12,820 research outputs found
The Qualified Legal Compliance Committee: Using the Attorney Conduct Rules to Restructure the Board of Directors
The Securities and Exchange Commission introduced a new corporate governance structure, the qualified legal compliance committee, as part of the professional standards of conduct for attorneys mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. QLCCs are consistent with the Commission\u27s general approach to improving corporate governance through specialized committees of independent directors. This Article suggests, however, that assessing the benefits and costs of creating QLCCs may be more complex than is initially apparent. Importantly, QLCCs are unlikely to be effective in the absence of incentives for active director monitoring. This Article concludes by considering three ways of increasing these incentives
Interpolating point spread function anisotropy
Planned wide-field weak lensing surveys are expected to reduce the
statistical errors on the shear field to unprecedented levels. In contrast,
systematic errors like those induced by the convolution with the point spread
function (PSF) will not benefit from that scaling effect and will require very
accurate modeling and correction. While numerous methods have been devised to
carry out the PSF correction itself, modeling of the PSF shape and its spatial
variations across the instrument field of view has, so far, attracted much less
attention. This step is nevertheless crucial because the PSF is only known at
star positions while the correction has to be performed at any position on the
sky. A reliable interpolation scheme is therefore mandatory and a popular
approach has been to use low-order bivariate polynomials. In the present paper,
we evaluate four other classical spatial interpolation methods based on splines
(B-splines), inverse distance weighting (IDW), radial basis functions (RBF) and
ordinary Kriging (OK). These methods are tested on the Star-challenge part of
the GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing 2010 (GREAT10) simulated data and
are compared with the classical polynomial fitting (Polyfit). We also test all
our interpolation methods independently of the way the PSF is modeled, by
interpolating the GREAT10 star fields themselves (i.e., the PSF parameters are
known exactly at star positions). We find in that case RBF to be the clear
winner, closely followed by the other local methods, IDW and OK. The global
methods, Polyfit and B-splines, are largely behind, especially in fields with
(ground-based) turbulent PSFs. In fields with non-turbulent PSFs, all
interpolators reach a variance on PSF systematics better than
the upper bound expected by future space-based surveys, with
the local interpolators performing better than the global ones
Testing baryon-induced core formation in CDM: A comparison of the DC14 and coreNFW dark matter halo models on galaxy rotation curves
Recent cosmological hydrodynamical simulations suggest that baryonic
processes, and in particular supernova feedback after bursts of star formation,
can alter the structure of dark matter haloes and transform primordial cusps
into shallower cores. To assess whether this mechanism offers a solution to the
cusp-core controversy, simulated haloes must be compared to real dark matter
haloes inferred from galaxy rotation curves. For this purpose, two new dark
matter density profiles were recently derived from simulations of galaxies in
complementary mass ranges: the DC14 halo () and the coreNFW halo (). Both models have individually been found to give good fits to
observed rotation curves. For the DC14 model, however, the agreement of the
predicted halo properties with cosmological scaling relations was confirmed by
one study, but strongly refuted by another. A next question is whether the two
models converge to the same solution in the mass range where both should be
appropriate. To investigate this, we tested the DC14 and cNFW halo models on
the rotation curves of a selection of galaxies with halo masses in the range - . We further applied the DC14
model to a set of rotation curves at higher halo masses, up to , to verify the agreement with the cosmological scaling
relations. We find that both models are generally able to reproduce the
observed rotation curves, in line with earlier results, and the predicted dark
matter haloes are consistent with the cosmological and
relations. The DC14 and cNFW models are also in fairly
good agreement with each other, even though DC14 tends to predict slightly less
extended cores and somewhat more concentrated haloes than cNFW.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in A&
Fractional Lindstedt series
The parametric equations of the surfaces on which highly resonant
quasi-periodic motions develop (lower-dimensional tori) cannot be analytically
continued, in general, in the perturbation parameter, i.e. they are not
analytic functions of the perturbation parameter. However rather generally
quasi-periodic motions whose frequencies satisfy only one rational relation
("resonances of order 1") admit formal perturbation expansions in terms of a
fractional power of the perturbation parameter, depending on the degeneration
of the resonance. We find conditions for this to happen, and in such a case we
prove that the formal expansion is convergent after suitable resummation.Comment: 40 pages, 6 figure
Comment on "Scalar-tensor gravity coupled to a global monopole and flat rotation curves" by Lee and Lee
The recent paper by Lee and Lee (2004) may strongly leave the impression that
astronomers have established that the rotation curves of spiral galaxies are
flat. We show that the old paradigm of Flat Rotation Curves lacks, today, any
observational support and following it at face value leads to intrinsically
flawed alternatives to the Standard Dark Matter Scenario. On the other side, we
claim that the rich systematics of spiral galaxy rotation curves, that reveals,
in the standard Newtonian Gravity framework, the phenomenon of dark matter, in
alternative scenarios, works as a unique benchmark.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, accepted in Phys. Rev.
Resummation of perturbation series and reducibility for Bryuno skew-product flows
We consider skew-product systems on T^d x SL(2,R) for Bryuno base flows close
to constant coefficients, depending on a parameter, in any dimension d, and we
prove reducibility for a large measure set of values of the parameter. The
proof is based on a resummation procedure of the formal power series for the
conjugation, and uses techniques of renormalisation group in quantum field
theory.Comment: 30 pages, 12 figure
Periodic solutions for a class of nonlinear partial differential equations in higher dimension
We prove the existence of periodic solutions in a class of nonlinear partial
differential equations, including the nonlinear Schroedinger equation, the
nonlinear wave equation, and the nonlinear beam equation, in higher dimension.
Our result covers cases where the bifurcation equation is infinite-dimensional,
such as the nonlinear Schroedinger equation with zero mass, for which solutions
which at leading order are wave packets are shown to exist.Comment: 34 page
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