Struggling to a monumental triumph : Re-assessing the final stages of the smallpox eradication program in India, 1960-1980

The global smallpox program is generally presented as the brainchild of a handful of actors from the WHO headquarters in Geneva and at the agency's regional offices. This article attempts to present a more complex description of the drive to eradicate smallpox. Based on the example of India, a major focus of the campaign, it is argued that historians and public health officials should recognize the varying roles played by a much wider range of participants. Highlighting the significance of both Indian and international field officials, the author shows how bureaucrats and politicians at different levels of administration and society managed to strengthen—yet sometimes weaken—important program components. Centrally dictated strategies developed at WHO offices in Geneva and New Delhi, often in association with Indian federal authorities, were reinterpreted by many actors and sometimes changed beyond recognition

Pieces of nilpotent cones for classical groups

We compare orbits in the nilpotent cone of type $B_n$, that of type $C_n$, and Kato's exotic nilpotent cone. We prove that the number of \F_q-points in each nilpotent orbit of type $B_n$ or $C_n$ equals that in a corresponding union of orbits, called a type-$B$ or type-$C$ piece, in the exotic nilpotent cone. This is a finer version of Lusztig's result that corresponding special pieces in types $B_n$ and $C_n$ have the same number of \F_q-points. The proof requires studying the case of characteristic 2, where more direct connections between the three nilpotent cones can be established. We also prove that the type-$B$ and type-$C$ pieces of the exotic nilpotent cone are smooth in any characteristic.Comment: 32 page

Geometric Satake, Springer correspondence, and small representations II

For a split reductive group scheme $G$ over a commutative ring $k$ with Weyl group $W$, there is an important functor $Rep(G,k) \to Rep(W,k)$ defined by taking the zero weight space. We prove that the restriction of this functor to the subcategory of small representations has an alternative geometric description, in terms of the affine Grassmannian and the nilpotent cone of the Langlands dual group to $G$. The translation from representation theory to geometry is via the Satake equivalence and the Springer correspondence. This generalizes the result for the $k=\mathbb{C}$ case proved by the first two authors, and also provides a better explanation than in that earlier paper, since the current proof is uniform across all types.Comment: Version 4: minor revisions; 73 page

Normality of orbit closures in the enhanced nilpotent cone

We continue the study of the closures of $GL(V)$-orbits in the enhanced nilpotent cone V\times\cN begun by the first two authors. We prove that each closure is an invariant-theoretic quotient of a suitably-defined enhanced quiver variety. We conjecture, and prove in special cases, that these enhanced quiver varieties are normal complete intersections, implying that the enhanced nilpotent orbit closures are also normal.Comment: 30 page

Modular generalized Springer correspondence: an overview

This is an overview of our series of papers on the modular generalized Springer correspondence. It is an expansion of a lecture given by the second author in the Fifth Conference of the Tsinghua Sanya International Mathematics Forum, Sanya, December 2014, as part of the Master Lecture `Algebraic Groups and their Representations' Workshop honouring G. Lusztig. The material that has not appeared in print before includes some discussion of the motivating idea of modular character sheaves, and heuristic remarks about geometric functors of parabolic induction and restriction.Comment: 19 pages. Version 2 includes more examples and tables in Section

Modular generalized Springer correspondence II: classical groups

We construct a modular generalized Springer correspondence for any classical group, by generalizing to the modular setting various results of Lusztig in the case of characteristic-$0$ coefficients. We determine the cuspidal pairs in all classical types, and compute the correspondence explicitly for $\mathrm{SL}(n)$ with coefficients of arbitrary characteristic and for $\mathrm{SO}(n)$ and $\mathrm{Sp}(2n)$ with characteristic-$2$ coefficients.Comment: 52 pages. Version 2 corrects a minor mistake in the combinatorics of the type D case; no numbered statements are affected. Version 3 has minor additions, mostly in Section 2; final version, to appear in J. Eur. Math. So

Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. Our statistical framework uses light growth to supplement existing income growth measures. The framework is applied to countries with the lowest quality income data, resulting in estimates of growth that differ substantially from established estimates. We then consider a longstanding debate: do increases in local agricultural productivity increase city incomes? For African cities, we find that exogenous agricultural productivity shocks (high rainfall years) have substantial effects on local urban economic activity.economic growth; remote sensing; urbanization; income measurement

Modular generalized Springer correspondence III: exceptional groups

We complete the construction of the modular generalized Springer correspondence for an arbitrary connected reductive group, with a uniform proof of the disjointness of induction series that avoids the case-by-case arguments for classical groups used in previous papers in the series. We show that the induction series containing the trivial local system on the regular nilpotent orbit is determined by the Sylow subgroups of the Weyl group. Under some assumptions, we give an algorithm for determining the induction series associated to the minimal cuspidal datum with a given central character. We also provide tables and other information on the modular generalized Springer correspondence for quasi-simple groups of exceptional type, including a complete classification of cuspidal pairs in the case of good characteristic, and a full determination of the correspondence in type $G_2$.Comment: 40 pages. Version 2: added section 7.5, modified Table 5.2 to match current conventions of GAP3. Version 3 has minor edits suggested by the referee, including a slight strengthening of Proposition 3.2; final version, to appear in Math. Annale

Corrigendum to `Orbit closures in the enhanced nilpotent cone', published in Adv. Math. 219 (2008)

In this note, we point out an error in the proof of Theorem 4.7 of [P. Achar and A.~Henderson, `Orbit closures in the enhanced nilpotent cone', Adv. Math. 219 (2008), 27-62], a statement about the existence of affine pavings for fibres of a certain resolution of singularities of an enhanced nilpotent orbit closure. We also give independent proofs of later results that depend on that statement, so all other results of that paper remain valid.Comment: 4 pages. The original paper, in a version almost the same as the published version, is arXiv:0712.107