Everyday disasters, stagnation and the normalcy of non-development: Roghun Dam, a flood, and campaigns of forced taxation in southern Tajikistan

This article conducts a comparative analysis of a catastrophic flood that hit the Kulob region of southern Tajikistan in 2010, and the government of Tajikistan’s campaign to gather money to build the Roghun dam and hydropower station. It advances the notion of ‘everyday disasters’ in order to explain the imprecise boundaries between major catastrophic events and more mundane dimensions of the everyday as experienced by residents of Kulob. The article seeks to shed light, firstly, on the processes that underpin both Kulob residents’ experiences of stagnation and the normalization of non-development, and, secondly, on the ways in which Kulob residents joke and ‘do’ cunning/cheating whilst dealing with disastrous events in order to cultivate an everydayness that is worth living

Option-Pricing in Incomplete Markets: The Hedging Portfolio plus a Risk Premium-Based Recursive Approach

Consider a non-spanned security CT in an incomplete market. We study the risk/return tradeoffs generated if this security is sold for an arbitrage-free price bC0 and then hedged. We consider recursive “one-period optimal” self-financing hedging strategies, a simple but tractable criterion. For continuous trading, diffusion processes, the one-period minimum variance portfolio is optimal. Let C0(0) be its price. Self-financing implies that the residual risk is equal to the sum of the oneperiod orthogonal hedging errors, Pt=T Yt(0)er(T -t). To compensate the residual risk, a risk premium yt.t is associated with every Yt. Now let C0(y) be the price of the hedging portfolio, and Pt=T (Yt(y) + yt.t) er(T -t) is the total residual risk. Although not the same, the one-period hedging errors Yt(0) and Yt(y) are orthogonal to the trading assets, and are perfectly correlated. This implies that the spanned option payoff does not depend on y. Let bC0 = C0(y). A main result follows. Any arbitrage-free price, bC0, is just the price of a hedging portfolio (such as in a complete market), C0(0), plus a premium, bC0 - C0(0). That is, C0(0) is the price of the option’s payoff which can be spanned, and bC0 - C0(0) is the premium associated with the option’s payoff which cannot be spanned (and yields a contingent risk premium of Pyt.ter(T -t) at maturity). We study other applications of option-pricing theory as well.

Low Energy Implications of Minimal Superstring Unification

We study the phenomenological implications of effective supergravities based on string vacua with spontaneously broken N=1 supersymmetry by dilaton and moduli $F$-terms. We further require Minimal String Unification, namely that large string threshold corrections ensure the correct unification of the gauge couplings at the grand unification scale. The whole supersymmetric mass spectrum turns out to be determined in terms of only two independent parameters, the dilaton-moduli mixing angle and the gravitino mass. In particular we discuss the region of the parameter space where at least one superpartner is ``visible" at LEP2. We find that the most likely candidates are the scalar partner of the right-handed electron and the lightest chargino, with interesting correlations between their masses and with the mass of the lightest higgs. We show how discovering SUSY particles at LEP2 might rather sharply discriminate between scenarios with pure dilaton SUSY breaking and mixed dilaton-moduli breaking.Comment: 11 pages, LaTEX, psfig, 8 figure

Analysis of soft wall AdS / QCD potentials to obtain melting temperature of scalar hadrons

We consider an analysis of potentials related to Schr\"odinger-type equations for scalar fields in a 5D AdS black hole background with dilaton in order to get melting temperatures for different hadrons in a thermal bath. The approach does not consider calculations of spectral functions and it is easy to get results for hadrons with an arbitrary number of constituents. We present results for scalar mesons, glueballs, hybrid mesons and tetraquarks, and we show that mesons are more resistant to being melted in a thermal bath than other scalar hadrons, and in general the melting temperature increases when hadrons contain heavy quarks.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures (8 plots

Nonperturbative effects of divergent ghost loops

We report on a recently unveiled connection at the nonperturbative level between the masslessness of the ghost, the precise form of the gluon propagator in the deep infrared, and the divergences observed in certain kinematic limits of the three-gluon vertex.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures; contribution to the Workshop "Excited QCD 2014'', Bjelasnica (Sarajevo) February 2-8, 201

