Equity and Patterns of Library Governance

published or submitted for publicatio

A sustainable model for ICT capacity building in developing countries

System administrators are often asked to apply their professional expertise in unusual situations, or under tight resource constraints. What happens, though, when the “situation” is a foreign country with only basic technical infrastructure, and the task is to bauild systems which are able to survive and grow in these over-constrained environments? In this paper we report on our experiences in two very different countries – Cuba and Ethiopia – where we ran a number of ICT projects. In those projects we assisted local universities to upgrade their ICT infrastructure and services. This included skills and process building for local system administrators. Based on our experiences we formulate a model for sustainable ICT capacity building. We hope this model will be useful for other organizations doing similar projects

Nodal separators of holomorphic foliations

We study a special kind of local invariant sets of singular holomorphic foliations called nodal separators. We define notions of equisingularity and topological equivalence for nodal separators as intrinsic objects and, in analogy with the celebrated theorem of Zariski for analytic curves, we prove the equivalence of these notions. We give some applications in the study of topological equivalences of holomorphic foliations. In particular, we show that the nodal singularities and its eigenvalues in the resolution of a generalized curve are topological invariants

The crust cooling curve of the neutron star in MXB 1659-29

We have monitored the quasi-persistent neutron-star X-ray transient MXB 1659-29 in quiescence using Chandra. The purpose of our observations was to monitor the quiescent behavior of the source after its last prolonged outburst episode and to study the cooling curve of the neutron star in this system. We discuss the results obtained and how they constrain the properties of the neutron star in MXB 1659-29Comment: To appear in Proceedings of IAU Colloquium 194 "Compact binaries in the Galaxy and beyond" (Rev. Mex. A&A Conf. Series), eds. G. Tovmassian and E. Sio