Thermal Characteristics and Systems of Residential Construction in College Station, Texas: 1981-1986

This paper examines the energy efficiency of residential construction in College Station from 1981-1986. Housing sizes, location, and construction activity by various contractors are described using data summarized from the College Station building permit book for this period. Site visits were made to apartments in complexes with over 20 percent of the multi-family units built during 1981-1986 and to selected single-family houses built by contractors responsible for over 25 percent of the single-family construction during this period. The information obtained on these visits was used to define the thermal. characteristics and systems of base cases representative of below-average and average multi-family units, and average and above average single-family units

Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances

This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide

Search for Radiative Decays of Cosmic Background Neutrino using Cosmic Infrared Background Energy Spectrum

We propose to search for the neutrino radiative decay by fitting a photon energy spectrum of the cosmic infrared background to a sum of the photon energy spectrum from the neutrino radiative decay and a continuum. By comparing the present cosmic infrared background energy spectrum observed by AKARI and Spitzer to the photon energy spectrum expected from neutrino radiative decay with a maximum likelihood method, we obatined a lifetime lower limit of $3.1 \times 10^{12}$ to $3.8 \times 10^{12}$ years at 95% confidence level for the third generation neutrino $\nu_3$ in the $\nu_3$ mass range between 50 \mmev and 150 \mmev under the present constraints by the neutrino oscillation measurements. In the left-right symmetric model, the minimum lifetime of $\nu_3$ is predicted to be $1.5 \times 10^{17}$ years for $m_3$ of 50 \mmev. We studied the feasibility of the observation of the neutrino radiative decay with a lifetime of $1.5 \times 10^{17}$ years, by measuring a continuous energy spectrum of the cosmic infrared background

Left-handed neutrino disappearance probe of neutrino mass and character

We explore the sensitivity to a non vanishing neutrino mass offered by dynamical observables, i.e., branching ratios and polarizations. The longitudinal polarization in the C.M. frame decreases by a 4% for $D^+ \rightarrow \tau^+ \nu_\tau$ and $m_{\nu_\tau}=24$ MeV. Taking advantage of the fact that the polarization is a Lorentz variant quantity, we study the polarization effects in a boosted frame. By means of a neutrino beam, produced by a high velocity boosted parent able to flip the neutrino helicity, we find that an enhanced left-handed neutrino deficit, induced by a Wigner rotation, appears.Comment: 8 pages and 2 figures. Last version accepted in PRL, new references and better analysis of experimental possibilitie

Vanadium (β-(Dimethylamino)ethyl)cyclopentadienyl Complexes with Diphenylacetylene Ligands

Reduction of the V(III) (β-(dimethylamino)ethyl)cyclopentadienyl dichloride complex [η5:η1-C5H4(CH2)2NMe2]VCl2(PMe3) with 1 equiv of Na/Hg yielded the V(II) dimer {[η5:η1-C5H4(CH2)2NMe2]V(µ-Cl)}2 (2). This compound reacted with diphenylacetylene in THF to give the V(II) alkyne adduct [η5:η1-C5H4(CH2)2NMe2]VCl(η2-PhC≡CPh). Further reduction of 2 with Mg in the presence of diphenylacetylene resulted in oxidative coupling of two diphenylacetylene groups to yield the diamagnetic, formally V(V), bent metallacyclopentatriene complex [η5:η1-C5H4(CH2)2NMe2]V(C4Ph4).

Field-induced Ordering in Critical Antiferromagnets

Transfer-matrix scaling methods have been used to study critical properties of field-induced phase transitions of two distinct two-dimensional antiferromagnets with discrete-symmetry order parameters: triangular-lattice Ising systems (TIAF) and the square-lattice three-state Potts model (SPAF-3). Our main findings are summarised as follows. For TIAF, we have shown that the critical line leaves the zero-temperature, zero -field fixed point at a finite angle. Our best estimate of the slope at the origin is $(dT_c/dH)_{T=H=0} = 4.74 \pm 0.15$. For SPAF-3 we provided evidence that the zero-field correlation length diverges as $\xi(T \to 0, H=0) \simeq \exp (a/T^{x})$, with $x=1.08 \pm 0.13$, through analysis of the critical curve at $H \neq 0$ plus crossover arguments. For SPAF-3 we have also ascertained that the conformal anomaly and decay-of-correlations exponent behave as: (a) H=0: $c=1, \eta=1/3$; (b) $H \neq 0: c=1/2, \eta=1/4$.Comment: RevTex, 7 pages, 4 eps figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Community-based arts research for people with learning disabilities: challenging misconceptions about learning disabilities

This article presents some of the community-based artwork of a group of men with learning disabilities, who aimed to challenge some of the misconceptions associated with learning disabilities. People with learning disabilities regularly face many forms of direct and indirect stigma. The consequences of such negative perceptions may affect individuals’ social relationships and ensure that barriers are strengthened which prevent their full inclusion. The men in this project used a series of visual and creative methods to challenge some of these misconceptions by telling stories through art, demonstrating skill through photography, using poetry to talk about sexual identity and improvising drama and filmmaking to challenge stigma, and through sculpture expressed their voices. Thus, by doing so, they were able to challenge some of the stigma associated with learning disabilities, indicating that community-based arts research is a valuable way in which to promote the voices of people with learning disabilities

Decay constants and mixing parameters in a relativistic model for q\barQ system

We extend our recent work, in which the Dirac equation with a ``(asymptotically free) Coulomb + (Lorentz scalar $\gamma_0\sigma r$) linear '' potential is used to obtain the light quark wavefunction for $q\bar Q$ mesons in the limit $m_Q\to \infty$, to estimate the decay constant $f_P$ and the mixing parameter $B$ of the pseudoscalar mesons. We compare our results for the evolution of $f_P$ and $B$ with the meson mass $M_P$ to the non-relativistic formulas for these quantities and show that there is a significant correction in the subasymptotic region. For $\sigma =0.14{{\rm ~GeV}}^{-2}$ and \lms =0.240{\rm ~GeV} we obtain: $f_D =0.371\; ,\; f_{D_s}=0.442\; ,\; f_B=0.301\; ,\; f_{B_s}=0.368 {\rm ~GeV}$ and $B_D=0.88\; ,\; B_{D_s}=0.89\; ,\; B_B=0.95\; ,\; B_{B_s}=0.96\; ,\;$ and $B_K=0.60$.Comment: 13 pages, Latex, 3 figures (included

Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame

This set of experiments shows that in 15 traditional small-scale societies there is an extraordinarily close correspondence between (i) the intensity of shame felt if one exhibited specific acts or traits and (ii) the magnitude of devaluation expressed in response to those acts or traits by local audiences, and even foreign audiences. Three important and widely acknowledged sources of cultural variation between communities—}geographic proximity, linguistic similarity, and religious similarity{—}all failed to account for the strength of between-community correlations in the shame{–}devaluation link. This supplies a parallel line of evidence that shame is a universal system, part of our species{’} cooperative biology, rather than a product of cultural evolution.Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species{’} social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action{’}s direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame{’s match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution