10,312 research outputs found
Collective Interview on the History of Town Meetings
As illustrated in the introduction, the special issue ends with a ‘collective interview’ to some distinguished
scholars that have given an important contribution to the study of New England Town Meetings. The collective interview has been realized by submitting three questions to our interviewees, who responded individually in written. The text of the answers has not been edited, if not minimally. However, the editors have broken up longer individual answers in shorter parts. These have been subsequently rearranged in an effort to provide, as much as possible, a fluid structure and a degree of interaction among the different perspectives provided by our interviewees on similar issues. The final version of this interview has been edited and approved by all interviewees
Supermassive black holes as the regulators of star formation in central galaxies
We present a relationship between the black hole mass, stellar mass, and star
formation rate of a diverse group of 91 galaxies with dynamically-measured
black hole masses. For our sample of galaxies with a variety of morphologies
and other galactic properties, we find that the specific star formation rate is
a smoothly decreasing function of the ratio between black hole mass and stellar
mass, or what we call the specific black hole mass. In order to explain this
relation, we propose a physical framework where the gradual suppression of a
galaxy's star formation activity results from the adjustment to an increase in
specific black hole mass and, accordingly, an increase in the amount of
heating. From this framework, it follows that at least some galaxies with
intermediate specific black hole masses are in a steady state of partial
quiescence with intermediate specific star formation rates, implying that both
transitioning and steady-state galaxies live within this region known as the
"green valley." With respect to galaxy formation models, our results present an
important diagnostic with which to test various prescriptions of black hole
feedback and its effects on star formation activity.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in The
Astrophysical Journa
Crux: Locality-Preserving Distributed Services
Distributed systems achieve scalability by distributing load across many
machines, but wide-area deployments can introduce worst-case response latencies
proportional to the network's diameter. Crux is a general framework to build
locality-preserving distributed systems, by transforming an existing scalable
distributed algorithm A into a new locality-preserving algorithm ALP, which
guarantees for any two clients u and v interacting via ALP that their
interactions exhibit worst-case response latencies proportional to the network
latency between u and v. Crux builds on compact-routing theory, but generalizes
these techniques beyond routing applications. Crux provides weak and strong
consistency flavors, and shows latency improvements for localized interactions
in both cases, specifically up to several orders of magnitude for
weakly-consistent Crux (from roughly 900ms to 1ms). We deployed on PlanetLab
locality-preserving versions of a Memcached distributed cache, a Bamboo
distributed hash table, and a Redis publish/subscribe. Our results indicate
that Crux is effective and applicable to a variety of existing distributed
algorithms.Comment: 11 figure
Uniqueness for a Boundary Identification Problem in Thermal Imaging
An inverse problem for a parabolic initial-boundary value problem is considered. The goal is to determine an unknown portion of the boundary of a region in Rn from measurements of Dirichlet data on a known portion of the boundary. It is shown that under reasonable hypotheses uniqueness results hold
AN EVALUATION OF BETTER PRICING UNDER COMPETITIVE CONTRACTING PROCEDURES FOR NAVWAR AND NIWC PACIFIC ADVISORY AND ASSISTANCE SERVICES
A goal of the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command and the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is to acquire advisory and assistance services (A&AS) on time and at fair and reasonable prices. Although these organizations employ a range of competitive and non-competitive contracting procedures, the efficacy is unclear toward this end. This research project uses quantitative data analysis of FY20 and FY21 Federal Procurement Data System outputs totaling $3.4B, emphasizing Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity Multiple Award Contracts (IDIQ/MACs). The results indicate that both organizations achieve better pricing under competitive procedures instead of an exception to fair opportunity or when the organizations do not have a reasonable expectation of receiving multiple offers. Recommendations include maximizing competition under MACs, provided multiple offers can be expected and exceptions to fair opportunity are not applicable. In these situations, the government may want to consider single award IDIQ contract vehicles to satisfy procurement requirements. These vehicles may result in better pricing compared to using an exception to fair opportunity under a MAC.CivilianCivilian, Department of the NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited
Gemini Spectroscopic Survey of Young Star Clusters in Merging/Interacting Galaxies. II. NGC 3256 Clusters
We present Gemini optical spectroscopy of 23 young star clusters in NGC3256.
We find that the cluster ages range are from few Myr to ~150 Myr. All these
clusters are relatively massive (2--40)x 10^{5} \msun$ and appear to be of
roughly 1.5 \zo metallicity. The majority of the clusters in our sample follow
the same rotation curve as the gas and hence were presumably formed in the
molecular-gas disk. However, a western subsample of five clusters has
velocities that deviate significantly from the gas rotation curve. These
clusters may either belong to the second spiral galaxy of the merger or may
have formed in tidal-tail gas falling back into the system. We discuss our
observations in light of other known cluster populations in merging galaxies,
and suggest that NGC 3256 is similar to Arp 220, and hence may become an
Ultra-luminous Infrared Galaxy as the merger progresses and the star-formation
rate increases.
Some of the clusters which appeared as isolated in our ground-based images
are clearly resolved into multiple sub-components in the HST-ACS images. The
same effect has been observed in the Antennae galaxies, showing that clusters
are often not formed in isolation, but instead tend to form in larger groups or
cluster complexes.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables; Accepted Ap
Generating Cosmological Gaussian Random Fields
We present a generic algorithm for generating Gaussian random initial
conditions for cosmological simulations on periodic rectangular lattices. We
show that imposing periodic boundary conditions on the real-space correlator
and choosing initial conditions by convolving a white noise random field
results in a significantly smaller error than the traditional procedure of
using the power spectrum. This convolution picture produces exact correlation
functions out to separations of L/2, where L is the box size, which is the
maximum theoretically allowed. This method also produces tophat sphere
fluctuations which are exact at radii . It is equivalent to
windowing the power spectrum with the simulation volume before discretizing,
thus bypassing sparse sampling problems. The mean density perturbation in the
volume is no longer constrained to be zero, allowing one to assemble a large
simulation using a series of smaller ones. This is especially important for
simulations of Lyman- systems where small boxes with steep power
spectra are routinely used.
We also present an extension of this procedure which generates exact initial
conditions for hierarchical grids at negligible cost.Comment: 12 pages incl 3 figures, accepted in ApJ Letter
- …