The use of referendums has gained popularity among both voters and parties. Yet, despite the diffusion of such direct forms of democracy during the last decades in Europe, referendums remain not a very common policy instrument in Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). We establish that this trend could be explained by a large consensus among mainstream (especially right) parties and voters against the use of direct democracy. Moreover, we confirmed the well-established demarcation with radical ideologies, which convey overall more support and congruence on the use of referendums than the mainstream. Additionally, and probably reflecting this new line of cleavage, we show that support for referendums among the voters relate to left-wing economic position, but also with culturally right-wing view. Overall, this article questions the relevance of the traditional left-right divide to explain support for direct democracy, as well as the capacity for (some) parties to align with their voters in terms of democratic demands.
Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry is a radio astronomy technique distinguished by a record-high angular resolution reaching single-digit microseconds of arc. The paper provides a brief account of the history of developments of this technique over the period 1960s-2020s.
We examine whether some countries are more richly represented in embedding space than others. We find that countries whose names occur with low frequency in training corpora are more likely to be tokenized into subwords, are less semantically distinct in embedding space, and are less likely to be correctly predicted: e.g., Ghana (the correct answer and in-vocabulary) is not predicted for, "The country producing the most cocoa is [MASK].". Although these performance discrepancies and representational harms are due to frequency, we find that frequency is highly correlated with a country's GDP; thus perpetuating historic power and wealth inequalities. We analyze the effectiveness of mitigation strategies; recommend that researchers report training word frequencies; and recommend future work for the community to define and design representational guarantees.
This document aims to estimate and describe the effects of the social distancing measures implemented in several countries with the expectancy of controlling the spread of COVID-19. The procedure relies on the classic Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model, which is modified to incorporate a permissiveness index, representing the isolation achieved by the social distancing and the future development of vaccination campaigns and allowing the math model to reproduce more than one infection wave. The adjusted SIR models are used to study the compromise between the economy's reactivation and the resulting infection spreading increase. The document presents a graphical-abacus that describes the convenience of progressively relax social distancing measures while a feasible vaccination campaign develops
Andrew Emerick, Greg L. Bryan, Mordecai-Mark Mac Low
We investigate how each aspect of a multi-channel stellar feedback model drives the chemodynamical evolution of a low-mass, isolated dwarf galaxy using a suite of high-resolution simulations. Our model follows individual star particles sampled randomly from an adopted initial mass function, considering independently feedback from: supernovae; stellar radiation causing photoelectric heating of dust grains, ionization and associated heating, Lyman-Werner (LW) dissociation of H$_2$, and radiation pressure; and winds from massive main sequence (neglecting their energy input) and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. Radiative transfer is done by ray tracing. We consider the effects each of these processes have on regulating the star formation rate, global properties, multi-phase interstellar medium (ISM), and driving of galactic winds. We follow individual metal species from distinct nucleosynthetic enrichment channels (AGB winds, massive star stellar winds, core collapse and Type Ia supernovae) and pay particular attention to how these feedback processes regulate metal mixing in the ISM, the metal content of outflows, and the stellar abundance patterns in our galaxy. We find that---for a low-metallicity, low-mass dwarf galaxy ---stellar radiation, particularly ionizing radiation and LW radiation, are important sources of stellar feedback whose effects dominate over photoelectric heating and HI radiation pressure. However, feedback is coupled non-linearly, and the inclusion or exclusion of each process produces non-negligible effects. We find strong variations with: the star formation history; the ejection fractions of metals, mass, and energy; and the distribution of elements from different nucleosynthetic sources in both the gas and stars.
A formalism is proposed to describe entangled quantum histories, and their entanglement entropy. We define a history vector, living in a tensor space with basis elements corresponding to the allowed histories, i.e. histories with nonvanishing amplitudes. The amplitudes are the components of the history vector, and contain the dynamical information. Probabilities of measurement sequences, and resulting collapse, are given by generalized Born rules: they are all expressed by means of projections and scalar products involving the history vector. Entangled history states are introduced, and a history density matrix is defined in terms of ensembles of history vectors. The corresponding history entropies (and history entanglement entropies for composite systems) are explicitly computed in two examples taken from quantum computation circuits.
Although many methods have been designed for ranking universities, there is no suitable system that focuses on the ranking of countries based on the performance of their universities. The overall ranking of the universities in a region can indicate the growth of interests in science among the people of that land. This paper introduces a novel ranking mechanism based on the rankings of universities. Firstly, we introduce and discuss two new rankings of countries, based on the rank of their universities. Secondly, we create rankings of countries according to the selected method, based on the top 12000 universities in webometrics.info (January 2012) and compare rankings of countries in 4 editions (January 2012 to July 2013). Firstly, we introduce two new methods of ranking countries based on their university rankings, Weighted Ranking (WR) and Average Ranking (AR). Secondly, we discuss how the introduced ranking systems, perform in ranking countries based on the two years of data. Thirdly, we choose QS (http://www.topuniversities.com) and webometrics.info as two different classification systems for comparing rankings of countries, based on the top 500 universities in these rankings. Results indicate that the methodology can be used to show the quality of the whole universities of each country used to compare rankings of countries in practice compare to other countries in the world.
