The “Broken Reed of a Staff”: the Pawnee Agency, Pawnees, and Agent W. De Puy, 1861-1862

In January 1863 Henry W. De Puy published an open letter to the President. Through the previous year De Puy’s administration at the Pawnee Agency at Genoa, Nebraska Territory (N.T.), had been wrecked and he had been accused of stealing from the Pawnees and his own employees. The Indian Commissioner’s Office had turned him out of office without a hearing. Even President Lincoln had not seen fit to intervene on the agent’s behalf in a department of the President’s own executive branch. De Puy did not want his old job back. He seems to have been sincere in his desire only to have his legitimacy as a governmental officer fully vindicated. The administration of Indian affairs at the agency level presents contradictions that prevent clear generalizations. The role of the agent varied, depending both on the time and the native people in question. Agents were sometimes diplomats trying to exert some influence over a people yet politically independent. With other peoples, or at another time with the same given people, the agent might be an authority figure in this own right. In this latter case, the agent to one degree or another replaced the traditional authorities of a native people that by then was dependent on the protection or largess of the United States government. In any case, the agent had broad responsibilities to keep his charges at peace, see to their general welfare, provide any services promised to them by treaty, and pursue some program of assimilation to 19th-century Anglo-American civilization. By the mid-1800s the Indian service was becoming notorious for patronage and corruption. A confusing situation arose in which good officers might be accused of being scoundrels by those who themselves sought economic or political gain. At both the administrative level of the local agent and that of a superintendency, officers received uncertain support from the so-called Indian Office (more properly the Office of Indian Affairs) at Washington. Money, supplies, military support, and even official forms for administrative paper work often failed to come as needed or expected. Then there were agents who might come under suspicion for good reason. Further, the agent, an employee of the Department of the Interior, might come in conflict with the military. Then in the early 1860s the Civil War brought much added stress. This account of Henry De Puy’s time with the Pawnees will hopefully serve as a useful case study of local Indian service administration during the Civil War years. This paper is also intended to be a useful account of a year of Pawnee struggles. This will be their story as well

Isotope shifts in francium isotopes Fr206-213 and Fr-221

We present the isotope shifts of the 7s(1/2) to 7p(1/2) transition for francium isotopes Fr206-213 with reference to Fr-221 collected from two experimental periods. The shifts are measured on a sample of atoms prepared within a magneto-optical trap by a fast sweep of radio-frequency sidebands applied to a carrier laser. King plot analysis, which includes literature values for 7s(1/2) to 7p(3/2) isotope shifts, provides a field shift constant ratio of 1.0520(10) and a difference between the specific mass shift constants of 170(100) GHz amu between the D-1 and D-2 transitions, of sufficient precision to differentiate between ab initio calculations

The FrPNC Experiment, weak interaction studies in Francium at TRIUMF

Francium is an excellent system to study the nuclear weak force due to its large nucleus and relatively simple atomic structure. The FrPNC experiment has a facility to produce cold trapped atomic francium samples for parity non-conservation studies. We are preparing to measure both the nuclear spin independent and dependent parts of the weak interaction in francium. The first one gives information about weak neutral currents at low energies, while the second one is sensitive to weak interactions between nucleons. We present the current status of the experiment

Altmetrics and Library Publishing

Altmetrics are a valuable offering that can enhance the services provided by a library publishing program and attract potential publishing partners. This presentation describes the use of altmetrics in the 38 journals published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, as part of its library publishing program. By using a widget from Plum Analytics, altmetrics from each journal article are displayed on abstract pages; furthermore, journal editors have access to a robust dashboard of metrics that allows editors, authors, and readers to access full information about the journal’s impact. Librarians who are part of a library publishing operation have a valuable role to play in training and supporting journal staff and users in the meaning and potential applications of altmetrics, which transforms altmetrics from a component of a publishing program to a service

Implementation of PhotoZ under Astro-WISE - A photometric redshift code for large datasets

We describe the implementation of the PhotoZ code in the framework of the Astro-WISE package and as part of the Photometric Classification Server of the PanSTARRS pipeline. Both systems allow the automatic measurement of photometric redshifts for the millions of objects being observed in the PanSTARRS project or expected to be observed by future surveys like KIDS, DES or EUCLID.Comment: Accepted for publication in topical issue of Experimental Astronomy on Astro-WISE information system, references update

Photo-z Performance for Precision Cosmology

Current and future weak lensing surveys will rely on photometrically estimated redshifts of very large numbers of galaxies. In this paper, we address several different aspects of the demanding photo-z performance that will be required for future experiments, such as the proposed ESA Euclid mission. It is first shown that the proposed all-sky near-infrared photometry from Euclid, in combination with anticipated ground-based photometry (e.g. PanStarrs-2 or DES) should yield the required precision in individual photo-z of sigma(z) < 0.05(1+z) at I_AB < 24.5. Simple a priori rejection schemes based on the photometry alone can be tuned to recognise objects with wildly discrepant photo-z and to reduce the outlier fraction to < 0.25% with only modest loss of otherwise usable objects. Turning to the more challenging problem of determining the mean redshift of a set of galaxies to a precision of 0.002(1+z) we argue that, for many different reasons, this is best accomplished by relying on the photo-z themselves rather than on the direct measurement of from spectroscopic redshifts of a representative subset of the galaxies. A simple adaptive scheme based on the statistical properties of the photo-z likelihood functions is shown to meet this stringent systematic requirement. We also examine the effect of an imprecise correction for Galactic extinction and the effects of contamination by fainter over-lapping objects in photo-z determination. The overall conclusion of this work is that the acquisition of photometrically estimated redshifts with the precision required for Euclid, or other similar experiments, will be challenging but possible. (abridged)Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures; submitted to MNRA

Atomic parity non-conservation in francium: The FrPNC experiment at TRIUMF

The FrPNC Collaboration is constructing an on-line laser cooling and trapping apparatus at TRIUMF to measure atomic parity non-conservation (PNC) and nuclear anapole moments in a series of artificially produced francium isotopes. Francium’s simple electronic structure and enhanced parity violation make it a strong candidate for precision measurements of atomic PNC: the optical PNC and anapole-induced PNC effects are expected to be an order of magnitude larger in francium than in cesium. Atomic PNC experiments provide unique high precision tests of the Standard Model’s predictions for neutral current weak interactions at very low energies. Furthermore, precision measurements of nuclear anapole moments probe inter-nucleon weak interactions within the nucleus