CIRAS News (Vol. 37, No. 2)

Contents: Governor endorses bioeconomy ideas unveiled at IIOF symposium; Niche market and quality focus spell success; Split courses cover engineering and statistics; PRO-Net and CCR combine for easier access; Perserverance and CIRAS ties mark Donco growth; CIRAS repeats success at NAMTAC; Grants critical to CIRAS serviceshttps://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ciras_news/1011/thumbnail.jp

Bimodal AGNs in Bimodal Galaxies

By their star content, the galaxies split out into a red and a blue population; their color index peaked around u-r=2.5 or u-r=1, respectively, quantifies the ratio of the blue stars newly formed from cold galactic gas, to the redder ones left over by past generations. On the other hand, upon accreting substantial gas amounts the central massive black holes energize active galactic nuclei (AGNs); here we investigate whether these show a similar, and possibly related, bimodal partition as for current accretion activity relative to the past. To this aim we use an updated semianalytic model; based on Monte Carlo simulations, this follows with a large statistics the galaxy assemblage, the star generations and the black hole accretions in the cosmological framework over the redshift span from z=10 to z=0. We test our simulations for yielding in close detail the observed split of galaxies into a red, early and a blue, late population. We find that the black hole accretion activities likewise give rise to two source populations: early, bright quasars and later, dimmer AGNs. We predict for their Eddington parameter $\lambda_E$ -- the ratio of the current to the past black hole accretions -- a bimodal distribution; the two branches sit now under $\lambda_E \approx 0.01$ (mainly contributed by low-luminosity AGNs) and around $\lambda_E \approx 0.3-1$. These not only mark out the two populations of AGNs, but also will turn out to correlate strongly with the red or blue color of their host galaxies.Comment: 7 pages, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Globalisation has made education the new political cleavage in Europe

Several recent European elections, as well as the UK's referendum on Brexit, have produced a clear split in voting choices between citizens with different levels of education. Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille argue that a new political cleavage in Europe has emerged between citizens with high levels of education and those with lower levels of educational attainment, with the former ..

Judicial Speculation on Consumer Impression: The Pitfalls of Measuring Trademark Tacking as a Question of Law

Trademark tacking allows a mark owner to adjust her mark without losing protection. The test for determining whether tacking is appropriate is whether the new mark is the legal equivalent of the old. This equivalency is measured by evaluating the continuing commercial impression created by the marks. A circuit split has developed over whether this test is a question of law or a question of fact. This Comment argues that the continuing commercial impression test is ill-suited to be measured as a question of law. Initially, this Comment focuses on how commercial impression is a fact-based inquiry and should be measured as such. This involves a discussion about the roles of the fact and law finders, a comparison to the likelihood of confusion analysis, as well as its treatment in court, and the complexities involved in determining consumer impression

Judicial Speculation on Consumer Impression: The Pitfalls of Measuring Trademark Tacking as a Question of Law

Trademark tacking allows a mark owner to adjust her mark without losing protection. The test for determining whether tacking is appropriate is whether the new mark is the legal equivalent of the old. This equivalency is measured by evaluating the continuing commercial impression created by the marks. A circuit split has developed over whether this test is a question of law or a question of fact. This Comment argues that the continuing commercial impression test is ill-suited to be measured as a question of law. Initially, this Comment focuses on how commercial impression is a fact-based inquiry and should be measured as such. This involves a discussion about the roles of the fact and law finders, a comparison to the likelihood of confusion analysis, as well as its treatment in court, and the complexities involved in determining consumer impression

It's education, stupid: how globalisation has made education the new political cleavage in Europe

Several recent European elections, as well as the UK's referendum on Brexit, have produced a clear split in voting choices between citizens with different levels of education. Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille argue that a new political cleavage in Europe has emerged between citizens with high levels of education and those with lower levels of educational attainment, with the former group more likely to support green and liberal parties, and the latter drawn toward nationalism

Forest Views: Shifting Attitudes Toward the Environment in Northeast Oregon

This brief reports on a telephone survey conducted in fall 2014 as part of the ongoing Communities and Forests in Oregon (CAFOR) project. CAFOR focuses on seven counties in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon (Baker, Crook, Grant, Umatilla, Union, Wallowa, and Wheeler), where the landscape and local livelihoods are changing in interconnected ways. In an effort to inform policy development around natural resource management, the study seeks to understand how public perceptions of climate change and forest management intersect. Authors Angela Boag, Joel Hartter, Lawrence Hamilton, Forrest Stevens, Mark Ducey, Michael Palace, Nils Christoffersen, and Paul Oester report that 65 percent of those surveyed believe that forests are less healthy than they were twenty years ago. Approximately half of residents support increased user fees to improve forest health on federal land, and a majority believes that climate change is happening, although opinion is split between those who believe it is human-caused and those who believe it is caused by natural forces. The authors conclude that innovative economic and policy solutions are needed across the Inland West to help people and forests regain a strong and productive relationship that both supports livelihoods and sustains working landscapes

High fidelity quantum memory via dynamical decoupling: theory and experiment

Quantum information processing requires overcoming decoherence---the loss of "quantumness" due to the inevitable interaction between the quantum system and its environment. One approach towards a solution is quantum dynamical decoupling---a method employing strong and frequent pulses applied to the qubits. Here we report on the first experimental test of the concatenated dynamical decoupling (CDD) scheme, which invokes recursively constructed pulse sequences. Using nuclear magnetic resonance, we demonstrate a near order of magnitude improvement in the decay time of stored quantum states. In conjunction with recent results on high fidelity quantum gates using CDD, our results suggest that quantum dynamical decoupling should be used as a first layer of defense against decoherence in quantum information processing implementations, and can be a stand-alone solution in the right parameter regime.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. Published version. This paper was initially entitled "Quantum gates via concatenated dynamical decoupling: theory and experiment", by Jacob R. West, Daniel A. Lidar, Bryan H. Fong, Mark F. Gyure, Xinhua Peng, and Dieter Suter. That original version split into two papers: http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.3433 (theory only) and the current pape