Towards the Holographic Dual of N = 2 SYK

The gravitational part of the holographic dual to the SYK model has been conjectured to be Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity. In this paper we construct an AdS2 background in N = (2,2) JT gravity and show that the gravitational dynamics are - as in the N = 0 and N = 1 cases - fully captured by the extrinsic curvature as an effective boundary action. This boundary term is given by the super-Schwarzian of the N = 2 SYK model, thereby providing further evidence of the JT/SYK duality. The chirality of this SYK model is reproduced by the inherent chirality of axial N = (2,2) supergravity.Comment: 22 pages,v2 references added, typos correcte

On modeled and observed warm rainfall occurrence and its relationships with cloud macrophysical properties

2014 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Rainfall from low-level, liquid-phase ("warm") clouds over the global oceans is ubiquitous and contributes non-negligibly to the total amount of precipitation that falls to the globe. In this study, modeled and observed warm rainfall occurrence and its bulk statistical relationships with cloud macrophysical properties are analyzed independently and directly compared with one another. Rain is found to fall from ~25% of the warm, maritime clouds observed from space by CloudSat and from ~27% of the warm clouds simulated within a large-scale, fine-resolution radiative convective equilibrium experiment performed with the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). Within both the model and the observations, the fractional occurrence of warm rainfall is found to increase with both column-integrated liquid water mass and cloud geometric depth, two cloud-scale properties that are shown to be directly related to one another. However, warm rain within RAMS is more likely with lower amounts of column water mass than observations indicate, suggesting that the parameterized cloud-to-rain conversion processes within RAMS produce rainfall too efficiently. To gain insight into the relationships between warm rainfall production and the concentration of liquid water within a cloud layer, warm rainfall occurrence is subsequently investigated as a joint, simultaneous function of both cloud depth and column-integrated water mass. While rainfall production within RAMS is largely governed by the availability of liquid water within the cloud volume, rain from observed warm clouds with relatively little column water mass is actually more likely to fall from deeper clouds with lower cloud-mean water contents. The latter, CloudSat-derived trend is shown to be robust across different seasons and environmental conditions; it varies little when the warm cloud distribution is stratified into ascending (day) and descending (night) CloudSat overpass groups. Using temperature differences between RAMS cloud tops and their immediate, surrounding environments as a proxy for cloud-top buoyancy, an attempt is then made to quantitatively investigate simulated warm rain occurrence within the broader context of cloud life cycle. It is found that rainfall likelihoods from RAMS-simulated warm clouds with cloud top temperatures warmer than their surrounding environments more closely resemble the overall CloudSat-derived rainfall occurrence trends. This result suggests that the CloudSat-observed warm cloud distribution is characterized by increased numbers of positively buoyant, developing clouds

The Case for Revisiting Contingent Liabilities under Article VIII

Prior to 2012, Washington municipalities frequently relied on contingentliability agreements (“CLA” or “CLAs”) to reduce borrowing costs because such liabilities did not constitute debt under article VIII of the Washington State Constitution. But the viability of CLAs was called into question by the Washington State Supreme Court’s 2012 plurality decision in In re Bond Issuance of Greater Wenatchee Regional Events Center Public Facilities District (“Wenatchee Events Center”), which applied a new method for determining what constitutes debt—the risk-of-loss principle—to conclude that the entire value of a CLA constitutes debt. This Essay urges the Court to revisit the opinion because the decision fails to offer clear guidance and relies on an unpersuasive distinction between debt and indebtedness to explain the holding. Additionally, this Essay argues that the risk-of-loss principle is not the correct standard for municipal debt because the framework is not supported by Washington precedent and the principle is a novel approach that disregards the origins of Washington’s debt provisions. If the Court decides to continue treating CLAs as debt, this Essay suggests the Court should not follow Wenatchee Event Center’s conclusion that the entire value of the CLA is debt and instead adopt the approach of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for governments: The amount of debt equals only that portion that is likely to become owed

Modeling Boundaries of Influence among Positional Uncertainty Fields

Within a CIS environment, the proper use of information requires the identification of the uncertainty associated with it. As such, there has been a substantial amount of research dedicated to describing and quantifying spatial data uncertainty. Recent advances in sensor technology and image analysis techniques are making image-derived geospatial data increasingly popular. Along with development in sensor and image analysis technologies have come departures from conventional point-by-point measurements. Current advancements support the transition from traditional point measures to novel techniques that allow the extraction of complex objects as single entities (e.g., road outlines, buildings). As the methods of data extraction advance, so too must the methods of estimating the uncertainty associated with the data. Not only will object uncertainties be modeled, but the connections between these uncertainties will also be estimated. The current methods for determining spatial accuracy for lines and areas typically involve defining a zone of uncertainty around the measured line, within which the actual line exists with some probability. Yet within the research community, the proper shape of this \u27uncertainty band\u27 is a topic with much dissent. Less contemplated is the manner in which such areas of uncertainty interact and influence one another. The development of positional error models, from the epsilon band and error band to the rigorous G-band, has focused on statistical models for estimating independent line features. Yet these models are not suited to model the interactions between uncertainty fields of adjacent features. At some point, these distributed areas of uncertainty around the features will intersect and overlap one another. In such instances, a feature\u27s uncertainty zone is defined not only by its measurement, but also by the uncertainty associated with neighboring features. It is therefore useful to understand and model the interactions between adjacent uncertainty fields. This thesis presents an analysis of estimation and modeling techniques of spatial uncertainty, focusing on the interactions among fields of positional uncertainty for image-derived linear features. Such interactions are assumed to occur between linear features derived from varying methods and sources, allowing the application of an independent error model. A synthetic uncertainty map is derived for a set of linear and aerial features, containing distributed fields of uncertainty for individual features. These uncertainty fields are shown to be advantageous for communication and user understanding, as well as being conducive to a variety of image processing techniques. Such image techniques can combine overlapping uncertainty fields to model the interaction between them. Deformable contour models are used to extract sets of continuous uncertainty boundaries for linear features, and are subsequently applied to extract a boundary of influence shared by two uncertainty fields. These methods are then applied to a complex scene of uncertainties, modeling the interactions of multiple objects within the scene. The resulting boundary uncertainty representations are unique from the previous independent error models which do not take neighboring influences into account. By modeling the boundary of interaction among the uncertainties of neighboring features, a more integrated approach to error modeling and analysis can be developed for complex spatial scenes and datasets

Paying for loyalty: product bundling in oligopoly

In recent times, pairs of retailers such as supermarket and retail gasoline chains have offered bundled discounts to customers who buy their respective product brands. These discounts are a fixed amount off the headline prices that allied brands continue to set independently. In this paper, we model this bundling using Hotelling competition between two brands of each product. We show that a pair of firms can profit from offering a bundled discount to the detriment of firms who do not bundle and consumers whose preferences are farther removed from the bundled brands. Indeed, when both pairs of firms negotiate bundling arrangements, there are no beneficiaries (the effect on equilibrium profits is zero) and consumers simply find themselves consuming a sub-optimal brand mix. If the two separate products are owned by the same firm, additional complications arise although if both product sets are integrated, no bundled discounts are offered in equilibrium

Detrimental Determinants: The Impacts of Neoliberalism on Pro-Environmental Behaviors

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on July 29, 2015Thesis advisor: Marc GarcelonVitaIncludes bibliographic references (pages 109-120)Thesis (M.A.)--Department of Sociology. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2015The mounting evidence of anthropogenic climate change in the past 30 years has beckoned the social sciences to illuminate and address the complex phenomena underlying actions that impact the environment. While many studies have considered salient indicators of pro-environmental behavior (PEB) in the United States, little research has assessed how economic ideologies influence such behaviors at the individual level. Accordingly, this study develops and tests a sociological augmentation of the Theory of Planned Behavior in an effort to understand how neoliberal market ideology impacts the frequency and likelihood of behaviors that benefit the environment. Using data from the 2010 General Social Survey and the Environment III module of the International Social Survey Program (N=1430), the impacts of market-fundamentalist endorsements are tested using hierarchical regression techniques on a variety of environmentally significant behavioral outcomes. Results indicate that neoliberalism overall plays a significant and often negative role in individual pro-environmental behavior, which empirically challenges the assertion that markets can simultaneously self-regulate and address environmental degradation. Insights for future research, theoretical synthesis, and public policy are discussed.Introduction -- Literature review -- Methods -- results -- Discussio

Neural differentiation is moderated by age in scene- but not face-selective cortical regions

The aging brain is characterized by neural dedifferentiation, an apparent decrease in the functional selectivity of category-selective cortical regions. Age-related reductions in neural differentiation have been proposed to play a causal role in cognitive aging. Recent findings suggest, however, that age-related dedifferentiation is not equally evident for all stimulus categories and, additionally, that the relationship between neural differentiation and cognitive performance is not moderated by age. In light of these findings, in the present experiment, younger and older human adults (males and females) underwent fMRI as they studied words paired with images of scenes or faces before a subsequent memory task. Neural selectivity was measured in two scene-selective (parahippocampal place area (PPA) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC)] and two face-selective [fusiform face area (FFA) and occipital face area (OFA)] regions using both a univariate differentiation index and multivoxel pattern similarity analysis. Both methods provided highly convergent results, which revealed evidence of age-related reductions in neural dedifferentiation in scene-selective but not face-selective cortical regions. Additionally, neural differentiation in the PPA demonstrated a positive, age-invariant relationship with subsequent source memory performance (recall of the image category paired with each recognized test word). These findings extend prior findings suggesting that age-related neural dedifferentiation is not a ubiquitous phenomenon, and that the specificity of neural responses to scenes is predictive of subsequent memory performance independently of age

Spatio-temporal influence of tundra snow properties on Ku-band (17.2 GHz) backscatter

During the 2010/11 boreal winter, a distributed set of backscatter measurements was collected using a ground-based Ku-band (17.2 GHz) scatterometer system at 26 open tundra sites. A standard snow-sampling procedure was completed after each scan to evaluate local variability in snow layering, depth, density and water equivalent (SWE) within the scatterometer field of view. The shallow depths and large basal depth hoar encountered presented an opportunity to evaluate backscatter under a set of previously untested conditions. Strong Ku-band response was found with increasing snow depth and snow water equivalent (SWE). In particular, co-polarized vertical backscatter increased by 0.82 dB for every 1 cm increase in SWE (R2 = 0.62). While the result indicated strong potential for Ku-band retrieval of shallow snow properties, it did not characterize the influence of sub-scan variability. An enhanced snow-sampling procedure was introduced to generate detailed characterizations of stratigraphy within the scatterometer field of view using near-infrared photography along the length of a 5m trench. Changes in snow properties along the trench were used to discuss variations in the collocated backscatter response. A pair of contrasting observation sites was used to highlight uncertainties in backscatter response related to short length scale spatial variability in the observed tundra environment

Equivariant intersection cohomology of the circle actions

In this paper, we prove that the orbit space B and the Euler class of an action of the circle S^1 on X determine both the equivariant intersection cohomology of the pseudomanifold X and its localization. We also construct a spectral sequence converging to the equivariant intersection cohomology of X whose third term is described in terms of the intersection cohomology of B.Comment: Final version as accepted in RACSAM. The final publication is available at springerlink.com; Revista de la Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales. Serie A. Matematicas, 201