An overview of laser operation and modelocking of a vertical external cavity surface emitting laser (VECSEL)

VECSEL laser systems are important additions to the family of lasers. They exhibit a combination of desirable lasing features that are usually not simultaneously attainable. These features are high power, diffraction limited beam quality, intra-cavity frequency doubling, tunability, and ultrashort pulses generated from passive mode-locking. In this work, we give a brief overview of the VECSEL structure, previous VECSEL literature, how lasing in a VECSEL works, and how mode locking in a VECSEL works

A "Stubbornly Persistent Illusion"?:: Climate Crisis and the North, Ecomusicology and Academic Discourse

The climate crisis impacts the northern polar regions in disproportionate ways, and ecomusicology is an academic discourse. In bringing these two seemingly unrelated pairs together, I argue for academic discourse in ecomusicology that makes connections with the climate crisis in music and sound studies. What can ecomusicology offer humanity as we face climate catastrophe? While not a panacea, ecomusicology can serve to further collapse the unfortunate nature-culture dichotomy that is at the root of so many social and environmental problems.  Academic discourse always should have a place for titillation, but we must not avoid the climate crisis in music scholarship, for that only enables climate change denialism. I elaborate on an ecomusicology that is both new and not new, providing examples of climate connections in ecomusicological discourse. Ultimately, we must make such connections and do something about the problems we face as a civilization.The climate crisis impacts the northern polar regions in disproportionate ways, and ecomusicology is an academic discourse. In bringing these two seemingly unrelated pairs together, I argue for academic discourse in ecomusicology that makes connections with the climate crisis in music and sound studies. What can ecomusicology offer humanity as we face climate catastrophe? While not a panacea, ecomusicology can serve to further collapse the unfortunate nature-culture dichotomy that is at the root of so many social and environmental problems.  Academic discourse always should have a place for titillation, but we must not avoid the climate crisis in music scholarship, for that only enables climate change denialism. I elaborate on an ecomusicology that is both new and not new, providing examples of climate connections in ecomusicological discourse. Ultimately, we must make such connections and do something about the problems we face as a civilization

Law Enforcement Officers and the Domestic Violence Advocacy Referral Process

Domestic violence incidents impact the daily activities of the law enforcement agencies responsible for responding to these calls for service. Legislators and law enforcement leaders have expended countless hours, staffing, and finances to adequately protect the victims of domestic violence. In Virginia, an essential component of protecting victims of domestic violence involves the referral process, used by law enforcement officers to connect victims of domestic violence to domestic violence advocacy groups. The Code of Virginia and law enforcement agencies receiving accreditation through the Virginia Law Enforcement Professional Standards Commission (VLEPSC) require these referrals. There is available research regarding the referral process at metropolitan law enforcement agencies across the United States. However, there is a gap regarding how Virginia law enforcement officers employed with VLEPSC-accredited agencies serving populations less than 50,000 describe their experiences and the navigation of the referral process. This qualitative study utilized semi-structured interviews to assess the perspectives of 15 law enforcement officers who served in a full-time capacity and were responsible for investigating domestic violence incidents reported to the Goochland County Sheriff’s Office, Greene County Sheriff’s Office, King George County Sheriff’s Office, Winchester Police Department, and the Woodstock Police Department. This study found the following: (a) rural law enforcement officers struggle with the strict level of confidentiality advocacy services, (b) it is imperative for law enforcement officers to take an active role in their education regarding the domestic violence process, and (c) rural law enforcement officers need extended training regarding domestic violence

Get Outta My Face[book]: The Discoverability of Social Networking Data and the Passwords Needed to Access Them

Under what circumstances can a social network user be compelled to turn over his or her user identification and password in civil litigation? In three recent cases, courts attempted to answer this question with varied results. The New York Supreme Court Appellate Division refused to allow discovery of private Facebook information in McCann v. Harleysville Insurance Co. because the discovery request was not sufficiently tailored to reach discoverable information. Soon thereafter, the same court allowed discovery of similar material in Romano v. Steelcase, Inc. based on the level of publicity of the social networking account. In McMillen v. Hummingbird Speedway, Inc., the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas allowed discovery of private Facebook information based upon similar considerations as the Romano court. The McMillen court questioned whether the plaintiff should be allowed to block discovery by asserting an evidentiary privilege and determined that no reasonable expectation of confidentiality exists on social networking sites. The court determined that as long as a person’s social network sites contain information relevant to the lawsuit, courts should allow litigants to utilize “all rational means for ascertaining the truth.” This Article first summarizes the potential bases to prohibit discovery of social networking information and communication. It then examines the recent case law and identifies the level of protection courts are willing to afford social networking communication and the login information needed to access them in civil discovery

Geotechnical Engineering: Particle Size Distribution of Layered Glacial Lake Columbia and Ice Age Flood Deposits in Latah Valley, Spokane, WA

We collected samples from the Latah Valley in Spokane, WA, of Missoula Flood deposits interbedded with Glacial Lake Columbia Sediments. We conducted tests on these soils according to ASTM standards. We performed Specific Gravity tests according to ASTM D854, and determined particle size distribution for these soils by conducting sieve and hydrometer analyses according to ASTM D422. We then plotted these data to create particle size distribution curves. Specific Gravities for the all of the samples collected range from 2.36 to 2.67. The flood deposits are dominated by coarse sand and gravel and the Glacial Lake Columbia deposits are dominated by finer grain silts

Estimating the Price Elasticity of Demand for Water with Quasi Experimental Methods

There is a growing recognition in both the professional and popular literatures that water scarcity is a key policy issue that is especially important in arid, urban settings with the prospects for shortfalls in water availability due to the effects of climate change. Those evaluating these types of water problems usually conclude prices must be reformed so that incentives facing water users change to reflect this scarcity. Demand functions provide the basic economic relationships required to understand how water use will respond to such changes. This paper proposes a new method for estimating the price elasticity of demand that meets policy needs and can accommodate the presence of increasing block pricing structures.Water Demand Elasticity, Quasi Experiment, Climate Change, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Exceptional automorphisms of (generalized) super elliptic surfaces

A super-elliptic surface is a compact, smooth Riemann surface S with a conformal automorphism w of prime order p such that S/ has genus zero, extending the hyper-elliptic case p=2. More generally, a cyclic n-gonal surface S has an automorphism w of order n such that S/ has genus zero. All cyclic n-gonal surfaces have tractable defining equations. Let A = Aut(S) and N be the normalizer of C = in A. The structure of N, in principal, can be easily determined from the defining equation. If the genus of S is sufficiently large in comparison to n, and C satisfies a generalized super-elliptic condition, then A = N. For small genus A - N may be non-empty and, in this case, any automorphism h ∈ A - N is called exceptional. The exceptional automorphisms of all general cyclic n-gonal surfaces seems to be hard. We focus on generalized super-elliptic surfaces in which n is composite and the projection of S onto S/C is fully ramified. Generalized super-elliptic surfaces are easily identified by their defining equations. In this paper we discuss an approach to the determination of generalized super-elliptic surfaces with exceptional automorphisms