The Effect of Congressional Committee Assignments on National Park Annual Operating Budget Appropriations

Yearly funding for individual national parks is overseen and determined by the House Appropriations and Natural Resources Committees. This process has resulted in the National Park Service being underfunded and facing a $12 billion maintenance backlog. Congress has passed temporary funding to help reduce this backlog but has not indicated a shift in how funding decisions are made to prevent future shortfalls. This thesis uses statistical analysis to explore how individual members of Congress are impacting funding for national Parks in their states or districts. Often congressional committee’s act on personal incentives to make funding decisions rather than basing their decisions on recommendations by experts. These results have significant implications for the future of national park funding and the role of committees in Congress

Parting the Red Sea: Prescriptions for the RLUIPA Equal Terms Provision\u27s Expanding Circuit Split

Congress unanimously passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) in 2000. The Act marked the culmination of a decades-long dialogue between Congress and the Supreme Court. RLUIPA’s passage embodied Congress’s resolve to provide religious free exercise protections—particularly as it pertained to religious land use. Since 2000, however, RLUIPA’s Equal Terms Provision has been subject to differing judicial interpretations, resulting in an expanding circuit split. This Note analyzes the circuit split and offers guidance to future interpreters. First, this Note examines the social, legislative, and judicial history leading to RLUIPA’s enactment. Second, it analyzes the contours of interpretations adopted by eight United States Circuit Courts of Appeals. Extrapolating from extant interpretations, it offers a judicial prescription for how future courts, particularly the Supreme Court, should interpret RLUIPA’s Equal Terms Provision to resolve the circuit split. Finally, it proposes a legislative prescription for how Congress could amend RLUIPA to clarify ambiguities perceived by the judiciary

Phenomenology of a light scalar: the dilaton

We make use of the language of non-linear realizations to analyze electro-weak symmetry breaking scenarios in which a light dilaton emerges from the breaking of a nearly conformal strong dynamics, and compare the phenomenology of the dilaton to that of the well motivated light composite Higgs scenario. We argue that -- in addition to departures in the decay/production rates into massless gauge bosons mediated by the conformal anomaly -- characterizing features of the light dilaton scenario (as well as other scenarios admitting a light CP-even scalar not directly related to the breaking of the electro-weak symmetry) are off-shell events at high invariant mass involving two longitudinally polarized vector bosons and a dilaton, and tree-level flavor violating processes. Accommodating both electro-weak precision measurements and flavor constraints appears especially challenging in the ambiguous scenario in which the Higgs and the dilaton fields strongly mix. We show that warped higgsless models of electro-weak symmetry breaking are explicit and tractable realizations of this limiting case. The relation between the naive radion profile often adopted in the study of holographic realizations of the light dilaton scenario and the actual dynamical dilaton field is clarified in the Appendix.Comment: 21 page

Dispersion of the high-energy phonon modes in Nd1.85_{1.85}Ce0.15_{0.15}CuO4_4

The dispersion of the high-energy phonon modes in the electron doped high-temperature superconductor Nd$_{1.85}$Ce$_{0.15}$CuO$_4$ has been studied by inelastic neutron scattering. The frequencies of phonon modes with Cu-O bond-stretching character drop abruptly when going from the Brillouin zone center along the [100]-direction; this dispersion is qualitatively similar to observations in the hole-doped cuprates. We also find a softening of the bond-stretching modes along the [110]-direction but which is weaker and exhibits a sinusoidal dispersion. The phonon anomalies are discussed in comparison to hole-doped cuprate superconductors and other metallic perovskites

On Charge-3 Cyclic Monopoles

We determine the spectral curve of charge 3 BPS su(2) monopoles with C_3 cyclic symmetry. The symmetry means that the genus 4 spectral curve covers a (Toda) spectral curve of genus 2. A well adapted homology basis is presented enabling the theta functions and monopole data of the genus 4 curve to be given in terms of genus 2 data. The Richelot correspondence, a generalization of the arithmetic mean, is used to solve for this genus 2 curve. Results of other approaches are compared.Comment: 34 pages, 16 figures. Revision: Abstract added and a few small change

The hypertoric intersection cohomology ring

We present a functorial computation of the equivariant intersection cohomology of a hypertoric variety, and endow it with a natural ring structure. When the hyperplane arrangement associated with the hypertoric variety is unimodular, we show that this ring structure is induced by a ring structure on the equivariant intersection cohomology sheaf in the equivariant derived category. The computation is given in terms of a localization functor which takes equivariant sheaves on a sufficiently nice stratified space to sheaves on a poset.Comment: Significant revisions in Section 5, with several corrected proof

Thermal conductivity of R2CuO4, with R = La, Pr and Gd

We present measurements of the in-plane kappa_ab and out-of-plane kappa_c thermal conductivity of Pr2CuO4 and Gd2CuO4 single crystals. The anisotropy gives strong evidence for a large contribution of magnetic excitations to kappa_ab i.e. for a heat current within the CuO2 planes. However, the absolute values of kappa_mag are lower than previous results on La2CuO4. These differences probably arise from deviations from the nominal oxygen stoichiometry. This has a drastic influence on kappa_mag, which is shown by an investigation of a La2CuO4+delta polycrystal.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure; presented at SCES200

Magnetic shape-memory effect in SrRuO3_3

Like most perovskites, SrRuO$_3$ exhibits structural phase transitions associated with rotations of the RuO$_6$ octahedra. The application of moderate magnetic fields in the ferromagnetically ordered state allows one to fully control these structural distortions, although the ferromagnetic order occurs at six times lower temperature than the structural distortion. Our neutron diffraction and macroscopic measurements unambiguously show that magnetic fields rearrange structural domains, and that for the field along a cubic [110]$_c$ direction a fully detwinned crystal is obtained. Subsequent heating above the Curie temperature causes a magnetic shape-memory effect, where the initial structural domains recover

Welcoming Remarks

Short welcoming remarks by Executive Symposium Editors Braden T. Meadows and Austin Headrick