A cross-sectional exploration of household financial reactions and homebuyer awareness of registered sex offenders in a rural, suburban, and urban county.

As stigmatized persons, registered sex offenders betoken instability in communities. Depressed home sale values are associated with the presence of registered sex offenders even though the public is largely unaware of the presence of registered sex offenders. Using a spatial multilevel approach, the current study examines the role registered sex offenders influence sale values of homes sold in 2015 for three U.S. counties (rural, suburban, and urban) located in Illinois and Kentucky within the social disorganization framework. Homebuyers were surveyed to examine whether awareness of local registered sex offenders and the homebuyer’s community type operate as moderators between home selling prices and the distance to the nearest registered sex offender. Registered sex offenders were not associated with home sale values after accounting for neighborhood characteristics. Urban homebuyers were most likely to be aware of local registered sex offenders. The homebuyers’ proximity to the nearest registered sex offenders is not related to the awareness of nearby registered sex offenders. Non-urban and urban homebuyers who are aware tend to reside further from registered sex offenders and buy higher priced homes, whereas unaware homebuyers seemingly buy homes without the consideration of nearby registered sex offenders. The importance of neighborhood characteristics in a spatial multilevel framework and the effects of sex offender policies are highlighted

More examples of structure formation in the Lemaitre-Tolman model

In continuing our earlier research, we find the formulae needed to determine the arbitrary functions in the Lemaitre-Tolman model when the evolution proceeds from a given initial velocity distribution to a final state that is determined either by a density distribution or by a velocity distribution. In each case the initial and final distributions uniquely determine the L-T model that evolves between them, and the sign of the energy-function is determined by a simple inequality. We also show how the final density profile can be more accurately fitted to observational data than was done in our previous paper. We work out new numerical examples of the evolution: the creation of a galaxy cluster out of different velocity distributions, reflecting the current data on temperature anisotropies of CMB, the creation of the same out of different density distributions, and the creation of a void. The void in its present state is surrounded by a nonsingular wall of high density.Comment: LaTeX 2e with eps figures. 30 pages, 11 figures, 30 figure files. Revision matches published versio

Unstable Relics as a Source of Galactic Positrons

We calculate the fluxes of 511 KeV photons from the Galactic bulge caused by positrons produced in the decays of relic particles with masses less than 100 MeV. In particular, we tighten the constraints on sterile neutrinos over a large domain of the mass--mixing angle parameter space, where the resulting photon flux would significantly exceed the experimental data. At the same time, the observed photon fluxes can be easily caused by decaying sterile neutrinos in the mass range 1 MeV < m_sterile < 50 MeV with the cosmological abundance typically within 10^{-9} < Omega_sterile < 10^{-5}, assuming that Omega_sterile comes entirely from the conversion of active neutrinos in the early Universe. Other candidates for decaying relics such as neutral (pseudo)scalar particles coupled to leptons with the gravitational strength can be compatible with the photon flux, and can constitute the main component of cold dark matter.Comment: Latex, 14 pages, 3 figures, Calculation of cosmological background is include

From Late Prehistory to the Foundation of Early States in Inland Southeast Asia: a Debate

Mortuary data from three Iron Age sites in Northeast Thailand and three in Northwest Cambodia are here reviewed for information on social formation on the cusp of early states. It has been suggested that the three Cambodian sites present evidence for a complex polity with three social tiers and that this contrasts with the lack of any evidence for equivalent complexity in the three communities in the upper Mun Valley of Northeast Thailand. This model is examined and queried on the basis of insufficient data for the Cambodian sites, and contestable statistical analysis. In its place, an alternative is presented, that identifies a critically important climatic deterioration causing increased aridity which stimulated the development of plough-based wet rice cultivation in irrigated permanent fields. In the upper Mun Valley of Northeast Thailand, this coincided with a swift rise in social elites, interred in lineage-based nuclei in which leading individuals were accompanied by unprecedented wealth. Within a century or two, some Iron Age settlements greatly expanded into regal centers documented through texts that mentioned the state of Sri Canasapura. This transition might also have occurred in Northwest Cambodia at the same time, but evidence for this is so far unconvincing

