The National Space Science Data Center: An operational perspective

The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) manages over 110,000 data tapes with over 4,000 data sets. The size of the digital archive is approximately 6,000 GBytes and is expected to grow to more than 28,000 GBytes by 1995. The NSSDC is involved in several initiatives to better serve the scientific community and improve the management of current and future data holdings. These initiatives address the need to manage data to ensure ready access by the user and manage the media to ensure continuing accessibility and integrity of the data. An operational view of the NSSDC, outlining current policies and procedures that have been implemented to ensure the effective use of available resources to support service and mission goals, and maintain compliance with prescribed data management directives is presented

Some Determinants of Productivity

This study tests the effects of several variables on value productivity in manufacturing. Changes in human capital seem to have a greater impact on production worker output than do changes in physical capital. Industries which exhibit a high degree of employment instability tend to have tower value productivity than do industries with relatively stable employment. This finding supports the learning curve\u27; hypothesis. Capacity utilization was found to be inversely associated with worker output. The degree of unionism in an industry, number of hours worked, presence of female workers, and industry wholesale price levels were found to be insignificant factors in the determination of the dollar value of labor\u27s output

The Concept of Political party and Chinese Mandarins in Exile: Concept and Experience between China and the Americas

La vasta bibliografía que ha sido dedicada al concepto de “partido político” suele dejar de lado la historia no-occidental de este concepto (con excepción de Rusia), y los trabajos que la abordan suelen limitarla a un marco nacional. Las páginas que siguen proponen remediar en parte esta carencia. Con el objeto de mostrar la complejidad de los procesos de transmisión y producción de conceptos políticos en los albores del siglo XX, este artículo aborda un breve episodio en la historia global del partido: es la historia del concepto de dang – un término de época imperial que a partir de fines del siglo XIX fue asociado a la noción de “partido” del discurso político euro-americano – y de las peripecias transcontinentales de este concepto entre el Este asiático y las Américas. La historia en cuestión tiene por objeto un dang reformador de fines del siglo XIX. Este dang nació en el imperio Qing en 1895 como reacción a la Guerra Sino-Japonesa y en 1898 logró consolidarse como una facción de la corte del emperador Guangxu. Expulsado por un golpe de palacio, el dang reformador fue reorganizado en 1899 bajo la forma de una asociación en el exilio, y mientras sus dirigentes lo extendían a diferentes partes del mundo –de Asia a las Américas, de Japón a Malasia, de Australia al Perú–, el dang comenzó paulatinamente a asociarse al concepto de “partido político” en el mundo occidental. La reconstrucción de esta historia nos permitirá elucidar no sólo el modo en que el concepto de partido político en China estuvo asociado a las discusiones y decisiones que el establecimiento de esta organización transcontinental requirió de sus dirigentes y miembros, sino, más en general, el modo en que se articulan producción de conceptos y experiencia social.Most of the research on the concept of “political party” often neglects the non-Western history of this concept (with the exception of Russia), and the scholars who deal with it usually remain within the limits of a national framework. We intend to compensate at least in part for this lack. With the aim of disclosing the complexity of the production and transmission of concepts at the beginning of the 20th century, we will deal with a brief episode in the global history of the political party. We will study the history of dang—an imperial term increasingly associated with the Euro-American concept of “party” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—and the transcontinental hazards of this concept between East Asia and the Americas. We will more particularly focus on the dang of late 19th century Chinese reformers. This dang emerged in in the Qing empire in 1895 after the Sino-Japanese war and in 1898 it managed to become a faction at the court of the emperor Guangxu. After a palace coup expelled it from China, the dang of the reformers was reorganized as an association in exile, and while its leaders extended it to different parts of the world—from Asian to the Americas, from Japan to Malasia, from Australia to Peru—, the dang was increasingly associated with the concept of “political party” in the Western world. This history will help us elucidate the way in which the concept of political party in China was related not only to the discussions and decisions of the leaders of this transcontinental association, but also, and more generally, to the way in which the production of concepts is related to social experience

Leading Lawrence into the Future

In this matriculation convocation President Laurie Carter and Provost Peter Blitstein welcome students, faculty, and staff back to campus to mark the start of the new academic year

A Minimal Orbital Quantization Model and Quantum Hall Effect Analog in Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics

