Reflecting on Michael McQuarrie's 'revolt of the rust belt'

Following Donald Trump's surprise election win in November 2016, Michael McQuarrie of LSE Sociology wrote on the regional nature of Trump's win. His blog article, "Trump and the Revolt of the Rust Belt", has now formed the basis of a new article in the British Journal of Sociology. We asked a several academic experts for their reactions to McQuarrie's new article. McQuarrie demonstrates ..

Space shuttle: Aerodynamic characteristics of the NASA-MSC S-4 orbiter in cruise and landing

Low speed wind tunnel test to define space shuttle model cruise and landing aerodynamic characteristic

A ‘healthy baby’: The double imperative of preimplantation genetic diagnosis

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.This article reports from a study exploring the social processes, meanings and institutions that frame and produce ‘ethical problems’ and clinical dilemmas for practitioners, scientists and others working in the specialty of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). A major topic in the data was that, in contrast to IVF, the aim of PGD is to transfer to the woman’s womb only those embryos likely to be unaffected by serious genetic disorders; that is, to produce ‘healthy babies’. Staff described the complex processes through which embryos in each treatment cycle must meet a double imperative: they must be judged viable by embryologists and ‘unaffected’ by geneticists. In this article, we focus on some of the ethical, social and occupational issues for staff ensuing from PGD’s double imperative.The Wellcome Trus

Stubble Height Effects on Limpograss Pasture Characteristics and Performance of Beef Heifers

Limpograss (Hemarthria altissima [Poir.] Stapf. & C.E. Hubb.) is a C4 species used in Florida beef production systems because of its cool-season growth, persistence on poorly drained soils, and high yield and digestibility. Animal performance on limpograss pastures, however, has been limited by low herbage crude protein (CP). This study evaluated the effect of canopy height of limpograss pastures and N supplementation of grazing cattle on sward characteristics and weight gain and blood urea N (BUN) concentration of yearling beef heifers. Under continuous stocking, six treatments were imposed that included all combinations of three stubble heights (20, 40, and 60 cm) and two N-supplement levels (S, supplemented; NS, unsupplemented). During 1998 and 1999, treatments were replicated twice and arranged in a completely randomized design. Seasonal (84 d) daily gains from heifers grazing limpograss pastures were not different (p= 0.25) between the two years and averaged 522 g. For the intermediate stubble, 40-cm, there was no effect of supplementation on daily gains (P= 0.1), but daily gain increased 40 and 70% due to supplementation (P \u3c 0.01) of heifers on pastures grazed to 20 and 60 cm, respectively. These data show that limpograss stubble height has an impact on pasture nutritive value affecting daily gains. Stubble height of approximately 40 cm seems to provide optimum gains of animals receiving no N supplement on continuously stocked pastures

The Fully Automated and Self-Contained Operations Paradigm of the CSIM Mission

The Compact Spectral Irradiance Monitor (CSIM) CubeSat Mission has been collecting solar spectral irradiance (SSI) data for over two years, contributing to 40+ years of multi-mission SSI data collection. CSIM utilizes a fully automated and self-contained operations paradigm developed at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). LASP efficiently performs the entire operations workflow for CSIM, from planning through data processing, which nominally requires only 15 minutes of staffed operations support per week. Mission operations students at LASP are responsible for the entire planning process. They query for ground station contacts and solar observation times which are input into a suite of software tools to create the onboard stored command table and the weekly uplink plan. An automated ground station script then configures for the upcoming CSIM contacts by querying Space-Track for overflights. Within 2 minutes from the start of a pass, the script commands the UHF or S-Band antenna to point at the spacecraft, brings up the command-and-control software, and performs an initial health-and-safety check upon AOS (acquisition of signal). Automated command scripts then configure the spacecraft and upload the plan using command success logic checks. This ensures that all commands are sent and accepted by the spacecraft in-order, and without overwriting any non-expired scheduling slots. The week\u27s worth of commands is loaded within a few passes, and science collection typically starts soon after. Ground automation will detect major anomalies and notify the flight control team in real-time, allowing the operators to recover the spacecraft on the next contact and prepare a new activity plan for autonomous upload. Additionally, ground automation queries CSIM health and safety data and sends telemetry trends to the operations team for daily, weekly, and monthly health and safety checks. CSIM science data is downlinked during 1 or 2 passes per day via the S-band antenna. This data is processed twice per day via an automated data processing pipeline which requires no regular human intervention. The self-contained and automated nature of the data processing pipeline ensures that LASP scientists can access CSIM data within a few hours of being received on the ground. We discuss how this efficient single-mission, self-contained operations paradigm will be expanded to support multiple missions and external customers in the future

Effects of anharmonic strain on phase stability of epitaxial films and superlattices: applications to noble metals

Epitaxial strain energies of epitaxial films and bulk superlattices are studied via first-principles total energy calculations using the local-density approximation. Anharmonic effects due to large lattice mismatch, beyond the reach of the harmonic elasticity theory, are found to be very important in Cu/Au (lattice mismatch 12%), Cu/Ag (12%) and Ni/Au (15%). We find that is the elastically soft direction for biaxial expansion of Cu and Ni, but it is for large biaxial compression of Cu, Ag, and Au. The stability of superlattices is discussed in terms of the coherency strain and interfacial energies. We find that in phase-separating systems such as Cu-Ag the superlattice formation energies decrease with superlattice period, and the interfacial energy is positive. Superlattices are formed easiest on (001) and hardest on (111) substrates. For ordering systems, such as Cu-Au and Ag-Au, the formation energy of superlattices increases with period, and interfacial energies are negative. These superlattices are formed easiest on (001) or (110) and hardest on (111) substrates. For Ni-Au we find a hybrid behavior: superlattices along and like in phase-separating systems, while for they behave like in ordering systems. Finally, recent experimental results on epitaxial stabilization of disordered Ni-Au and Cu-Ag alloys, immiscible in the bulk form, are explained in terms of destabilization of the phase separated state due to lattice mismatch between the substrate and constituents.Comment: RevTeX galley format, 16 pages, includes 9 EPS figures, to appear in Physical Review

Carbon Nanotubes and Graphene as Additives in 3D Printing

3D printing is a revolutionary technology for the consumer and industrial markets. As the technology for 3D printing has expanded, the need for multi-materials that support fused deposition modeling and other forms of additive manufacturing is increasing. 3D printing filaments infused with carbon nanotubes and graphene are now commercially available, with the promise of producing conductive composites. This chapter explores some of the research, products, and challenges involved in bringing the next generation of functional printing materials to the consumer market

Corporate manslaughter: An examination of the determinants of prosecutorial policy

Although the offence of corporate manslaughter has arguably been established in English law for over twenty five years, it has been prosecuted only twice and both indictments failed. There is, however, much prima facie evidence to implicate companies in reckless manslaughter. The purpose of this paper is to present an explanation of why companies which appear to commit homicide have been treated with conspicuous indulgence by the state. I begin by examining the evidence that incriminates companies in homicide. I look at how the state has responded to these deaths with marked leniency. A brief account is given of the historical development of corporate liability in this area. The state's prosecutorial policy is then considered from three perspectives, moving outwards from close focus to a wide historical angle: I examine (a) the mechanics of the criminal justice system, its procedures and the decisions of its personnel; (b) the role of public perception in influencing those decisions and (c) the aspects of the political economy which engender the public perception in question

Diamonds, gold and crime displacement: Hatton Garden, and the evolution of organised crime in the UK

The 2015 Hatton Garden Heist was described as the ‘largest burglary in English legal history’. However, the global attention that this spectacular crime attracted to ‘The Garden’ tended to concentrate upon the value of the stolen goods and the vintage of the burglars. What has been ignored is how the burglary shone a spotlight into Hatton Garden itself, as an area with a unique ‘upperworld’ commercial profile and skills cluster that we identify as an incubator and facilitator for organised crime. The Garden is the UK’s foremost jewellery production and retail centre and this paper seeks to explore how Hatton Garden’s businesses integrated with a fluid criminal population to transition, through hosting lucrative (and bureaucratically complex) VAT gold frauds from 1980 to the early 1990s, to become a major base for sophisticated acquisitive criminal activities. Based on extensive interviews over a thirty year period, evidence from a personal research archive and public records, this paper details a cultural community with a unique criminal profile due to the particularities of its geographical location, ethnic composition, trading culture, skills base and international connections. The processes and structures that facilitate criminal markets are largely under-researched (Antonopoulos et al. 2015: 11), and this paper considers how elements of Hatton Garden’s ‘upperworld’ businesses integrated with project criminals, displaced by policing strategies, to effect this transition