Future trends in Animal Breeding due to new genetic tecnologies

The Darwin theory of evolution by natural selection is based on three principles: (a) variation; (b) inheritance; and (c) natural selection. Here, I take these principles as an excuse to review some topics related to the future research prospects in Animal Breeding. With respect to the first principle I describe two forms of variation different from mutation that are becoming increasingly important: variation in copy number and microRNAs. With respect to the second principle I comment on the possible relevance of non-mendelian inheritance, the so-called epigenetic effects, of which the genomic imprinting is the best characterized in domestic species. Regarding selection principle I emphasize the importance of selection for social traits and how this could contribute to both productivity and animal welfare. Finally, I analyse the impact of molecular biology in Animal Breeding, the achievements and limitations of quantitative trait locus and classical marker-assisted selection and the future of genomic selectio

Two-person neuroscience and naturalistic social communication: The role of language and linguistic variables in brain-coupling research

Social cognitive neuroscience (SCN) seeks to understand the brain mechanisms through which we comprehend others? emotions and intentions in order to react accordingly. For decades, SCN has explored relevant domains by exposing individual participants to predesigned stimuli and asking them to judge their social (e.g., emotional) content. Subjects are thus reduced to detached observers of situations that they play no active role in. However, the core of our social experience is construed through real-time interactions requiring the active negotiation of information with other people. To gain more relevant insights into the workings of the social brain, the incipient field of two-person neuroscience (2PN) advocates the study of brain-to-brain coupling through multi-participant experiments. In this paper, we argue that the study of online language-based communication constitutes a cornerstone of 2PN. First, we review preliminary evidence illustrating how verbal interaction may shed light on the social brain. Second, we advance methodological recommendations to design experiments within language-based 2PN. Finally, we formulate outstanding questions for future research.Fil: García, Adolfo Martín. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. Universidad Diego Portales; ChileFil: Ibanez Barassi, Agustin Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. Universidad Diego Portales; Chile. Universidad Autónoma del Caribe; Colombia. Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders; Australi

Stability of toroidal magnetic fields in stellar interiors

We present 3D MHD simulations of purely toroidal and mixed poloidal-toroidal magnetic field configurations to study the behavior of the Tayler instability. For the first time the simultaneous action of rotation and magnetic diffusion are taken into account and the effects of a poloidal field on the dynamic evolution of unstable toroidal magnetic fields is included. In the absence of diffusion, fast rotation (rotation rate compared to Alfv\'en frequency) is able to suppress the instability when the rotation and magnetic axes are aligned and when the radial field strength gradient p < 1.5. When diffusion is included, this system turns unstable for diffusion dominated and marginally diffusive dominated regions. If the magnetic and rotation axes are perpendicular to each other the stabilizing effect induced by the Coriolis force is scale dependent and decreases with increasing wavenumber. In toroidal fields with radial field gradients bigger than p > 1.5, rapid rotation does not suppress the instability but instead introduces a damping factor to the growth rate in agreement with the analytic predictions. For the mixed poloidal-toroidal fields we find an unstable axisymmetric mode, not predicted analytically, right at the stability threshold for the non-axisymmetric modes; it has been argued that an axisymmetric mode is necessary for the closure of the Tayler-Spruit dynamo loop.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in A&

Optimal strategies for driving a mobile agent in a guidance by repulsion model

We present a guidance by repulsion model based on a driver-evader interaction where the driver, assumed to be faster than the evader, follows the evader but cannot be arbitrarily close to it, and the evader tries to move away from the driver beyond a short distance. The key ingredient allowing the driver to guide the evader is that the driver is able to display a circumvention maneuver around the evader, in such a way that the trajectory of the evader is modified in the direction of the repulsion that the driver exerts on the evader. The evader can thus be driven towards any given target or along a sufficiently smooth path by controlling a single discrete parameter acting on driver's behavior. The control parameter serves both to activate/deactivate the circumvention mode and to select the clockwise/counterclockwise direction of the circumvention maneuver. Assuming that the circumvention mode is more expensive than the pursuit mode, and that the activation of the circumvention mode has a high cost, we formulate an optimal control problem for the optimal strategy to drive the evader to a given target. By means of numerical shooting methods, we find the optimal open-loop control which reduces the number of activations of the circumvention mode to one and which minimizes the time spent in the active~mode. Our numerical simulations show that the system is highly sensitive to small variations of the control function, and that the cost function has a nonlinear regime which contributes to the complexity of the behavior of the system, so that a general open-loop control would not be of practical interest. We then propose a feedback control law that corrects from deviations while preventing from an excesive use of the circumvention mode, finding numerically that the feedback law significantly reduces the cost obtained with the open-loop control