Lelong numbers on projective varieties

Given a positive closed (1,1)-current $T$ defined on the regular locus of a projective variety $X$ with bounded mass near the singular part of $X$ and $Y$ an irreducible algebraic subset of $X$, we present uniform estimates for the locus inside $Y$ where the Lelong numbers of $T$ are larger than the generic Lelong number of $T$ along $Y$

Addicted to Punishment: The Disproportionality of Drug Laws in Latin America

In Latin America, trafficking cocaine so it can be sold to someone who wants to use it is more serious than raping a woman or deliberately killingyour neighbor. While it may seem incredible, that is the conclusion of arigorous study of the evolution of criminal legislation in the region, which shows that countries' judicial systems mete out harsher penalties for traffickingeven modest amounts of drugs than for acts as heinous as sexua lassault or murder.How have we reached such an unjust and irrational point? In recent decades, especially the 1980s, Latin American countries, influenced by aninternational prohibitionist model, fell -- ironically -- into what we mightmetaphorically call an addiction to punishment.Addiction creates the need to consume more and more drugs, whichhave less and less effect; ultimately, the problematic user simply consumesdrugs to avoid withdrawal. Drug legislation in Latin America seems to have followed a similar path. Countries have an ever-growing need to add crimes and increase the penalties for drug trafficking, supposedly to control an expanding illegal market, while this increasingly punitive approach has less and less effect on decreasing the supply and use of illegal drugs.This report explores whether the recent evolution of criminal legislation in Latin American countries with regard to drug-related conducts respects these minimal guarantees to which criminal law should be subject, and especially whether that criminal legislation can be considered proportionate to the harm caused by prohibited conducts. Ultimately, the question is whether the crimes and punishments outlined in national legislation are proportionate. If the answer is no, the conclusion should be that they may even be unconstitutional within the framework of a constitutional state.To address this question, the report explores the recent development of criminal laws on drug-related crime in seven Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and Mexico. These countries were chosen based on two basic criteria. First, they are of academic importance, because they have different drug-related problems, different geographic locations, diverse contexts and different political systems. According to traditional categorization, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia are considered producer countries; Mexico and even Brazil are considered trans-shipment countries. They also represent the different regions of Latin America,from the Southern Cone to the furthest Spanish-speaking country in North America.This report has three main parts. The first provides a conceptual and methodological overview of the elements that form the basis of the analysis.The second describes the principal recent trends in criminal drug legislation in Latin America. The third analyzes the proportionality of drug-related crimes and punishment in the countries, comparing them with penalties for other serious crimes, followed by some conclusions

Continuum and Spectral Line Radiation from a Random Clumpy Medium

We present a formalism for continuum and line emission from random clumpy media together with its application to problems of current interest, including CO spectral lines from ensembles of clouds and radio emission from HII regions, supernovae and star-forming regions. For line emission we find that the effects of clump opacity on observed line ratios can be indistinguishable from variations of intrinsic line strengths, adding to the difficulties in determining abundances from line observations. Our formalism is applicable to arbitrary distributions of cloud properties, provided the cloud volume filling factor is small; numerical simulations show it to hold up to filling factors of about 10%. We show that irrespective of the complexity of the cloud ensemble, the radiative effect of clumpiness can be parametrized at each frequency by a single multiplicative correction to the overall optical depth; this multiplier is derived from appropriate averaging over individual cloud properties. Our main finding is that cloud shapes have only a negligible effect on radiation propagation in clumpy media; the results of calculations employing point-like clouds are practically indistinguishable from those for finite-size clouds with arbitrary geometrical shapes.Comment: ApJ, to be publishe

Preliminary results from the COLA N sample

We present preliminary radio imaging results for the northern COLA (Compact Objects in Low power AGN) sample. COLA is a large sample of moderate luminosity 10 ≤ log(L_(FIR)/L_☉) ≤ 12 infra-red selected galaxies. Our primary aim is to investigate possible connections between starburst activity and AGN. The sample has been observed in a variety of wavebands searching for correlations between AGN presence, galactic structure, gas content or degree of interaction. VLA A-array observations of half of the Northern sample are presented. From this data we find, consistent with previous studies, an anti-correlation between FIR luminosity and radio size. Unexpectedly we find that amongst sources which lie slightly above the radio-IR correlation, the excess radio emission is mostly in large scale structure (≥ 1kpc). Studies of the southern COLA sample suggest a strong correlation between having a radio excess and the presence of a compact AGN core, even though the core itself only accounts for small fraction of the excess. We speculate that either the bulk of AGN radio emission is on unexpectedly large scales or that AGN presence is correlated with old starbursts; a result consistent with proposed evolutionary models

