The early 21st century has not been kind to California's reputation for good government. But the Golden State's governance flaws reflect worrisome national trends with origins in the 1970s and 1980s. Growing voter distrust with government, a demand for services but not taxes to pay for them, a sharp decline in enlightened leadership and effective civic watchdogs, and dysfunctional political institutions have all contributed to the current governance malaise. Until recently, San Diego, California—America's 8th largest city—seemed immune to such systematic governance disorders. This sunny beach town entered the 1990s proclaiming to be "America's Finest City," but in a few short years its reputation went from "Futureville" to "Enron-by-the-Sea." In this eye-opening and telling narrative, Steven P. Erie, Vladimir Kogan, and Scott A. MacKenzie mix policy analysis, political theory, and history to explore and explain the unintended but largely predictable failures of governance in San Diego. Using untapped primary sources—interviews with key decision makers and public documents—and benchmarking San Diego with other leading California cities, Paradise Plundered examines critical dimensions of San Diego's governance failure: a multi-billion dollar pension deficit; a chronic budget deficit; inadequate city services and infrastructure; grandiose planning initiatives divorced from dire fiscal realities; an insulated downtown redevelopment program plagued by poorly-crafted public-private partnerships; and, for the metropolitan region, inadequate airport and port facilities, a severe underinvestment in firefighting capacity despite destructive wildfires, and heightened Mexican border security concerns. Far from a sunny story of paradise and prosperity, this account takes stock of an important but understudied city, its failed civic leadership, and poorly performing institutions, policymaking, and planning. Though the extent of these failures may place San Diego in a league of its own, other cities are experiencing similar challenges and political changes. As such, this tale of civic woe offers valuable lessons for urban scholars, practitioners, and general readers concerned about the future of their own cities.
A series of seminal technological revolutions has led to a new generation of electronic devices miniaturized to such tiny scales where the strange laws of quantum physics come into play. There is no doubt that, unlike scientists and engineers of the past, technology leaders of the future will have to rely on quantum mechanics in their everyday work. This makes teaching and learning the subject of paramount importance for further progress. Mastering quantum physics is a very non-trivial task and its deep understanding can only be achieved through working out real-life problems and examples. It is notoriously difficult to come up with new quantum-mechanical problems that would be solvable with a pencil and paper, and within a finite amount of time. This book remarkably presents some 700+ original problems in quantum mechanics together with detailed solutions covering nearly 1000 pages on all aspects of quantum science. The material is largely new to the English-speaking audience. The problems have been collected over about 60 years, first by the lead author, the late Prof. Victor Galitski, Sr. Over the years, new problems were added and the material polished by Prof. Boris Karnakov. Finally, Prof. Victor Galitski, Jr., has extended the material with new problems particularly relevant to modern science.
Conventional accounts of local politics downplay the importance of constituent preferences in explaining democratic outcomes. Instead, they emphasize the overweening influence of elite interest groups, constraints imposed from above by higher levels of government, and the threat of jurisdictional competition as main policy drivers. Using analytical and methodological tools commonly applied in other subfields of political science, I challenge the standard account of urban exceptionalism. In the first empirical chapter, I adopt a statistical method known as multilevel modeling and post-stratification (MRP) to, for the first time, develop comparable measures of public opinion at the local level. I validate the method by showing that it can correctly recover known population parameters by accurately predicting local election outcomes, and demonstrate that MRP improves on other existing tools for measuring policy-specific local opinion. In Chapter 3, I combine MRP with a new dataset on food stamp enrollment in American counties. Using administrative program data, I document substantial variation in the degree of participation across counties, despite the existence of universal eligibility criteria. I then show that mass preferences for redistribution at the local level can account for a substantial amount of this variation. Chapter 4 assesses the extent to which competition between government agencies influences local policy, and who stands to benefit when local governments compete with one another. The chapter analyzes variation in compensation of public employees, testing recent claims that interjurisdictional competition drives up the wages and benefits of specialized public employees. While I find that this is indeed true for certain classes of employees, I show that the effects are modest in size and vary across occupational groups. The concluding chapter examines institutional development among American counties. My analysis challenges Banfield and Wilson's (1963) good-government account of Progressive reforms at the local level. Instead, I argue that reformers were motivated neither by public-regarding values nor desire for more efficient administration but rather by self-interest. Using new data on local economic inequality at the end of the 20th century, I show that wealthy interests pursued reform to insulate government from popular control and to prevent economic redistribution.
While the chemistry, physics, and optical properties of simple atoms and molecules are quite well understood, this book demonstrates that there is much to be learned about the optics of nanomaterials. Through comparative analysis of the size-dependent optical response from nanomaterials, it is shown that although strides have been made in computational chemistry and physics, bridging length scales from nano to macro remains a major challenge. Organic, molecular, polymer, and biological systems are shown to be potentially useful models for assembly. Our progress in understanding the optical properties of biological nanomaterials is important driving force for a variety of applications.
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