NAGEKEO WOMEN'S CULTURAL STRUGGLE AS A FLORES SUB-CULTURE AGAINST THE FLOW OF CIVILIZATION'S PROGRESS

ABSTRACT HobaPojo is a traditional cloth from the Nagekeo district that is commonly used by Nagekeo women. However, the development of fashion with other motive trends made hobapojo less prestige and began to be abandoned. This qualitative study uses case studies, in-depth interviews with triangulation methods to achieve research credibility. Data was found that the hobapojo cloth was traditionally intended for Nagekeo women. The meaning contained in the cloth covers the entire life cycle to the death of Nagekeo woman. Hobapojo must be used in a variety of traditional events, like clothing, blankets, dance costumes, surrender at the wedding, and cut teeth until the luggage when he died. Hobapojo is also a handicraft product for Nagekeo women to support their lives and to drive the family economy. There are rules in the use of fabrics, and each motif represents the characteristics and thinking skills of the weavers as a form of existence and effort to preserve culture. Keywords; Culture; HobaPojo; Cultural Communication. ABSTRAK HobaPojo adalah kain tradisional dari distrik Nagekeo yang biasa digunakan oleh wanita Nagekeo. Namun, perkembangan mode dengan tren motif lainnya membuat hobapojo kurang gengsi dan mulai ditinggalkan. Penelitian kualitatif ini menggunakan studi kasus, wawancara mendalam dengan metode triangulasi untuk mencapai kredibilitas penelitian. Data ditemukan bahwa kain hobapojo secara tradisional ditujukan untuk wanita Nagekeo. Makna yang terkandung dalam kain mencakup seluruh siklus hidup sampai kematian wanita Nagekeo. Hobapojo harus digunakan dalam berbagai acara tradisional, seperti pakaian, selimut, kostum tari, pasrah di pesta pernikahan, potong gigi sampai koper ketika ia meninggal. Hobapojo juga merupakan produk kerajinan tangan untuk wanita Nagekeo untuk mendukung kehidupan mereka dan untuk mendorong ekonomi keluarga. Ada aturan dalam penggunaan kain, dan masing-masing motif mewakili karakteristik dan keterampilan berpikir para penenun sebagai bentuk keberadaan dan upaya untuk melestarikan budaya. Kata kunci; Budaya; HobaPojo; Komunikasi Budaya

Can codimension-two branes solve the cosmological constant problem?

It has been suggested that codimension-two braneworlds might naturally explain the vanishing of the 4D effective cosmological constant, due to the automatic relation between the deficit angle and the brane tension. To investigate whether this cancellation happens dynamically, and within the context of a realistic cosmology, we study a codimension-two braneworld with spherical extra dimensions compactified by magnetic flux. Assuming Einstein gravity, we show that when the brane contains matter with an arbitrary equation of state, the 4D metric components are not regular at the brane, unless the brane has nonzero thickness. We construct explicit 6D solutions with thick branes, treating the brane matter as a perturbation, and find that the universe expands consistently with standard Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) cosmology. The relation between the brane tension and the bulk deficit angle becomes $\Delta=2\pi G_6(\rho-3 p)$ for a general equation of state. However, this relation does not imply a self-tuning of the effective 4D cosmological constant to zero; perturbations of the brane tension in a static solution lead to deSitter or anti-deSitter braneworlds. Our results thus confirm other recent work showing that codimension-two braneworlds in nonsupersymmetric Einstein gravity do not lead to a dynamical relaxation of the cosmological constant, but they leave open the possibility that supersymmetric versions can be compatible with self-tuning.Comment: Revtex4, 17 pages, references added, typos corrected, minor points clarified. Matches published versio

An Efficient, Highly Flexible Multi-Channel Digital Downconverter Architecture

In this innovation, a digital downconverter has been created that produces a large (16 or greater) number of output channels of smaller bandwidths. Additionally, this design has the flexibility to tune each channel independently to anywhere in the input bandwidth to cover a wide range of output bandwidths (from 32 MHz down to 1 kHz). Both the flexibility in channel frequency selection and the more than four orders of magnitude range in output bandwidths (decimation rates from 32 to 640,000) presented significant challenges to be solved. The solution involved breaking the digital downconversion process into a two-stage process. The first stage is a 2 oversampled filter bank that divides the whole input bandwidth as a real input signal into seven overlapping, contiguous channels represented with complex samples. Using the symmetry of the sine and cosine functions in a similar way to that of an FFT (fast Fourier transform), this downconversion is very efficient and gives seven channels fixed in frequency. An arbitrary number of smaller bandwidth channels can be formed from second-stage downconverters placed after the first stage of downconversion. Because of the overlapping of the first stage, there is no gap in coverage of the entire input bandwidth. The input to any of the second-stage downconverting channels has a multiplexer that chooses one of the seven wideband channels from the first stage. These second-stage downconverters take up fewer resources because they operate at lower bandwidths than doing the entire downconversion process from the input bandwidth for each independent channel. These second-stage downconverters are each independent with fine frequency control tuning, providing extreme flexibility in positioning the center frequency of a downconverted channel. Finally, these second-stage downconverters have flexible decimation factors over four orders of magnitude The algorithm was developed to run in an FPGA (field programmable gate array) at input data sampling rates of up to 1,280 MHz. The current implementation takes a 1,280-MHz real input, and first breaks it up into seven 160-MHz complex channels, each spaced 80 MHz apart. The eighth channel at baseband was not required for this implementation, and led to more optimization. Afterwards, 16 second stage narrow band channels with independently tunable center frequencies and bandwidth settings are implemented A future implementation in a larger Xilinx FPGA will hold up to 32 independent second-stage channels

Insights into mRNP Biogenesis Provided by New Genetic Interactions Among Export and Transcription Factors

The various steps of mRNP biogenesis (transcription, processing and export) are interconnected. It has been shown that the transcription machinery plays a pivotal role in mRNP assembly, since several mRNA export factors are recruited during transcription and physically interact with components of the transcription machinery. Although the shuttling DEAD-box protein Dbp5p is concentrated on the cytoplasmic fibrils of the NPC, previous studies demonstrated that it interacts physically and genetically with factors involved in transcription initiation. We investigated the effect of mutations affecting various components of the transcription initiation apparatus on the phenotypes of mRNA export mutant strains. Our results show that growth and mRNA export defects of dbp5 and mex67 mutant strains can be suppressed by mutation of specific transcription initiation components, but suppression was not observed for mutants acting in the very first steps of the pre-initiation complex (PIC) formation