A Piece of My Heart: Examining Healing Facilitated by the Performing Arts

Undergraduate Performing Arts - Theatr

The Photoeccentric Effect and Proto-hot Jupiters. III. A Paucity of Proto-hot Jupiters on Super-eccentric Orbits

Gas giant planets orbiting within 0.1 AU of their host stars are unlikely to have formed in situ and are evidence for planetary migration. It is debated whether the typical hot Jupiter smoothly migrated inward from its formation location through the proto-planetary disk, or was perturbed by another body onto a highly eccentric orbit, which tidal dissipation subsequently shrank and circularized during close stellar passages. Socrates and collaborators predicted that the latter model should produce a population of super-eccentric proto-hot Jupiters readily observable by Kepler. We find a paucity of such planets in the Kepler sample, which is inconsistent with the theoretical prediction with 96.9% confidence. Observational effects are unlikely to explain this discrepancy. We find that the fraction of hot Jupiters with an orbital period P > 3 days produced by the star-planet Kozai mechanism does not exceed (at two-sigma) 44%. Our results may indicate that disk migration is the dominant channel for producing hot Jupiters with P > 3 days. Alternatively, the typical hot Jupiter may have been perturbed to a high eccentricity by interactions with a planetary rather than stellar companion, and began tidal circularization much interior to 1 AU after multiple scatterings. A final alternative is that early in the tidal circularization process at high eccentricities tidal circularization occurs much more rapidly than later in the process at low eccentricities, although this is contrary to current tidal theories

The Photoeccentric Effect and Proto-Hot Jupiters I. Measuring photometric eccentricities of individual transiting planets

Exoplanet orbital eccentricities offer valuable clues about the history of planetary systems. Eccentric, Jupiter-sized planets are particularly interesting: they may link the "cold" Jupiters beyond the ice line to close-in hot Jupiters, which are unlikely to have formed in situ. To date, eccentricities of individual transiting planets primarily come from radial velocity measurements. Kepler has discovered hundreds of transiting Jupiters spanning a range of periods, but the faintness of the host stars precludes radial velocity follow-up of most. Here we demonstrate a Bayesian method of measuring an individual planet's eccentricity solely from its transit light curve using prior knowledge of its host star's density. We show that eccentric Jupiters are readily identified by their short ingress/egress/total transit durations -- part of the "photoeccentric" light curve signature of a planet's eccentricity --- even with long-cadence Kepler photometry and loosely-constrained stellar parameters. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo exploration of parameter posteriors naturally marginalizes over the periapse angle and automatically accounts for the transit probability. To demonstrate, we use three published transit light curves of HD 17156 b to measure an eccentricity of e = 0.71 +0.16/-0.09, in good agreement with the discovery value e = 0.67+/-0.08 based on 33 radial-velocity measurements. We present two additional tests using actual Kepler data. In each case the technique proves to be a viable method of measuring exoplanet eccentricities and their confidence intervals. Finally, we argue that this method is the most efficient, effective means of identifying the extremely eccentric, proto hot Jupiters predicted by Socrates et al. (2012).Comment: ApJ, 756, 122. Received 2012 April 5; accepted 2012 July 9; published 2012 August 2

The Co-Construction of Roles and Patterns of Interaction in Family Discourse

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature on the discourse analysis of spoken interaction in the family context. Specific aspects of family discourse are discussed, including the co-construction of identity, the specific roles and identities of family members, and the patterns of interaction found in the discourse. Since gender is an important aspect of family roles, an overview of the research on gender and spoken interaction is included. The concepts of framing and power, as they relate to family interaction are also discussed given the salience researchers have attached to these concepts. This is followed by a review of the literature on language and identity, including the co-construction of identity in interaction, and discourse analysis studies on particular family member roles and family identity. Discourse patterns specific to family interaction are discussed in the last section. The review concludes that although discourse analysis research on family talk has shed light on family-specific patterns of interaction, it has nevertheless focused on a narrowly defined concept of what constitutes a family and has largely been based on short-term data collection

A Multi-Layered Framework of Framing

Professor Leslie M. Beebe has always been an unfailing source of encouragement, a wealth of knowledge and insight, and a wonderful critic. She has taught me much about pragmatics and sociolinguistics, the foundations of my current interests in the social construction of meaning in interaction. My passion for discourse analysis developed while taking several of Professor Beebe’s courses, in particular Interactional Sociolinguistics, where I was introduced to the notion of framing. From our classroom discussions and readings, I developed a conceptualization of framing that became the underlying framework for my subsequent research and current dissertation work on family discourse and identity construction. Below is an adaptation of the “framework of framing” from my data collection paper in the Interactional Sociolinguistics class

Conclusion: Re-evaluating Eclecticism

When looking at the original data analysis, we see a variety of approaches used to examine the discourse data of focus. The analysis is rich and includes a wide array of features. Conversely, the three single perspective analyses conducted for this Forum each drew upon different linguistic details to support their conclusions with different insights

A Pragmatics Perspective

In this conversation, a husband and wife discuss upcoming vacation plans (see Appendix A for the full transcript). It seems that the wife is guiding much of the conversation through attentiongetting phrases and by explicitly stating what she hopes the talk will accomplish. The husband, on the other hand, answers the wife and, at times, tries to add his opinion but is not able to get it out because the wife is talking over him or continues talking. Of the three excerpts we are focusing on (see Appendix B), the husband talks most in excerpt B, calculating expenses. There are instances of implicature (Grice, 1975), where one spouse understands unstated or implied meanings, and cases where one or both spouses are attending to negative or positive face needs (Brown & Levinson, 1987)

A Counter Perspective

It was with great interest that I read the Stubbe, Lane, Hilder, Vine, Vine, Marra, Holmes, and Weatherall (2003) article analyzing workplace interaction. It demonstrated the varied ways the same material could be dissected and the diverse conclusions that could be drawn from approaches of conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguisitcs, politeness theory, critical discourse analysis, and discursive psychology. However, I found myself disagreeing with the general analyses made by the writers in all five approaches. It seems that, in looking to properly use linguistic, paralinguistic, and discourse features in ways championed by each approach, the analysts tailored their discussions to fit with the general assumptions and foci inherent to each style, and in consequence, to ignore the big picture (or what I term the common sense view that we, as social beings, have of an interaction from our general social knowledge)