Internet of things (IoT) is very much attractive for several sensor based applications. It provides large coverage of the services with small amount of resources. Its applications span from the ordinary scenarios such as sensing in the common digital ecosystem to the far more complicated processes of modern manufacturing, agriculture, security provisioning, location tracking and health care. Several types of IoTs have been proposed for the recent applications. Narrowband IoT (NBIoT) is one of the economical versions of the IoTs. It is a low power wide area network technology and thus suitable for resource limited scenarios. In the developing countries, the resources are scarce and economical solutions are always preferable. Therefore, NBIoT is an attractive solution for the developing countries. In this article, we present its features and functions which make it suitable for developing countries. We also provide several sector based analysis which are suitable for the NBIoT deployment.
Research collaboration is promoted by governments and research funders but if the relative prevalence and merits of collaboration vary internationally different national and disciplinary strategies may be needed to promote it. This study compares the team size and field normalised citation impact of research across all 27 Scopus broad fields in the ten countries with the most journal articles indexed in Scopus 2008-2012. The results show that team size varies substantially by discipline and country, with Japan (4.2) having two thirds more authors per article than the UK (2.5). Solo authorship is rare in China (4%) but common in the UK (27%). Whilst increasing team size associates with higher citation impact in almost all countries and fields, this association is much weaker in China than elsewhere. There are also field differences in the association between citation impact and collaboration. For example, larger team sizes in the Business, Management & Accounting category do not seem to associate with greater research impact, and for China and India, solo authorship associates with higher citation impact. Overall, there are substantial international and field differences in the extent to which researchers collaborate and the extent to which collaboration associates with higher citation impact.
We present a straightforward procedure to evaluate the scientific contribution of territories and institutions that combines the size-dependent geometric mean, Q, of the number of research documents (N) and citations (C), and a scale-free measure of quality, q=C/N. We introduce a Global Research Output (GRO-index) as the geometric mean of Q and q. We show that the GRO-index correlates with the h-index, but appears to be more strongly correlated with other well known, widely used bibliometric indicators. We also compute relative GRO-indexes (GROr) associated with the scientific production within research fields. We note that although total sums of GROr values are larger than the GRO-index, due to the non-linearity in the computation of the geometric means, both counts are nevertheless highly correlated. That enables us to make useful comparative analyses among territories and institutions. Furthermore, to identify strengths and weaknesses of a given country or institution, we compute a Relative Research Output count (RROr-index) to tackle variations of the C/N ratio across research fields. Moreover, by using a wealth-index also based on quantitative and qualitative variables, we show that the GRO and RRO indexes are highly correlated with the wealth of the countries and the states of the USA. Given the simplicity of the procedures introduced in this paper and the fact that their results are easily understandable by non-specialists, we believe they could become as useful for the assessment of the research output of countries and institutions as the impact factor is for journals or the h-index for individuals.
Caroline S. Wagner, Travis Whetsell, Jeroen Baas
et al.
The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier national level full and fractional paper counts as well as accompanying field-weighted citation counts. Then we collected information from Elsevier on the percent of all internationally coauthored papers for each country, as well as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development measures of the international mobility of the scientific workforce in 2013, and conducted a principle component analysis that produced an openness index. We added data from the OECD on government budget allocation on research and development for 2011 to tie in the public spending that contributed to the 2013 output. We found that openness among advanced science systems is strongly correlated with impact: the more internationally engaged a nation is in terms of coauthorships and researcher mobility, the higher the impact of scientific work. The results have important implications for policy making around investment, as well as the flows of students, researchers, and technical workers.
On the eve of the Beeldenstorm, a great number of churches in the Low Countries had a sacrament house, a shrine for the Corpus Christi, often metres high. These monstrance-like tabernacles were nearly all destroyed by iconoclasts between 1566 and 1585. This essay discusses the dialectics between the construction and destruction of sacrament houses before and after the Beeldenstorm.
It argues against a strict divide between material devotion and spiritual belief by highlighting the intertwining of Catholic and Calvinist embodied pieties. Fuelled by their opposing conceptions of the Eucharist, Catholic devotees and Protestant iconoclasts both engaged with sacrament houses and other expressions of the Corpus Christi devotion (processions, miracle cults et cetera) in a deliberate and intensely physical manner.
