Evaluation of Safety of Reinforced Concrete Buildings to Earthquakes

National Science Foundation Grant GK-3637

A Conflict Theory of Voting

Research in the behavioral psychology of voting has found that voters tend to be poorly informed, highly responsive to candidate personality, and follow a "fast and frugal" heuristic. This paper analyzes optimal candidate strategies in a two-party election in which voters are assumed to behave according to these traits. Under this assumption, candidates face a trade-off between appealing to a broader base and being overly ambiguous in their policy stances. A decrease in the cost of ambiguity within this model offers a parsimonious justification for the increase in voter independence, candidate ambiguity, and party politics that empirical studies have revealed over the last five decades. I additionally argue a decrease in the cost of ambiguity is a natural result of the primary system, campaign finance reform, and changing media environment.

High Sensitivity Torsion Balance Tests for LISA Proof Mass Modeling

We have built a highly sensitive torsion balance to investigate small forces between closely spaced gold coated surfaces. Such forces will occur between the LISA proof mass and its housing. These forces are not well understood and experimental investigations are imperative. We describe our torsion balance and present the noise of the system. A significant contribution to the LISA noise budget at low frequencies is the fluctuation in the surface potential difference between the proof mass and its housing. We present first results of these measurements with our apparatus.Comment: 6th International LISA Symposiu

Optical Design of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Millimeter Bolometric Array Camera

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope is a 6-meter telescope designed to map the Cosmic Microwave Background simultaneously at 145 GHz, 215 GHz, and 280 GHz with arcminute resolution. Each frequency will have a 32 by 32 element focal plane array of TES bolometers. This paper describes the design of the telescope and the cold reimaging optics, which is optimized for millimeter-wave observations with these sensitive detectors.Comment: 23 pages. Accepted for publication in Applied Optics. Several minor clarifications added after peer revie

Modeling Diffusive Dynamics in Adaptive Resolution Simulation of Liquid Water

We present a dual-resolution molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of liquid water employing a recently introduced Adaptive Resolution Scheme (AdResS). The spatially adaptive molecular resolution procedure allows for changing from a coarse-grained to an all-atom representation and vice-versa on-the-fly. In order to find the most appropriate coarse-grained water model to be employed with AdResS we first study the accuracy of different coarse-grained water models in reproducing the structural properties of the all-atom system. Typically, coarse-grained molecular models have a higher diffusion constant than the corresponding all-atom models due to the reduction in degrees of freedom (DOFs) upon coarse-graining that eliminates the fluctuating forces associated with those integrated-out molecular DOFs. Here, we introduce the methodology to obtain the same diffusional dynamics across different resolutions. We show that this approach leads to the correct description of essential thermodynamic, structural and dynamical properties of liquid water at ambient conditions.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figure