Railway Reform in China.

The purpose of this working paper is to consider the current situation of Chinese Railways, the progress of reforms to date, and possible future developments. The first section describes the current problems of Chinese Railways, as a vast organisation subject to strong central control, facing enormous and rapidly growing demands which it is unable to satisfy. The progress of reform in Chinese Railways to date, and in particular the Economic Contract Responsibility System instituted in the late 1980's and the development of joint venture companies to build new lines, are then described. In the following section the key reform models found in other countries - deregulation and privatisation of vertically integrated regional companies; separation of infrastructure from operations with open access andlor franchising competitors; or reorganisation on the basis of business sectors - are then described. None is fully suitable for China, but it is suggested that a combination of sectorisation, more commercial independence, further development of joint public/private partnerships and more contracting out, is the most likely way forward

A multinomial quadrivariate D-vine copula mixed model for meta-analysis of diagnostic studies in the presence of non-evaluable subjects

Diagnostic test accuracy studies observe the result of a gold standard procedure that defines the presence or absence of a disease and the result of a diagnostic test. They typically report the number of true positives, false positives, true negatives and false negatives. However, diagnostic test outcomes can also be either non-evaluable positives or non-evaluable negatives. We propose a novel model for the meta-analysis of diagnostic studies in the presence of non-evaluable outcomes, which assumes independent multinomial distributions for the true and non-evaluable positives, and, the true and non-evaluable negatives, conditional on the latent sensitivity, specificity, probability of non-evaluable positives and probability of non-evaluable negatives in each study. For the random effects distribution of the latent proportions, we employ a drawable vine copula that can successively model the dependence in the joint tails. Our methodology is demonstrated with an extensive simulation study and applied to data from diagnostic accuracy studies of coronary computed tomography angiography for the detection of coronary artery disease. The comparison of our method with the existing approaches yields findings in the real data application that change the current conclusions

The utility of unmanned probes in lunar exploration

Utility of unmanned probes of Ranger or Surveyor class in Apollo exploration program - Lunar scientific exploratio

A simple explanation of the non-appearance of physical gluons and quarks

We show that the non-appearance of gluons and quarks as physical particles is a rigorous and automatic result of the full, i.e. nonperturbative, nonabelian nature of the color interaction in quantum chromodynamics. This makes it in general impossible to describe the color field as a collection of elementary quanta (gluons). Neither can a quark be an elementary quantum of the quark field, as the color field of which it is the source is itself a source, making isolated noninteracting quarks, crucial for a physical particle interpretation, impossible. In geometrical language, the impossibility of quarks and gluons as physical elementary particles arises due to the fact that the color Yang-Mills space does not have a constant trivial curvature. In QCD, the particles ``gluons'' and ``quarks'' are merely artifacts of an approximation method (the perturbative expansion) and are simply absent in the exact theory. This also coincides with the empirical, experimental evidence.Comment: 8 pages, Latex (to appear in Can.J.Phys.

Social work education, training and standards in the Asia-Pacific region

This article discusses the joint project between the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) to establish guidelines for the training and standard setting that elucidates what social work represents on a global level. While it is impossible to address all the issues that might be significant in such a large scope, attention is given to the challenges establishing global standards might encounter in a region as diverse as the Asia-Pacific

Approximate well-supported Nash equilibria in symmetric bimatrix games

The $\varepsilon$-well-supported Nash equilibrium is a strong notion of approximation of a Nash equilibrium, where no player has an incentive greater than $\varepsilon$ to deviate from any of the pure strategies that she uses in her mixed strategy. The smallest constant $\varepsilon$ currently known for which there is a polynomial-time algorithm that computes an $\varepsilon$-well-supported Nash equilibrium in bimatrix games is slightly below $2/3$. In this paper we study this problem for symmetric bimatrix games and we provide a polynomial-time algorithm that gives a $(1/2+\delta)$-well-supported Nash equilibrium, for an arbitrarily small positive constant $\delta$

Renormalization of Coulomb interaction in graphene: computing observable quantities

We address the computation of physical observables in graphene in the presence of Coulomb interactions of density-density type modeled with a static Coulomb potential within a quantum field theory perturbative renormalization scheme. We show that all the divergences encountered in the physical quantities are associated to the one loop electron self-energy and can be determined without ambiguities by a proper renormalization of the Fermi velocity. The renormalization of the photon polarization to second order in perturbation theory - a quantity directly related to the optical conductivity - is given as an example.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Run-and-tumble particles with hydrodynamics: sedimentation, trapping and upstream swimming

We simulate by lattice Boltzmann the nonequilibrium steady states of run-and-tumble particles (inspired by a minimal model of bacteria), interacting by far-field hydrodynamics, subject to confinement. Under gravity, hydrodynamic interactions barely perturb the steady state found without them, but for particles in a harmonic trap such a state is quite changed if the run length is larger than the confinement length: a self-assembled pump is formed. Particles likewise confined in a narrow channel show a generic upstream flux in Poiseuille flow: chiral swimming is not required

The gap exponent of XXZ model in a transverse field

We have calculated numerically the gap exponent of the anisotropic Heisenberg model in the presence of the transverse magnetic field. We have implemented the modified Lanczos method to obtain the excited states of our model with the same accuracy of the ground state. The coefficient of the leading term in the perturbation expansion diverges in the thermodynamic limit (N --> infinity). We have obtained the relation between this divergence and the scaling behaviour of the energy gap. We have found that the opening of gap in the presence of transverse field scales with a critical exponent which depends on the anisotropy parameter (Delta). Our numerical results are in well agreement with the field theoretical approach in the whole range of the anisotropy parameter, -1 < Delta < 1.Comment: 6 pages and 4 figure