This article is part of the special issue 'Beeldenstorm'.
Aan de vooravond van de Beeldenstorm stond in heel wat kerken in de Nederlanden een sacramentshuis, een vaak metershoge toren met het uiterlijk van een reusachtige monstrans, waarin het Corpus Christi werd tentoongesteld. Deze tabernakels werden haast allemaal vernield door iconoclasten tussen 1566 en 1585. Dit artikel bestudeert het samenspel tussen het optrekken en afbreken van sacramentshuizen voor en na de Beeldenstorm.
De centrale stelling luidt dat we af moeten van een strikte scheiding tussen materiële devotie en spiritueel geloof. Zowel katholieken als calvinisten beleefden hun geloof op een belichaamde manier en hun handelingen waren steeds verweven. Vrome katholieke leken en protestantse beeldenstormers hadden sterk conflicterende ideeën over de eucharistie, maar juist daarom gingen ze op een heel bewuste en uiterst lichamelijke manier om met de sacramentshuizen en andere uitingen van sacramentsvroomheid zoals ommegangen en mirakelcultussen.
Dit artikel maakt deel uit van het themanummer 'Beeldenstorm'.
Magnetic field topology frozen in ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) and its breakage in near ideal MHD are reviewed in two parts. The first part gives a physically complete description of the frozen in field topology, taking magnetic flux conservation as fundamental and treating four topics, Eulerian and Lagrangian descriptions of MHD, Chandrasekhar-Kendall and Euler-potential field representations, magnetic helicity, and inviscid vortex dynamics in comparison to ideal MHD. A corollary clarifies the challenge of achieving a high degree of the frozen in condition in numerical MHD. The second part treats field topology breakage centered on the Parker Magnetostatic Theorem on a general incompatibility of a continuous magnetic field with the dual demand of force free equilibrium and an arbitrarily prescribed, 3D field topology. Preserving field topology as a global constraint readily results in formation of tangential magnetic discontinuities, i.e., electric current sheets of zero thickness. A similar incompatibility is present in the steady, force and thermal balance of a heated radiating fluid subject to an anisotropic thermal flux conducted strictly along the frozen in magnetic field in the low beta limit. In a weakly resistive fluid the thinning of current sheets by these incompatibilities inevitably results in sheet dissipation, resistive heating and topological changes in the field despite the small resistivity. Faraday induction drives but also macroscopically limits this mode of energy dissipation, storing free energy in self organized, ideal MHD structures. This property of MHD turbulence captured by the Taylor hypothesis is reviewed in relation to the Sun's corona, calling for a basic quantitative description of the breakdown of flux conservation in the low resistivity limit. A cylindrical, initial boundary value problem provides specificity in the review.
We investigate aspects of low-magnetic-Reynolds-number flow between two parallel, perfectly insulating walls, in the presence of an imposed magnetic field parallel to the bounding walls. We find a functional basis to describe the flow, well adapted to the problem of finding the attractor dimension, and which is also used in subsequent direct numerical simulation of these flows. For given Reynolds and Hartmann numbers, we obtain an upper bound for the dimension of the attractor by means of known bounds on the nonlinear inertial term and this functional basis for the flow. Three distinct flow regimes emerge: a quasi-isotropic 3D flow, a non-isotropic three-dimensional (3D) flow, and a 2D flow. We find the transition curves between these regimes in the space parameterized by Hartmann number Ha and attractor dimension $d_\text{att}$. We find how the attractor dimension scales as a function of Reynolds and Hartmann numbers (Re and Ha) in each regime. We also investigate the thickness of the boundary layer along the bounding wall, and find that in all regimes this scales as 1/Re, independently of the value of Ha, unlike Hartmann boundary layers found when the field is normal to the channel. The structure of the set of least dissipative modes is indeed quite different between these two cases but the properties of turbulence far from the walls (smallest scales and number of degrees of freedom) are found to be very similar.
A novel picture of the relative positions of countries in the world of science is offered through application of a two-dimensional mapping method which is based on quantity and quality indicators of the scientific production as peer-reviewed articles. To obtain such indicators, different influential effects such as the background global trends, temporal fluctuations, disciplinary characteristics, and mainly, the effect of countries resources have been taken into account. Fifty countries with the highest scientific production are studied in twelve years (1996-2007). A common clustering algorithm is used to detect groups of co-evolving countries in the two-dimensional map, and thereby countries are classified into four major clusters based on their relative positions in the two-dimensional map. The final results are in contrast with common views on relative positions of countries in the world of science, as demonstrated by considering some examples like USA, China or New Zealand. The proposed method and results thereof might influence the concept of 'scientific advancement' and the future scientific orientations of countries.