In the past decade, it has been demonstrated that droplets walking along the surface of a rotating, vibrating fluid bath, or walkers, exhibit robust orbital quantization. This phenomenon, although predicted by the previously derived integro-differential equations of motion, lacks a clear mechanism. We here present a reduced model containing the minimal ingredients for the emergence of orbital quantization. Namely, by taking into account the contribution to the wave field from the walker’s recent history and points where the source-to-walker distance is instantaneously not changing, we capture numerically equivalent quantization of orbital radius. Further, we develop a new hydrodynamic analog to the Quantum Hall Effect that arises when a constant force mimicking an electric field is added to the equation of motion. In particular, we show the existence of quantization of a mechanical analog to electrical resistivity, analogous to what is observed in the Quantum Hall Effect. In doing so, we further blur the line between classical and quantum mechanics, and show one way quantization of resistivity could emerge in a deterministic pilot-wave model.Bachelor of Scienc

Perceptions of the food shopping environment are associated with greater consumption of fruits and vegetables

Objective The present study examined whether characteristics such as quality, selection and convenience are associated with dietary intake of fruits and vegetables independent of perceived costs in an inner-city, low-income population. Design Secondary analysis of baseline data from a social marketing intervention designed to change household dietary practices among parents of 3- to 7-year-old children. Setting A community sample drawn from six low-income, primarily minority neighbourhoods in Chicago, IL, USA. Subjects From the parent study, 526 respondents completed the baseline survey and were eligible for inclusion. Of this number, 495 provided complete data on sociodemographic characteristics, fruit and vegetable consumption, perceptions of the shopping environment, perceived costs of fruits and vegetables, and food shopping habits. Results Logistic regression analysis showed that more positive perceptions of the food shopping environment were associated with greater consumption of fruits and vegetables. There was an increase of approximately twofold in the likelihood of consuming three or more fruits and vegetables daily per level of satisfaction ascribed to the shopping environment. This association was independent of perceived cost, store type and sociodemographic characteristics. Conclusions Our data show that among a generally minority and low-income population, quality, selection and convenience are important determinants of fruit and vegetable consumption. Nutrition promotion campaigns that aim to alter the built environment by increasing access to fruits and vegetables should recognize that simply increasing availability may not yield beneficial change when characteristics of the shopping context are ignored

Probing the Few Body Spin-1/2 Fermion Problem with Eigenvector Continuation and Algebra Automation

Recently in the nuclear structure community, a variational method called Eigenvector Continuation has been gaining traction as a means to efficiently compute the energy spectrum of a strongly interacting system. We here summarize its convergence properties, elucidating the philosophy of the method with a simple toy model consisting of an anharmonic oscillator. We then consider in all generality the energy spectrum of few body, spin-1/2, non relativistic fermions interacting via a short range contact interaction. The results are bench-marked with those available in the literature at unitarity, and are extended to fill in the gap of results from the weakly repulsive to the strongly interacting regime. The calculations proceed entirely analytically, allowing us to make use of an automated algebra framework to study larger fermion systems and increase the accuracy of our results. In doing so, we gain further insight into the study of nuclear dynamics, where the central problem consists of analyzing strongly interacting protons and neutrons.Bachelor of Scienc

Researching Stalin’s nationality policy in the archives

L’étude de la politique stalinienne des nationalités à travers les archives. – Les archives d’État et du parti de l’Union Soviétique sont classées principalement par institution. Le chercheur qui travaille sur des questions ne relevant pas d’une institution particulière ou d’un groupe d’institutions se heurte donc à des difficultés, comme c’est le cas en ce qui concerne la politique des nationalités. Cet article fait part des problèmes inhérents à l’étude de la politique des nationalités de l’URSS entre les années 1930 et 1950 par une description détaillée de collections spécifiques et de documents de six dépôts d’archives centrales situés à Moscou. L’auteur décrit deux grands types de sources : communications de routine entre le centre et la périphérie, et groupements irréguliers de documents portant sur des événements particulièrement marquants. L’auteur met l’accent autant sur les types de documents qui ne sont pas disponibles que sur ceux qui le sont dans les fonds d’archives centrales. Il conclut sur une mise en garde : la prise en compte uniquement de l’un ou de l’autre type – routinier ou sensationnel – peut déformer notre compréhension de la politique des nationalités pendant la période stalinienne.Insofar as Soviet party and state archives are organized primarily on the institutional principle, the researcher working on questions which did not fall under the purview of a particular institution or group of institutions encounters difficulties. One such area is nationality policy. The article discusses the problems of researching Soviet nationality policy from the 1930s to 1950s, detailing specific collections and genres of documents in six central archives located in Moscow. The author describes two general kinds of sources: routinized communications between center and periphery, and irregular batches of documents focused on particularly sensational events. Emphasis is placed as much on the kinds of information that is not available, as on what is available in central archives. In concluding, the author cautions that reliance on either routinized or sensational sources alone will skew understanding of nationality policy in the Stalin period