Electoral Reforms, Membership Stability and the Existence of Committee Property Rights in American State Legislatures

One of the most creative theories advanced about legislative organization in recent years is Katz and Sala\u27s linkage of the development of committee property rights in the US House of Representatives to the introduction of the Australian ballot. Katz and Sala argue that the Australian ballot – a government-printed ballot cast in secret that replaced a party-produced ballot that was cast in public – gave members of the House an incentive to pursue personal constituency votes. This, in turn, led to the rise of committee property rights as members sought to keep their committee assignments from term to term because of the potential electoral benefits they derived from them. In this Note we use the state legislative committee membership dataset collected by Hamm and Hedlund and their colleagues to test whether committee property rights appeared in American state legislatures at roughly the same time as Katz and Sala find they emerged in the US House. State legislatures were, of course, exposed to the same electoral innovation at the same time. But, while in some ways state legislatures were much like Congress as organizations, in other ways they were very different. Our cross-sectional data and the variance in important institutional variables they provide allow us to test a critical proposition about the importance of membership stability rates in mediating the rise of committee property rights. We also go beyond Katz and Sala\u27s analysis by testing to see if differences in Australian ballot design (office column and party bloc) across the states influenced the behaviour of legislators in the way their theory suggests

Propofol-Based Procedural Sedation with or without Low-Dose Ketamine in Children

Objective Examine comparative dosing, efficacy, and safety of propofol alone or with an initial, subdissociative dose of ketamine approach for deep sedation. Background Propofol is a sedative-hypnotic agent used increasingly in children for deep sedation. As a nonanalgesic agent, use in procedures (e.g., bone marrow biopsies/aspirations, renal biopsies) is debated. Our intensivist procedural sedation team sedates using one of two protocols: propofol-only (P-O) approach or age-adjusted dose of 0.25 or 0.5 mg/kg intravenous ketamine (K + P) prior to propofol. With either approach, an initial induction dose of 1 mg/kg propofol is recommended and then intermittent dosing throughout the procedure to achieve adequate sedation to safely and effectively perform the procedure. Approach: Retrospective evaluation of 754 patients receiving either the P-O or K + P approach to sedation. Results A total of 372 P-O group patients and 382 K + P group. Mean age (7.3 ± 5.5 years for P-O; 7.3 ± 5.4 years for K + P) and weight (30.09 ± 23.18 kg for P-O; 30.14 ± 24.45 kg for K + P) were similar in both groups (p = NS). All patients successfully completed procedures with a 16% combined incidence of hypoxia (SPO2 < 90%). Procedure time was 3 minutes longer for K + P group than P-O group (18.68 ± 15.13 minutes for K + P; 15.11 ± 12.77 minutes for P-O; p < 0.01), yet recovery times were 5 minutes shorter (17.04 ± 9.36 minutes for K + P; 22.17 ± 12.84 minutes for P-O; p < 0.01). Mean total dose of propofol was significantly greater in P-O than in K + P group (0.28 ± 0.20 mg/kg/min for K + P; 0.40 ± 0.26 mg/kg/min for P-O; p < 0.0001), and might explain the shorter recovery time. Conclusion Both sedation approaches proved to be well tolerated and equally effective. Addition of ketamine was associated with reduction in the recovery time, probably explained by the statistically significant decrease in the propofol dose

Insecurity for compact surfaces of positive genus

A pair of points in a riemannian manifold $M$ is secure if the geodesics between the points can be blocked by a finite number of point obstacles; otherwise the pair of points is insecure. A manifold is secure if all pairs of points in $M$ are secure. A manifold is insecure if there exists an insecure point pair, and totally insecure if all point pairs are insecure. Compact, flat manifolds are secure. A standing conjecture says that these are the only secure, compact riemannian manifolds. We prove this for surfaces of genus greater than zero. We also prove that a closed surface of genus greater than one with any riemannian metric and a closed surface of genus one with generic metric are totally insecure.Comment: 37 pages, 11 figure

