9,259 research outputs found
"After Tocqueville â the Curious Adventures of Bernard-Henri LĂ©vy and Don Watson"
review essa
Mr Galt Goes To Washington
Two recently published oral histories highlight the long-term trend concerning the mainstreaming of Objectivism, the political and economic ideas of the libertarian conservative writer and ideologue, Ayn Rand. Scott McConnellâs sympathetic interview collection focuses on supporters and acquaintances from Randâs active period in the 1960s and 1970s. These supporters and acquaintances include former Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, who provides McConnell with his considered views concerning
Rand. Gary Weissâs critical interview collection focusses on her more recent supporters, with one displeased and insightful interviewee to be found in both collections. Weissâs collection reveals the role played by Objectivists in galvanizing the focus of the populist Tea Party movement. Both oral histories reveal the role played by the media and popular culture in mainstreaming Randâs views. The review ends by comparing Randolph Stowâs socially responsive individualism as described in his novel 'Tourmaline'
with Randâs transactional individualism as described in 'Atlas Shrugged.
Mesoscale atmosphere ocean coupling enhances the transfer of wind energy into the ocean
Although it is well established that the large-scale wind drives much of the worldâs ocean
circulation, the contribution of the wind energy input at mesoscales (10â200 km)
remains poorly known. Here we use regional simulations with a coupled high-resolution
atmosphereâocean model of the South Atlantic, to show that mesoscale ocean features and,
in particular, eddies can be energized by their thermodynamic interactions with the
atmosphere. Owing to their sea-surface temperature anomalies affecting the wind field above
them, the oceanic eddies in the presence of a large-scale wind gradient provide a mesoscale
conduit for the transfer of energy into the ocean. Our simulations show that this pathway is
responsible for up to 10% of the kinetic energy of the oceanic mesoscale eddy field in the
South Atlantic. The conditions for this pathway to inject energy directly into the mesoscale
prevail over much of the Southern Ocean north of the Polar Front
The effect of personality on collaborative task performance and interaction
Collocated, multi-user technologies, which support group-work are becoming increasingly popular. Examples include MERL's Diamondtouch and Microsoft's Surface, both of which have evolved from research prototypes to commercial products. Many applications have been developed for such technologies which support the work and entertainment needs of small groups of people. None of these applications however, have been studied in terms of the interactions and performances of their users with regards to their personality. In this paper, we address this research gap by conducting a series of user studies involving dyads working on a number of multi-user applications on the DiamondTouch tabletop device
How To Build an Undervoting Machine: Lessons from an Alternative Ballot Design
Despite the importance of usability in ensuring election integrity, it remains an under-studied aspect of voting systems.
Voting computers (a.k.a. DREs) offer the opportunity to present ballots to voters in novel ways, yet this space has not been
systematically explored. We constructed a DRE that, unlike most commercial DREs, does not require voters to view every
race, but instead starts at the âreview screenâ and lets voters directly navigate to races. This was compared with a more
traditional, sequentially-navigated, DRE. The direct access navigation model had two effects, both of which were quite
large. First, voters made omission (undervote) errors markedly more often. Second, voters who were free to choose who to
vote for chose to vote in substantially fewer races. We also examined the relationship between the true error rateâwhich is
not observable in real electionsâand the residual vote rate, a measure of effectiveness commonly used for real elections.
Replicating the findings of [Campbell and Byrne 2009a], the mean residual vote rate was close to the mean true error rate,
but the correlation between these measures was low, suggesting a loose coupling between these two measures
Multilingualism in London: LUCIDE City Report
This report is produced for LUCIDE (Languages in Urban Contexts: Integration and Diversity in Europe) project and network, funded by the EU Lifelong learning programme 2010- 2014, based on the collected primary and secondary data. It includes a brief historic overview of Londonâs demolinguistic features and a range of evidence relevant to current manifestations of multilingualism and plurilingualism in this global city. Considering the size, population and complexity of London our specific focus is on one local authority (out of an existing 33): the City of Westminster, geographically the heart of this metropolis. Westminster is in many ways representative of London language trends. It shows some of the most prominent features of multilingualism in London: an extraordinary linguistic variety with a wide distribution of languages, where no one language is dominant. Nevertheless, we also make reference to examples of multilingualism from outside Westminster, when we have considered it to be pertinent
The Chromospheric Activity and Ages of M Dwarf Stars in Wide Binary Systems
We investigate the relationship between age and chromospheric activity for
139 M dwarf stars in wide binary systems with white dwarf companions. The age
of each system is determined from the cooling age of its white dwarf component.
The current limit for activity-age relations found for M dwarfs in open
clusters is 4 Gyr. Our unique approach to finding ages for M stars allows for
the exploration of this relationship at ages older than 4 Gyr. The general
trend of stars remaining active for a longer time at later spectral type is
confirmed. However, our larger sample and greater age range reveals additional
complexity in assigning age based on activity alone. We find that M dwarfs in
wide binaries older than 4 Gyr depart from the log-linear relation for clusters
and are found to have activity at magnitudes, colors and masses which are
brighter, bluer and more massive than predicted by the cluster relation. In
addition to our activity-age results, we present the measured radial velocities
and complete space motions for 161 white dwarf stars in wide binaries.Comment: 22 pages including 9 figures and 5 tables. Accepted for publication
in The Astronomical Journa
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