CMB Polarization Experiments

We discuss the analysis of polarization experiments with particular emphasis on those that measure the Stokes parameters on a ring on the sky. We discuss the ability of these experiments to separate the $E$ and $B$ contributions to the polarization signal. The experiment being developed at Wisconsin university is studied in detail, it will be sensitive to both Stokes parameters and will concentrate on large scale polarization, scanning a $47^o$ degree ring. We will also consider another example, an experiment that measures one of the Stokes parameters in a $1^o$ ring. We find that the small ring experiment will be able to detect cosmological polarization for some models consistent with the current temperature anisotropy data, for reasonable integration times. In most cosmological models large scale polarization is too small to be detected by the Wisconsin experiment, but because both $Q$ and $U$ are measured, separate constraints can be set on $E$ and $B$ polarization.Comment: 27 pages with 12 included figure

Adding school to work–family balance: The role of support for Portuguese working mothers attending a master’s degree

This qualitative study examines the work, family, and study experiences of Portuguese professional women in two different career stages: early career and mid-career. Using semi-structured interviews with a sample of 22 working mothers enrolled in a master’s degree, this study explores their experiences of combining the roles of mother, worker and student and the role of support for a successful integration of work–family and school. Support from peers was found to be a critical factor for successfully integrating work–family and school responsibilities. Differences in the use of partner and family support were found between early and mid-career women. Lack of or limited support from the workplace was a barrier that emerged in both groups.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Sequences of purchases in credit card data reveal life styles in urban populations

Zipf-like distributions characterize a wide set of phenomena in physics, biology, economics and social sciences. In human activities, Zipf-laws describe for example the frequency of words appearance in a text or the purchases types in shopping patterns. In the latter, the uneven distribution of transaction types is bound with the temporal sequences of purchases of individual choices. In this work, we define a framework using a text compression technique on the sequences of credit card purchases to detect ubiquitous patterns of collective behavior. Clustering the consumers by their similarity in purchases sequences, we detect five consumer groups. Remarkably, post checking, individuals in each group are also similar in their age, total expenditure, gender, and the diversity of their social and mobility networks extracted by their mobile phone records. By properly deconstructing transaction data with Zipf-like distributions, this method uncovers sets of significant sequences that reveal insights on collective human behavior.Comment: 30 pages, 26 figure

The family drug & alcohol court (FDAC) evaluation project

This report presents the findings from the evaluation of the first pilot Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC) in Britain. FDAC is a new approach to care proceedings, in cases where parental substance misuse is a key element in the local authority decision to bring proceedings. It is being piloted at the Inner London Family Proceedings Court in Wells Street. Initially the pilot was to run for three years, to the end of December 2010, but is now to continue until March 2012. The work is co-funded by the Department for Education (formerly the Department for Children, Schools and Families), the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, the Department of Health and the three pilot authorities (Camden, Islington and Westminster). The evaluation was conducted by a research team at Brunel University, with funding from the Nuffield Foundation and the Home Office. FDAC is a specialist court for a problem that is anything but special. Its potential to help break the inter-generational cycle of harm associated with parental substance misuse goes straight to the heart of public policy and professional practice. Parental substance misuse is a formidable social problem and a key factor in around a third of long-term cases in children’s services in some areas. It is a major risk factor for child maltreatment, family separation and offending in adults, and for poor educational performance and substance misuse by children and young people. The parents’ many difficulties create serious problems for their children and place major demands on health, welfare and criminal justice services. For these reasons, parental substance misuse is a cross-cutting government agenda. FDAC is distinctive because it is a court-based family intervention which aims to improve children’s outcomes by addressing the entrenched difficulties of their parents. It has been adapted to English law and practice from a model of family treatment drug courts that is used widely in the USA and is showing promising results with a higher number of cases where parents and children were able to remain together safely, and with swifter alternative placement decisions for children if parents were unable to address their substance misuse successfully. The catalysts for the FDAC pilot were the encouraging evidence from the USA and concerns about the response to parental substance misuse through ordinary care proceedings in England: poor coordination of adult and children’s services; late interventions to protect children; delays in reaching decisions in court; and soaring costs of proceedings, linked to the cost of expert evidence.The work is co-funded by the Department for Education (formerly the Department for Children, Schools and Families), the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, the Department of Health and the three pilot authorities (Camden, Islington and Westminster).1 The evaluation was conducted by a research team at Brunel University, with funding from the Nuffield Foundation and the Home Office

Cosmological Recombination of Lithium and its Effect on the Microwave Background Anisotropies

The cosmological recombination history of lithium, produced during Big--Bang nucleosynthesis, is presented using updated chemistry and cosmological parameters consistent with recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements. For the popular set of cosmological parameters, about a fifth of the lithium ions recombine into neutral atoms by a redshift $z\sim 400$. The neutral lithium atoms scatter resonantly the CMB at 6708 \AA and distort its intensity and polarization anisotropies at observed wavelengths around $\sim 300 \mu$m, as originally suggested by Loeb (2001). The modified anistropies resulting from the lithium recombination history are calculated for a variety of cosmological models and found to result primarily in a suppression of the power spectrum amplitude. Significant modification of the power spectrum occurs for models which assume a large primordial abundance of lithium. While detection of the lithium signal might prove difficult, if offers the possibility of inferring the lithium primordial abundance and is the only probe proposed to date of the large-scale structure of the Universe for $z\sim 500-100$.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure