Jupiter’s interior and deep atmosphere: The initial pole-to-pole passes with the Juno spacecraft

On 27 August 2016, the Juno spacecraft acquired science observations of Jupiter, passing less than 5000 kilometers above the equatorial cloud tops. Images of Jupiter’s poles show a chaotic scene, unlike Saturn’s poles. Microwave sounding reveals weather features at pressures deeper than 100 bars, dominated by an ammonia-rich, narrow low-latitude plume resembling a deeper, wider version of Earth’s Hadley cell. Near-infrared mapping reveals the relative humidity within prominent downwelling regions. Juno’s measured gravity field differs substantially from the last available estimate and is one order of magnitude more precise. This has implications for the distribution of heavy elements in the interior, including the existence and mass of Jupiter’s core. The observed magnetic field exhibits smaller spatial variations than expected, indicative of a rich harmonic content

Putting Ethics on the Agenda for Real Estate Agents

This article uses sociological role theory to help understand ethical challenges faced by Norwegian real estate agents. The article begins with an introductory case, and then briefly examines the strengths and limitations of using legal definitions and rules for understanding real estate agency and real estate agent ethics. It goes on to argue that the ethical challenges of real estate agency can be described and understood as a system of conflicting roles with associated rights and duties, in particular sales agent, intermediary and adviser sub-roles. The arguments are developed using exploratory findings from a survey of Norwegian real estate agents and from several focus groups. The article then suggests the use of various intranet tools as a kind of action research aimed at putting ethics on the real estate agents’ agenda, working to develop a collective conscience and collective selfcriticism among the agents, and, in doing so, building bridges between academic research and the practical working world of the agents

Adaptive Adjustable Tricycle

As a part of the Cal Poly Mechanical Engineering curriculum, all students must take part in a three quarter long senior design project. Students are presented with existing problems, select a project, and then apply the knowledge they have gained throughout their academic career to design and build a solution. The intent behind this project is to create an experience that is similar to an engineering project in industry, by applying engineering and teamwork skills to solve a problem. Team Trikeceratops’ mission was to develop an adaptive adjustable tricycle to be used in the Special Education Department of the Buena Park School District for recreational use and physical therapy. The design team was comprised of four Cal Poly mechanical engineering students and a kinesiology student-consultant who worked through three primary design phases over the course of nine months to develop a functional prototype. These phases included ideation and conception, detailed design, and manufacturing, all of which have different requirements that call for a variety of skill sets. During ideation and conception, Team Trikeceratops developed lists of requirements from sponsor input, divided the project into components, generated ideas, and refined the options to reach an overall conceptual design. This initial phase was also essential in developing a team mentality and establishing the basic rules and guidelines by which the team would operate. At the end of ideation and conception, the team had developed a full theoretical design that would meet the customer requirements. Detailed design was the second phase wherein the students took the conceptual design and applied engineering knowledge to clearly define the solution. In this phase, most of the more stereotypical engineering occurred. Students sized tubing for the frame, performed calculations and analysis on components, created manufacturing drawings, identified part numbers for acquisition, and began contacting companies for parts and services. At the end of detailed design, the team had a bill of materials, manufacturing plan, contact information for suppliers, and fully dimensioned drawings for manufacturing custom parts. The third phase of product development was manufacturing and testing. Students cut, notched, welded, and machined various custom components while simultaneously overcoming problems of improper sizing and extended lead times on ordered materials. Following this process, the students tested the tricycle to ensure that it met the customer requirements set forth in the Design Verification Plan and Report (DVPR). At the end of this phase a functioning prototype was completed and staged for delivery and the final report was compiled. This remainder of this report details Team Trikeceratops’ progress from initial concept generation to prototype realization and explores each part of the aforementioned engineering design process in depth

Closing in on the picture : analyzing interactions in video recordings

This paper provides a detailed account of the processing and analysing of data, obtained through video recording during reflective practitioner research. It sets out five stages in the analysis of video recordings of classroom interactions during a series of educational drama lessons: from decisions relating to the selection of data for close analysis, to the seeking of themes, and finally to the presentation of conclusions. The researcher adapted and synthesised several processes derived from discourse analysis (Wells, 2001; Spiers, 2004; Gee, 2005) to produce a range of instruments for use in transcription and analysis of verbal and non-verbal discourse. These include: a simple transcription key; classifications for verbal and non-verbal discourse; and a template for a transcription and analysis matrix

Pay What You Want as a Marketing Strategy in Monopolistic and Competitive Markets

Pay What You Want (PWYW) can be an attractive marketing strategy to price discriminate between fair-minded and selfish customers, to fully penetrate a market without giving away the product for free, and to undercut competitors that use posted prices. We report on laboratory experiments that identify causal factors determining the willingness of buyers to pay voluntarily under PWYW. Furthermore, to see how competition affects the viability of PWYW, we implement markets in which a PWYW seller competes with a traditional seller. Finally, we endogenize the market structure and let sellers choose their pricing strategy. The experimental results show that outcome-based social preferences and strategic considerations to keep the seller in the market can explain why and how much buyers pay voluntarily to a PWYW seller. We find that PWYW can be viable in isolation, but it is less successful as a competitive strategy because it does not drive traditional posted-price sellers out of the market. Instead, the existence of a posted-price competitor reduces buyers’ payments and prevents the PWYW seller from fully penetrating the market. If given the choice, the majority of sellers opt for setting a posted price rather than a PWYW pricing. We discuss the implications of these results for the use of PWYW as a marketing strategy

The impact of relative position and returns on sacrifice and reciprocity: an experimental study using individual decisions

We present a comprehensive experimental design that makes it possible to characterize other-regarding preferences and their relationship to the decision maker’s relative position. Participants are faced with a large number of decisions involving variations in the trade-offs between own and other’s payoffs, as well as in other potentially important factors like the decision maker’s relative position. We find that: (1) choices are responsive to the cost of helping and hurting others; (2) The weight a decision maker places on others’ monetary payoffs depends on whether the decision maker is in an advantageous or disadvantageous relative position; and (3) We find no evidence of reciprocity of the type linked to menu-dependence. The results of a mixture-model estimation show considerable heterogeneity in subjects’ motivations and confirm the absence of reciprocal motives. Pure selfish behavior is the most frequently observed behavior. Among the subjects exhibiting social preferences, social-welfare maximization is the most frequent, followed by inequality-aversion and by competitiveness

Multilevel blocking approach to the fermion sign problem in path-integral Monte Carlo simulations

A general algorithm toward the solution of the fermion sign problem in finite-temperature quantum Monte Carlo simulations has been formulated for discretized fermion path integrals with nearest-neighbor interactions in the Trotter direction. This multilevel approach systematically implements a simple blocking strategy in a recursive manner to synthesize the sign cancellations among different fermionic paths throughout the whole configuration space. The practical usefulness of the method is demonstrated for interacting electrons in a quantum dot.Comment: 4 pages RevTeX, incl. two figure