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After an insightful introductory part on recent developments in the thermodynamics of small systems, the author presents his contribution to a long-standing problem, namely the connection between irreversibility and dissipation. He develops a method based on recent results on fluctuation theorems that is able to estimate dissipation using only information acquired in a single, sufficiently long, trajectory of a stationary nonequilibrium process. This part ends with a remarkable application of the method to the analysis of biological data, in this case, the fluctuations of a hair bundle. The third part studies the energetics of systems that undergo symmetry breaking transitions. These theoretical ideas lead to, among other things, an experimental realization of a Szilard engine using manipulated colloids. This work has the potential for important applications ranging from the analysis of biological media to the design of novel artificial nano-machines.
The premise of Studies in Irreversibility: Texts and Contexts is that there is a big difference between phenomena, practices, processes, and events that are irreversible and those that are reversible, and moreover that this difference and its manifold implications remain underappreciated so long as the analysis of culture continues to anchor itself in an emphasis on the capacities of human agency. If messianic modes posit a future to justify the present, and so interpret the influence of the past, the papers in this collection are devoted to examining the present of experience from the perspective of its uncompromising and irreducible past, finding in irreversibility a key to an interpretation of futurity. Together, these papers outline a method of examining experience as something more—or at least other—than the desire to know it, and in so doing they shed light on the powerful role of normativity in the narratives we construct in and about culture. Through novel analyses from the disciplines of literature, art criticism, history, philosophy, ethnic studies, and ethics, the contributors to this book address key questions about the nature of irreversibility: What differentiates the experience of the irreversible from the experience of the reversible? How is irreversibility recognized? What happens when we acknowledge something to be irreversible? How has society contended with irreversibility, and what sorts of tools exist today to interpret its significance? Wary of impetuously fixing the meaning of a still-elusive concept, this volume collects papers that employ a wide array of methodologies, mindful that no one critical approach may yet have proved itself. Irreversibility is not simply a quality of the texts examined in this volume, nor is it strictly speaking a lens through which otherwise coherent or stable texts are examined; rather, it emerges as a model that brings together texts and the thinking of them. By together outlining a method of examining culture that moves beyond reliance on tropes such as functionalism, teleology, and chance, tropes that have dominated twentieth century cultural analysis, these papers help to inaugurate a new paradigm in the study of culture.
The problem of deriving irreversible thermodynamics from the re versible microscopic dynamics has been on the agenda of theoreti cal physics for a century and has produced more papers than can be digested by any single scientist. Why add to this too long list with yet another work? The goal is definitely not to give a gen eral review of previous work in this field. My ambition is rather to present an approach differing in some key aspects from the stan dard treatments, and to develop it as far as possible using rather simple mathematical tools (mainly inequalities of various kinds). However, in the course of this work I have used a large number of results and ideas from the existing literature, and the reference list contains contributions from many different lines of research. As a consequence the reader may find the arguments a bit difficult to follow without some previous exposure to this set of problems.
NAMED A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE TIMES AND THE SUNDAY TIMES "Irreversible Damage . . . has caused a storm. Abigail Shrier, a Wall Street Journal writer, does something simple yet devastating: she rigorously lays out the facts." —Janice Turner, The Times of London Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively. But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as “transgender.” These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers.” Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and “gender-affirming” educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility. Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to “detransitioners”—young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves. Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back. She offers urgently needed advice about how parents can protect their daughters. A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.
This paper examines dynamic patterns of investment in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe, assessing the consistency of those patterns with different adjustment cost structures. Using survey data on manufactured firms, we document the importance of zero investment episodes and lumpy investment. The proportion of firms experiencing large investment spikes is significant in explaining aggregate manufacturing investment. Taken together, evidence from descriptive statistics, average investment regressions modeling the response to capital imbalance, and transition data analysis indicate that irreversibility is an important factor considered by firms when making investment plans. The picture is not unanimous however, and some explanations for the mixed results are proposed.
The optical spectra of molecular membrane probes can be interpreted terms of the structure, dynamics, and the physiological state of the membrane. The general picture we have of membranes and of the properties of the proteins imbedded in them, has, arguably, emerged directly from probe studies over the last 20 years. This work is designed to make these techniques accessible to a broad audience of cell biologist. The techniques discussed revolve primarily around the fluorescence of membrane probes, but applications of light absorption and Raman scattering are included. In addition to reviews of the major applications, most chapters include information on required apparatus, experimental design, data analysis, and potential pitfalls.
Investment is often irreversible, in that installed capital has little or no value unless used in production. In the presence of ongoing uncertainty, an individual firm's irreversible investment policy optimally alternates short bursts of positive gross investment to periods of inaction, when the installed capital stock is allowed to depreciate. The behavior of aggregate investment series is characterized by sluggish, continuous adjustment instead. We argue in this paper that aggregate dynamics should be interpreted in terms of unsynchronized irreversible investment decisions by heterogenous firms, rather than in terms of ad-hoc adjustment cost functions in a representative-agent framework. We propose a closed-form solution for a realistic model of sequential irreversible investment, characterize the aggregate implications of microeconomic irreversibility and idiosyncratic uncertainty, and interpret U.S. data in light of the theoretical results.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computability in Europe, CiE 2007, held in Sienna, Italy, in June 2007. The 50 revised full papers presented together with 36 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions.
Although the basic theories of thermodynamics are adequately covered by a number of existing texts, there is little literature that addresses more advanced topics. In this comprehensive work the author redresses this balance, drawing on his twenty-five years of experience of teaching thermodynamics at undergraduate and postgraduate level, to produce a definitive text to cover thoroughly, advanced syllabuses. The book introduces the basic concepts which apply over the whole range of new technologies, considering: a new approach to cycles, enabling their irreversibility to be taken into account; a detailed study of combustion to show how the chemical energy in a fuel is converted into thermal energy and emissions; an analysis of fuel cells to give an understanding of the direct conversion of chemical energy to electrical power; a detailed study of property relationships to enable more sophisticated analyses to be made of both high and low temperature plant and irreversible thermodynamics, whose principles might hold a key to new ways of efficiently covering energy to power (e.g. solar energy, fuel cells). Worked examples are included in most of the chapters, followed by exercises with solutions. By developing thermodynamics from an explicitly equilibrium perspective, showing how all systems attempt to reach a state of equilibrium, and the effects of these systems when they cannot, the result is an unparalleled insight into the more advanced considerations when converting any form of energy into power, that will prove invaluable to students and professional engineers of all disciplines.
The neglect of time in general and of the time structure of production in particular in mainstream economics led to the rebirth of the Austrian tradition in the seventies. The names of BERNHCLZ, HICKS, KIRZNER and VON WEIZSACKER are representative of different approaches. In 1979 my "Introduction to Modern Austrian Capital Theory" appeared, in which I unified various papers BERNHOLZ and I had written. I also linked our approach to those of VON NEUMANN, of HICKS and of neoclassical capital theory. These "Studies" supplement and continue my "Introduction" in various ways. With all the authors of the present volume I have cooperated for several years. This volume is subdivided into five parts. The first one, Historical Perspectives, gives first an outline on the development of Austrian capital theory from its origins to the present. Next it relates Modern Austrian Capital Theory to SRAFFA's theory and to the Austrian subjectivists' pure time preference theory of interest. The latter theory is represented in its opposition to the traditional productivity-cum-time preference explanation of interest, which is. common t9 neoclassical and BOHM-BAWERKian capital theory alike. The Austrian subjectivist pure time preference theory has been misinterpreted in its recent presentation, which has led to misunderstandings. It is shown that there is no real contradiction between the two appoaches.