterschool on Electronic Properties of Novel Materials 2000, Kirchberg, March 4-11, 200

An explicit calculation of the Ronkin function

We calculate the second order derivatives of the Ronkin function in the case of an affine linear polynomial in three variables and give an expression of them in terms of complete elliptic integrals and hypergeometric functions. This gives a semi-explicit expression of the associated Monge-Amp\`ere measure, the Ronkin measure.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figure