The engineers that time forgot

You and I, dear reader of IEEE Microwave Magazine, are set to become more valuable day by day. Let me see if I can paint a picture of why

From discussion leader to consumer guide: A century of theater criticism in Chicago newspapers

This article completes a three-part examination of theater critics working for Chicago newspapers during the twentieth century. The first article in the series covered the boomtown period leading up to World War I, and the second article addressed Chicago\u27s rise after 1960 as a regional center for theater covered by fewer newspapers and fewer critics. This article reviews those periods but emphasizes the middle, road town period, which saw a gradually dwindling band of critics functioning as quality control experts, passing judgment on New York road shows. After examining that period, this article uses commodification to consider the changing role of the critic over the entire century. It concludes that while commodification is a useful concept to understand vast changes in the critical landscape, it is neither an irresistible nor an inevitable force

Observational Constraints on Trojans of Transiting Extrasolar Planets

Theoretical studies predict that Trojans are likely a frequent byproduct of planet formation and evolution. We present a novel method of detecting Trojan companions to transiting extrasolar planets which involves comparing the time of central eclipse with the time of the stellar reflex velocity null. We demonstrate that this method offers the potential to detect terrestrial-mass Trojans using existing ground-based observatories. This method rules out Trojan companions to HD 209458b and HD 149026b more massive than ~13 Earth masses and \~25 Earth masses at a 99.9% confidence level. Such a Trojan would be dynamically stable, would not yet have been detected by photometric or spectroscopic monitoring, and would be unrecognizable from radial velocity observations alone. We outline the future prospects for this method, and show that the detection of a "Hot Trojan" of any mass would place a significant constraint on theories of orbital migration.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, accepted to ApJL. Added references, new transiting planets to table; minor correction

A letter to the editor

The goal of this letter is to point out that the fastest way to weaken any society and its business model, including the IEEE and its reader-pays stance, is to lose your professional integrity

Observation of explosive collisionless reconnection in 3D nonlinear gyrofluid simulations

The nonlinear dynamics of collisionless reconnecting modes is investigated, in the framework of a three-dimensional gyrofluid model. This is the relevant regime of high-temperature plasmas, where reconnection is made possible by electron inertia and has higher growth rates than resistive reconnection. The presence of a strong guide field is assumed, in a background slab model, with Dirichlet boundary conditions in the direction of nonuniformity. Values of ion sound gyro-radius and electron collisionless skin depth much smaller than the current layer width are considered. Strong acceleration of growth is found at the onset to nonlinearity, while at all times the energy functional is well conserved. Nonlinear growth rates more than one order of magnitude higher than linear growth rates are observed when entering into the small-$\Delta'$ regime