Solar Terrestrial programs: A five year plan

Major projects to be initiated in the 1980-1985 period, designed to study the Sun, the heliosphere, Earth's magnetosphere, and the upper atmosphere involve the use of spacelab as well as free flying spacecraft. Current and recent investigations in these areas are reviewed and the guiding principles followed in planning future missions are examined. The implementation strategy, the planning process, and supporting research and technology are discussed

Searching for Variable Stars Using the Large Array Survey Telescope (LAST)

This paper introduces a novel variability report generator developed for the Large Array Survey Telescope (LAST), a cost-effective multi-purpose telescope array conducting a wide survey of the variable sky in the visible-light spectrum. Designed to automate variability detection, the report generator identifies candidate variable stars by employing adjustable thresholds to detect periodic and non-periodic variables. The program outputs a visual and tabular photometric report for each candidate variable source from a given LAST sub-image. Functioning as a whitepaper, this document also provides a concise overview of LAST, discussing its design, data workflow, and variability search performance.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures. Proceedings from undergraduate research conducted at Weizmann Institute of Science under the 2023 Kupcinet-Getz International Summer Schoo

Using the Consumer Choice Approach to Antitrust Law

The current paradigms of antitrust law - price and efficiency - do not work well enough. They were an immense improvement over their predecessors, and they have served the field competently for a generation, producing reasonably accurate results in most circumstances. Accumulated experience has also revealed their shortcomings, however. They are hard to fully understand and are not particularly transparent in their application. Moreover, in a disturbingly large number of circumstances they are unable to handle the important issue of non-price competition. In this article we suggest replacing the older paradigms with the somewhat broader approach of consumer choice. The choice framework has several advantages. It takes full account of all the things that are actually important to consumers- price, of course, but also variety, innovation, quality, and other forms of non-price competition. It is also far more transparent, which is an important administrative virtue even where, as in the great majority of cases, it will reach the same result. And in some important real-world situations it will lead to better substantive outcomes. There are a number of variety-valuing industries and circumstances that can be assessed correctly only by including an effective analysis of nonprice factors. We identify several of those in the article

Using the Consumer Choice Approach to Antitrust Law

The current paradigms of antitrust law - price and efficiency - do not work well enough. They were an immense improvement over their predecessors, and they have served the field competently for a generation, producing reasonably accurate results in most circumstances. Accumulated experience has also revealed their shortcomings, however. They are hard to fully understand and are not particularly transparent in their application. Moreover, in a disturbingly large number of circumstances they are unable to handle the important issue of non-price competition. In this article we suggest replacing the older paradigms with the somewhat broader approach of consumer choice. The choice framework has several advantages. It takes full account of all the things that are actually important to consumers- price, of course, but also variety, innovation, quality, and other forms of non-price competition. It is also far more transparent, which is an important administrative virtue even where, as in the great majority of cases, it will reach the same result. And in some important real-world situations it will lead to better substantive outcomes. There are a number of variety-valuing industries and circumstances that can be assessed correctly only by including an effective analysis of nonprice factors. We identify several of those in the article

An Investigation of Existential and Positive Psychological Resources in College Students

The number of college students reporting moderate to severe mental health symptoms has steadily increased since the 1990s to the point of a “mental health crisis” occurring on the majority of American college campuses (Joyce, 2016, p. 17). Students face a number of stressors including academic pressure, developmental challenges, and the existential issues of meaning in life and identity formation. Unfortunately, many college students struggle to respond to psychological stress in healthy and adaptive ways. This study measured the relationships between positive psychological resources, existential thought, coping strategies, and mental health symptoms among a national sample of 251 undergraduate students. Results indicated that the positive psychological resources of mindfulness, hope, and meaning of life predicted relatively lower rates of maladaptive coping strategies and mental health symptoms. Positive emotions and existential reflection predicted higher levels of adaptive coping. A multivariate canonical correlation analysis demonstrated a significant and positive relationship between maladaptive coping strategies and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. Existential reflection was found to be beneficial to the cultivation of adaptive coping and presence of meaning in life, but also positively correlated to maladaptive coping and increased mental health symptoms. The light and the dark aspects of existential thought are discussed. This research significantly contributes to the literature of existential and positive psychology, as well as college counseling. Positive psychological resources are internal strengths that can be cultivated throughout a student’s time at college. It is recommended that university administrators, college counselors, and faculty explore these constructs with students in order to further develop their individual strengths

The Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) Science Symposium

The principle purpose of this symposium is to provide the EGRET (Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope) scientists with an opportunity to study and improve their understanding of high energy gamma ray astronomy. The Symposium began with the galactic diffusion radiation both because of its importance in studying galactic cosmic rays, galactic structure, and dynamic balance, and because an understanding of its characteristics is important in the study of galactic sources. The galactic objects to be reviewed included pulsars, bursts, solar flares, and other galactic sources of several types. The symposium papers then proceeded outward from the Milky Way to normal galaxies, active galaxies, and the extragalactic diffuse radiation

A search for dark matter among Fermi-LAT unidentified sources with systematic features in Machine Learning

Around one third of the point-like sources in the Fermi-LAT catalogs remain as unidentified sources (unIDs) today. Indeed, these unIDs lack a clear, univocal association with a known astrophysical source. If dark matter (DM) is composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), there is the exciting possibility that some of these unIDs may actually be DM sources, emitting gamma rays from WIMPs annihilation. We propose a new approach to solve the standard, Machine Learning (ML) binary classification problem of disentangling prospective DM sources (simulated data) from astrophysical sources (observed data) among the unIDs of the 4FGL Fermi-LAT catalogue. Concretely, we artificially build two systematic features for the DM data which are originally inherent to observed data: the detection significance and the uncertainty on the spectral curvature. We do it by sampling from the observed population of unIDs, assuming that the DM distributions would, if any, follow the latter. We consider different ML models: Logistic Regression, Neural Network (NN), Naive Bayes and Gaussian Process, out of which the best, in terms of classification accuracy, is the NN, achieving around 93% performance. Applying the NN to the unIDs sample, we find that the degeneracy between some astrophysical and DM sources can be partially solved within this methodology. Nonetheless, we conclude that there are no DM source candidates among the pool of 4FGL Fermi-LAT unIDs.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figures, ready for submission to MNRA

Toward Reduced Poverty Across Generations: Early Findings from New York City's Conditional Cash Transfer Program

In 2007, New York City launched Opportunity NYC -- Family Rewards, an experimental, privately funded, conditional cash transfer (CCT) program to help families break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. CCT programs offer cash assistance to reduce immediate hardship and poverty but condition this assistance -- or cash transfers -- on families' efforts to improve their "human capital" (typically, children's educational achievement and family health) in the hope of reducing their poverty over the longer term. Such programs have grown rapidly across lower- and middle-income countries, and evaluations have found some important successes. Family Rewards is the first comprehensive CCT program in a developed country.Aimed at low-income families in six of New York City's highest-poverty communities, Family Rewards ties cash rewards to a pre-specified set of activities and outcomes in the areas of children's education, family preventive health care, and parents' employment. The program is available to 2,400 families for three years. Inspired by Mexico's pioneering Oportunidades program, Family Rewards' program effects are being measured via a randomized control trial.The Family Rewards demonstration is one of 40 initiatives sponsored by New York City's Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO), a unit within the Office of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that is responsible for testing innovative strategies to reduce the number of New Yorkers who are living in poverty. Two national, New York-based nonprofit organizations -- MDRC, a nonpartisan social policy research firm, and Seedco, a workforce and economic development organization -- worked in close partnership with CEO to design the demonstration. Seedco, together with a small network of local community-based organizations, is operating Family Rewards, and MDRC is conducting the evaluation and managing the overall demonstration. A consortium of private funders is supporting the project.1This report presents the initial findings from an ongoing and comprehensive evaluation of Family Rewards. It examines the program's implementation in the field and families' responses to it during the first two of its three years of operations. This evaluation period, beginning in September 2007 and ending in August 2009, encompasses a start-up phase as well as a stage when the program was beginning to mature. The report also presents early findings on the program's effects, or "impacts," on a wide range of outcome measures. For some measures, the results cover only the first program year, while for others they also cover part or all of the second year. No data are available yet on the third year. The evaluation findings are based on analyses of a wide variety of administrative records data, responses to a survey of parents that was administered about 18 months after random assignment, and qualitative in-depth interviews with program staff and families.Overall, this study shows that, despite an extraordinarily rapid start-up and early challenges, the program was operating largely as intended by its second year. Although many families struggled with the complexity of the program, most were substantially engaged with it and received a large amount of money for meeting the conditions it established. During the period covered by the report, Family Rewards reduced current poverty (its main short-term goal) and produced a range of effects on a variety of outcomes across all three program domains (children's education, family health care, and parents' work and training)