Structural and Energetic Characterization of the Ankyrin Repeat Protein Family

Ankyrin repeat containing proteins are one of the most abundant solenoid folds. Usually implicated in specific protein-protein interactions, these proteins are readily amenable for design, with promising biotechnological and biomedical applications. Studying repeat protein families presents technical challenges due to the high sequence divergence among the repeating units. We developed and applied a systematic method to consistently identify and annotate the structural repetitions over the members of the complete Ankyrin Repeat Protein Family, with increased sensitivity over previous studies. We statistically characterized the number of repeats, the folding of the repeat-arrays, their structural variations, insertions and deletions. An energetic analysis of the local frustration patterns reveal the basic features underlying fold stability and its relation to the functional binding regions. We found a strong linear correlation between the conservation of the energetic features in the repeat arrays and their sequence variations, and discuss new insights into the organization and function of these ubiquitous proteins.Fil: Parra, Rodrigo Gonzalo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Espada, Rocío. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Verstraete, Nina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Ferreiro, Diego Ulises. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentin

Huella empresarial tolimense

146 p. Recuros ElectrónicoEl estudio de la historia empresarial es muy reciente en nuestro país y son pocos los investigadores que se dedican a profundizar en este tema. Sin embargo, es importante señalar que algunas instituciones académicas han empezado a mostrar interés por el estudio y la investigación en ésta temática, con el ánimo de explorar sobre el legado industrial que han dejado algunos empresarios. Estas circunstancias han provocado reformas en currículos para incorporar cursos de historia empresarial en los planes de estudio de los programas de las facultades de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas, y en especial en los programas de Administración de Empresa

Protein Repeats from First Principles

Some natural proteins display recurrent structural patterns. Despite being highly similar at the tertiary structure level, repeating patterns within a single repeat protein can be extremely variable at the sequence level. We use a mathematical definition of a repetition and investigate the occurrences of these in sequences of different protein families. We found that long stretches of perfect repetitions are infrequent in individual natural proteins, even for those which are known to fold into structures of recurrent structural motifs. We found that natural repeat proteins are indeed repetitive in their families, exhibiting abundant stretches of 6 amino acids or longer that are perfect repetitions in the reference family. We provide a systematic quantification for this repetitiveness. We show that this form of repetitiveness is not exclusive of repeat proteins, but also occurs in globular domains. A by-product of this work is a fast quantification of the likelihood of a protein to belong to a family.Fil: Turjanski, Pablo Guillermo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Computación; ArgentinaFil: Parra, Rodrigo Gonzalo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Espada, Rocío. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Becher, Veronica Andrea. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Computación; ArgentinaFil: Ferreiro, Diego. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentin

Resolution of the Compact Radio Continuum Sources in Arp220

We present 2 cm and 3.6 cm wavelength very long baseline interferometry images of the compact radio continuum sources in the nearby ultra-luminous infrared galaxy Arp220. Based on their radio spectra and variability properties, we confirm these sources to be a mixture of supernovae (SNe) and supernova remnants (SNRs). Of the 17 detected sources we resolve 7 at both wavelengths. The SNe generally only have upper size limits. In contrast all the SNRs are resolved with diameters {\geq} 0.27 pc. This size limit is consistent with them having just entered their Sedov phase while embedded in an interstellar medium (ISM) of density 10^4 cm^{-3} . These objects lie on the diameter-luminosity correlation for SNRs (and so also on the diameter-surface brightness relation) and extend these correlations to very small sources. The data are consistent with the relation L {\propto} D^{-9/4}. Revised equipartition arguments adjusted to a magnetic field to relativistic particle energy density ratio of 1% combined with a reasonable synchrotron-emitting volume filling factor of 10% give estimated magnetic field strengths in the SNR shells of ~ 15-50 mG. The SNR shell magnetic fields are unlikely to come from compression of ambient ISM fields and must instead be internally generated. We set an upper limit of 7 mG for the ISM magnetic field. The estimated energy in relativistic particles, 2%-20% of the explosion kinetic energy, is consistent with estimates from models that fit the IR-radio correlation in compact starburst galaxies.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

A thin ring model for the OH megamaser in IIIZw35

We present a model for the OH megamaser emission in the starburst galaxy IIIZw35. The observed diffuse and compact OH maser components in this source are explained by a single phase of unsaturated clumpy gas distributed in a thin ring structure and amplifying background continuum. We emphasize the importance of clumpiness in the OH masing medium, an effect that has not been fully appreciated previously. The model explains why multiple bright spots are seen only at the ring tangents while smoother emission is found elsewhere. Both the observed velocity gradients and the line to continuum ratios around the ring enquire a geometry where most of the seed photons come from a continuum emission which lies outside the OH ring. To explain both the OH and continuum brightness, free-free absorbing gas is required along the ring axis to partially absorb the far side of the ring. It is proposed that the required geometry arises from an inwardly propagating ring of starburst activity