The organisational and human resource challenges facing primary care trusts : protocol of a multiple case study

BACKGROUND: The study is designed to assess the organisational and human resource challenges faced by Primary Care Trusts (PCTs). Its objectives are to: specify the organisational and human resources challenges faced by PCTs in fulfilling the roles envisaged in government and local policy; examine how PCTs are addressing these challenges, in particular, to describe the organisational forms they have adopted, and the OD/HR strategies and initiatives they have planned or in place; assess how effective these structures, strategies and initiatives have been in enabling the PCTs to meet the organisational and human resources challenges they face; identify the factors, both internal to the PCT and in the wider health community, which have contributed to the success or failure of different structures, strategies and initiatives. METHODS: The study will be undertaken in three stages. In Stage 1 the key literature on public sector and NHS organisational development and human resources management will be reviewed, and discussions will be held with key researchers and policy makers working in this area. Stage 2 will focus on detailed case studies in six PCTs designed to examine the organisational and human resources challenges they face. Data will be collected using semi-structured interviews, group discussion, site visits, observation of key meetings and examination of local documentation. The findings from the case study PCTs will be cross checked with a Reference Group of up to 20 other PCG/Ts, and key officers working in organisational development or primary care at local, regional and national level. In Stage 3 analysis of findings from the preparatory work, the case studies and the feedback from the Reference Group will be used to identify practical lessons for PCTs, key messages for policy makers, and contributions to further theoretical development

Cellular automata and Lyapunov exponents

In this article we give a new definition of some analog of Lyapunov exponents for cellular automata . Then for a shift ergodic and cellular automaton invariant probability measure we establish an inequality between the entropy of the automaton, the entropy of the shift and the Lyapunov exponent

Connecting geodesics and security of configurations in compact locally symmetric spaces

A pair of points in a riemannian manifold makes a secure configuration if the totality of geodesics connecting them can be blocked by a finite set. The manifold is secure if every configuration is secure. We investigate the security of compact, locally symmetric spaces.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figure

Nodal domains of Maass forms I

This paper deals with some questions that have received a lot of attention since they were raised by Hejhal and Rackner in their 1992 numerical computations of Maass forms. We establish sharp upper and lower bounds for the $L^2$-restrictions of these forms to certain curves on the modular surface. These results, together with the Lindelof Hypothesis and known subconvex $L^\infty$-bounds are applied to prove that locally the number of nodal domains of such a form goes to infinity with its eigenvalue.Comment: To appear in GAF

Eluding SUSY at every genus on stable closed string vacua

In closed string vacua, ergodicity of unipotent flows provide a key for relating vacuum stability to the UV behavior of spectra and interactions. Infrared finiteness at all genera in perturbation theory can be rephrased in terms of cancelations involving only tree-level closed strings scattering amplitudes. This provides quantitative results on the allowed deviations from supersymmetry on perturbative stable vacua. From a mathematical perspective, diagrammatic relations involving closed string amplitudes suggest a relevance of unipotent flows dynamics for the Schottky problem and for the construction of the superstring measure.Comment: v2, 17 pages, 8 figures, typos corrected, new figure added with 3 modular images of long horocycles,(obtained with Mathematica

Conservation Laws in Cellular Automata

If X is a discrete abelian group and B a finite set, then a cellular automaton (CA) is a continuous map F:B^X-->B^X that commutes with all X-shifts. If g is a real-valued function on B, then, for any b in B^X, we define G(b) to be the sum over all x in X of g(b_x) (if finite). We say g is `conserved' by F if G is constant under the action of F. We characterize such `conservation laws' in several ways, deriving both theoretical consequences and practical tests, and provide a method for constructing all one-dimensional CA exhibiting a given conservation law.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX 2E with one (1) Encapsulated PostScript figure. To appear in Nonlinearity. (v2) minor changes/corrections; new references added to bibliograph