Electromagnetic follow-up of gravitational wave transient signal candidates

Pioneering efforts aiming at the development of multi-messenger gravitational wave and electromagnetic astronomy have been made. An electromagnetic observation follow-up program of candidate gravitational wave events has been performed (Dec 17 2009 to Jan 8 2010 and Sep 4 to Oct 20 2010) during the recent runs of the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors. It involved ground-based and space electromagnetic facilities observing the sky at optical, X-ray and radio wavelengths. The joint gravitational wave and electromagnetic observation study requires the development of specific image analysis procedures able to discriminate the possible electromagnetic counterpart of gravitational wave triggers from contaminant/background events. The paper presents an overview of the electromagnetic follow-up program and the image analysis procedures.Comment: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on "Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics" (TAUP 2011), Munich, September 2011 (to appear in IoP Journal of Physics: Conference Series

Historical Overview of Children\u27s Magazines

In an effort to illuminate a neglected field of study, this thesis will examine children\u27s magazines in the United States and the forces shaping them. Children\u27s magazines reflect the country\u27s history and attitudes about youth and yet limited research about these important periodicals exists. This look at the development and publication of children\u27s magazines from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries explores selected periodicals from the printing press to the World Wide Web. Significant aspects of research to be assessed are: (1) the status and role of children\u27s magazines (2) changes in publishing and marketing from early times to present, and (3) the future of children\u27s magazines. These periodicals are an important part of the written record of American civilization and an invaluable resource about the tastes, manners, habits, interests, and achievements of United States history. A major change in purpose occurred in the mid-nineteenth century when the tone lightened from dreary moralizers and religious conversion was changed to social conversion. The child was still saved—but for this world not the next. The editorial objective of children\u27s periodicals expanded from educating to include entertaining. Although children\u27s magazine methods of educating and entertaining have changed to accommodate seismic shifts from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution these two missions have not. Children\u27s magazines have existed in the United States since 1789 when George Washington became the first president and children were considered little adults, and research indicates these periodicals will continue to survive and thrive even with the fate of print in the hands of digital natives

Enhancing gravitational wave astronomy with galaxy catalogues

Joint gravitational wave (GW) and electromagnetic (EM) observations, as a key research direction in multi-messenger astronomy, will provide deep insight into the astrophysics of a vast range of astronomical phenomena. Uncertainties in the source sky location estimate from gravitational wave observations mean follow-up observatories must scan large portions of the sky for a potential companion signal. A general frame of joint GW-EM observations is presented by a multi-messenger observational triangle. Using a Bayesian approach to multi-messenger astronomy, we investigate the use of galaxy catalogue and host galaxy information to reduce the sky region over which follow-up observatories must scan, as well as study its use for improving the inclination angle estimates for coalescing binary compact objects. We demonstrate our method using a simulated neutron stars inspiral signal injected into simulated Advanced detectors noise and estimate the injected signal sky location and inclination angle using the Gravitational Wave Galaxy Catalogue. In this case study, the top three candidates in rank have $72\%$, $15\%$ and $8\%$ posterior probability of being the host galaxy, receptively. The standard deviation of cosine inclination angle (0.001) of the neutron stars binary using gravitational wave-galaxy information is much smaller than that (0.02) using only gravitational wave posterior samples.Comment: Proceedings of the Sant Cugat Forum on Astrophysics. 2014 Session on 'Gravitational Wave Astrophysics

Competing forces of withdrawal and disease avoidance in the risk networks of people who inject drugs

We analyze a network of needle-sharing ties among 117 people who inject drugs (PWID) in rural Puerto Rico, using exponential random graph modeling to examine whether network members engage in partner restriction to lower their risk of contracting HIV or hepatitis C (HCV), or in informed altruism to prevent others from contracting these infections. Although sharing of used syringes is a significant risk factor for transmission of these diseases among PWID, we find limited evidence for partner restriction or informed altruism in the network of reported needle-sharing ties. We find however that sharing of needles is strongly reciprocal, and individuals with higher injection frequency are more likely to have injected with a used needle. Drawing on our ethnographic work, we discuss how the network structures we observe may relate to a decision-making rationale focused on avoiding withdrawal sickness, which leads to risk-taking behaviors in this poor, rural context where economic considerations often lead PWID to cooperate in the acquisition and use of drugs

The Critical Coupling Likelihood Method: A new approach for seamless integration of environmental and operating conditions of gravitational wave detectors into gravitational wave searches

Any search effort for gravitational waves (GW) using interferometric detectors like LIGO needs to be able to identify if and when noise is coupling into the detector's output signal. The Critical Coupling Likelihood (CCL) method has been developed to characterize potential noise coupling and in the future aid GW search efforts. By testing two hypotheses about pairs of channels, CCL is able to identify undesirable coupled instrumental noise from potential GW candidates. Our preliminary results show that CCL can associate up to $\sim 80$ of observed artifacts with $SNR \geq 8$, to local noise sources, while reducing the duty cycle of the instrument by $\lesssim 15$. An approach like CCL will become increasingly important as GW research moves into the Advanced LIGO era, going from the first GW detection to GW astronomy.Comment: submitted CQ

Always Affecting the Wrong People? The Impact of US Sanctions on Poverty

In this paper, we analyze the effect of US economic sanctions on the target countries' poverty gap during the period 1978-2011. Econometrically, we employ a nearest neighbor matching approach to account for differences in the countries' economic and political environment and the likelihood of being exposed to US sanctions. Our results indicate that US sanctions are indeed affecting the wrong people as we observe a 2.3-5.1 percentage points (pp) larger poverty gap in sanctioned countries compared to their nearest neighbors. Severe sanctions, such as fuel embargoes, trade restrictions, the freezing of assets, or embargoes on most or all economic activity are particularly detrimental and lead to an increase in the poverty gap by 6.1-7.4 pp

An all-sky search algorithm for continuous gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars in binary systems

Rapidly spinning neutron stars with non-axisymmetric mass distributions are expected to generate quasi-monochromatic continuous gravitational waves. While many searches for unknown, isolated spinning neutron stars have been carried out, there have been no previous searches for unknown sources in binary systems. Since current search methods for unknown, isolated neutron stars are already computationally limited, expanding the parameter space searched to include binary systems is a formidable challenge. We present a new hierarchical binary search method called TwoSpect, which exploits the periodic orbital modulations of the continuous waves by searching for patterns in doubly Fourier-transformed data. We will describe the TwoSpect search pipeline, including its mitigation of detector noise variations and corrections for Doppler frequency modulation caused by changing detector velocity. Tests on Gaussian noise and on a set of simulated signals will be presented.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit