92,150 research outputs found
Governance, rational choice and new public management (npm): a general view (and some critics)
This article aims to study the New Public Management (NPM), one of the main trends associated to neoliberalism. It studies governance to show its general, wider and abstract scope. It also focuses on the Rational Choice as an important theory about governance, a basis for NPM. And it observes the neoliberal foundations of NPM, showing critical aspects of its real practice. Methodology: hypothetical deductive method of research, with a qualitative and critical approach and bibliographic-documental research technique. As results of this research, we can conclude that: i) the ideological usage of NPM has been expressed in a culture of minimal state and
government - but in practice, such culture, when embossing implemented reforms, seldom reverted the role of the state, destroyed social safety nets, and placed the tax burden on the working majority rather than on the wealthy elite; ii) advocates for NPM have Western-shaped minds, generally making erroneous assumptions about institutions and cultures, which
may be present in Anglo-American countries, but not in other culturally different ones; iii) in practice, NPM reforms were imposed to low-income countries by donor institutions to adjust their states for good governance - but those reforms did not solve problems with inefficiency and corruption. This work is original and valuable because it shows that even
when public policies highlight the importance of less
state intervention, solid norms and institutions are
always necessary, and because it helps demystifying
discourses that simply put that less state/more market
politics can be valuable everywhere
Kardar-Parisi-Zhang growth on one-dimensional decreasing substrates
Recent experimental works on one-dimensional (1D) circular
Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) systems whose radii decrease in time have reported
controversial conclusions about the statistics of their interfaces. Motivated
by this, we investigate here several 1D KPZ models on substrates whose size
changes in time as , focusing on the case . From
extensive numerical simulations, we show that for there exists a
transient regime in which the statistics is consistent with that of flat KPZ
systems (the case), for both . Actually,
for a given model, and , we observe that a difference between
ingrowing () systems arises only at long
times (), when the expanding surfaces cross over to
the statistics of curved KPZ systems, whereas the shrinking ones become
completely correlated. A generalization of the Family-Vicsek scaling for the
roughness of ingrowing interfaces is presented. Our results demonstrate that a
transient flat statistics is a general feature of systems starting with large
initial sizes, regardless their curvature. This is consistent with their recent
observation in ingrowing turbulent liquid crystal interfaces, but it is in
contrast with the apparent observation of curved statistics in colloidal
deposition at the edge of evaporating drops. A possible explanation for this
last result, as a consequence of the very small number of monolayers analyzed
in this experiment, is given. This is illustrated in a competitive growth model
presenting a few-monolayer transient and an asymptotic behavior consistent,
respectively, with the curved and flat statistics.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
Width and extremal height distributions of fluctuating interfaces with window boundary conditions
We present a detailed study of squared local roughness (SLRDs) and local
extremal height distributions (LEHDs), calculated in windows of lateral size
, for interfaces in several universality classes, in substrate dimensions
and . We show that their cumulants follow a Family-Vicsek
type scaling, and, at early times, when ( is the correlation
length), the rescaled SLRDs are given by log-normal distributions, with their
th cumulant scaling as . This give rise to an
interesting temporal scaling for such cumulants , with . This scaling is analytically
proved for the Edwards-Wilkinson (EW) and Random Deposition interfaces, and
numerically confirmed for other classes. In general, it is featured by small
corrections and, thus, it yields exponents 's (and, consequently,
, and ) in nice agreement with their respective universality
class. Thus, it is an useful framework for numerical and experimental
investigations, where it is, usually, hard to estimate the dynamic and
mainly the (global) roughness exponents. The stationary (for ) SLRDs and LEHDs of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) class are also investigated
and, for some models, strong finite-size corrections are found. However, we
demonstrate that good evidences of their universality can be obtained through
successive extrapolations of their cumulant ratios for long times and large
's. We also show that SLRDs and LEHDs are the same for flat and curved KPZ
interfaces.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 4 table
Scalar scattering from black holes with tidal charge
The cross sections of black holes with tidal charge predicted in the context
of the Randall--Sundrum brane-world scenario are computed considering the
massless scalar field. Results obtained for black holes with different
tidal-charge intensities are compared in order to study how this charge
modifies the black hole cross sections. Such results are also compared with the
ones for Schwarzschild and extreme Reissner--Nordstr\"om black holes. The
increase of the tidal-charge intensity makes the black hole absorb more and can
also be measured by the narrowing of interference fringes of the differential
scattering cross section. These results indicate that the effects of the tidal
charge are very important in phenomena which take place near the black hole,
but can be neglected in the far region. Analytical results are obtained in the
high-frequency limit and are shown to excellently agree with the numeric
results obtained via the partial-wave method. It is shown numerically that
black holes with tidal charge obey the universality of the low-frequency
absorption cross section of stationary black holes for the massless scalar
field
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