Technical Progress on the Ares I-X Flight Test

Ares I-X will be NASA's first test flight for a new human-rated launch vehicle since 1981, and the team is well on its way toward completing the vehicle's design and hardware fabrication for an April 2009 launch. This uncrewed suborbital development test flight gives NASA its first opportunities to: gather critical data about the flight dynamics of the integrated launch vehicle; understand how to control its roll during flight; better characterize the stage separation environments during future flight; and demonstrate the first stage recovery system. The Ares I-X Flight Test Vehicle (FTV) incorporates a mix of flight and mockup hardware. It is powered by a four-segment solid rocket booster, and will be modified to include a fifth, spacer segment; the upper stage, Orion crew exploration vehicle, and launch abort system are simulator hardware to make the FTV aerodynamically similar to the same size, shape, and weight of Ares I. The Ares IX first stage includes an existing Shuttle solid rocket motor and thrust vector control system controlled by an Ascent Thrust Vector Controller (ATVC) designed and built by Honeywell International. The avionics system will be tested in a dedicated System Integration Laboratory located at Lockheed Martin Space Systems (LMSS) in Denver, Colorado. The Upper Stage Simulator (USS) is made up of cylindrical segments that will be stacked and integrated at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for launch. Glenn Research Center is already building these segments, along with their internal access structures. The active Roll Control System (RoCS) includes two thruster units harvested from Peacekeeper missiles. Duty cycle testing for RoCS was conducted, and fuel tanking and detanking tests will occur at KSC in early 2008. This important flight will provide valuable experience for the ground operations team in integrating, stacking, and launching Ares I. Data from Ares I-X will ensure the safety and reliability of America's newest launch vehicle

The Phases and Faces of the Duke Lacrosse Controversy: A Conversation James E. Coleman, Jr.

This panel took place at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools ( SEALS ) in July 2008 in West Palm Beach, Florid

The Phases and Faces of the Duke Lacrosse Controversy: A Conversation

The genesis of this panel is an essay I wrote arguing that the single moniker Duke lacrosse controversy encapsulates a broad, multi-faceted legal, political, and social controversy that more accurately consists of five related seriatim sub-controversies. Initially, it was a sexual assault case. An African-American woman, hired as an exotic dancer at a party thrown by members of the Duke University men\u27s lacrosse team, reported to Durham police that she had been sexually assaulted by several white team members. The allegations quickly became a national story, tinged with issues of race, class, gender, privilege, and at some level, the role of athletics and athletes in the university community. It then became a story about an overzealous prosecutor and overzealous police, pursuing and obtaining indictments of three players despite mounting evidence of their innocence and the complainant\u27s lack of credibility. It then became a story of actual innocence. The prosecution\u27s case fell apart in the face of vigorous defense work and the North Carolina Attorney General intervened and, following an independent investigation, declared the three indicted lacrosse players to be actually innocent. It then became about prosecutorial ethics, when the North Carolina Bar instituted an ethics complaint, resulting in the disbarment of Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong for his actions in misleading the court, withholding exculpatory evidence, and making public statements intended to prejudice the targets of the investigation.\u27 Finally, it became a story about the role of civil litigation to remedy unconstitutional and tortuous misconduct in the criminal justice system. Forty-one lacrosse players have filed two separate lawsuits against various government actors, Duke University, and Duke officials. Underlying each phase are issues of race, class, gender, the role of athletics, the role and obligations of university faculty, the role and obligations of university administrators, and the role of the mass media in covering the criminal justice system and how press coverage contributed to the problems in this controvers

Landslide susceptibility mapping in North-East Wales

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk on 4th October 2011, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/19475705.2011.600778In North-East Wales, United Kingdom, slope instability is a known environmental hazard which has caused significant damage to the built environment in the recent past. This paper reports on the creation of a digital landslide inventory for North-East Wales and the use of a Geographical Information System (GIS) to create landslide susceptibility models that are applicable to landslide hazard management in the area. The research undertaken has resulted in the most comprehensive landslide inventory of North-East Wales to date, documenting 430 landslides within the area. Landslide susceptibility models created within a GIS using a statistical (multiple logistic regression) approach, divide the landscape of North-East Wales into areas of ‘low’, ‘moderate’ and ‘high’ landslide susceptibility using calculated probability values. These models indicate that 8% of the surface exposure of drift deposits and 12% of the area of solid geology is of high or very high susceptibility to slope instability. Validation tests have demonstrated the accuracy of these models and their potential value in a predictive sense. The digital landslide database and susceptibility models created are readily available to interested stakeholders, and may be useful tools in land-use planning, development of civil contingency plans and as guidance for the insurance industry

Evidence of Color Coherence Effects in W+jets Events from ppbar Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV

We report the results of a study of color coherence effects in ppbar collisions based on data collected by the D0 detector during the 1994-1995 run of the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, at a center of mass energy sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV. Initial-to-final state color interference effects are studied by examining particle distribution patterns in events with a W boson and at least one jet. The data are compared to Monte Carlo simulations with different color coherence implementations and to an analytic modified-leading-logarithm perturbative calculation based on the local parton-hadron duality hypothesis.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to Physics Letters

Energy Flow in the Hadronic Final State of Diffractive and Non-Diffractive Deep-Inelastic Scattering at HERA

An investigation of the hadronic final state in diffractive and non--diffractive deep--inelastic electron--proton scattering at HERA is presented, where diffractive data are selected experimentally by demanding a large gap in pseudo --rapidity around the proton remnant direction. The transverse energy flow in the hadronic final state is evaluated using a set of estimators which quantify topological properties. Using available Monte Carlo QCD calculations, it is demonstrated that the final state in diffractive DIS exhibits the features expected if the interaction is interpreted as the scattering of an electron off a current quark with associated effects of perturbative QCD. A model in which deep--inelastic diffraction is taken to be the exchange of a pomeron with partonic structure is found to reproduce the measurements well. Models for deep--inelastic $ep$ scattering, in which a sizeable diffractive contribution is present because of non--perturbative effects in the production of the hadronic final state, reproduce the general tendencies of the data but in all give a worse description.Comment: 22 pages, latex, 6 Figures appended as uuencoded fil

A Search for Selectrons and Squarks at HERA

Data from electron-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 300 GeV are used for a search for selectrons and squarks within the framework of the minimal supersymmetric model. The decays of selectrons and squarks into the lightest supersymmetric particle lead to final states with an electron and hadrons accompanied by large missing energy and transverse momentum. No signal is found and new bounds on the existence of these particles are derived. At 95% confidence level the excluded region extends to 65 GeV for selectron and squark masses, and to 40 GeV for the mass of the lightest supersymmetric particle.Comment: 13 pages, latex, 6 Figure

Measurement of the B0-anti-B0-Oscillation Frequency with Inclusive Dilepton Events

The $B^0$-$\bar B^0$ oscillation frequency has been measured with a sample of 23 million \B\bar B pairs collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric B Factory at SLAC. In this sample, we select events in which both B mesons decay semileptonically and use the charge of the leptons to identify the flavor of each B meson. A simultaneous fit to the decay time difference distributions for opposite- and same-sign dilepton events gives $\Delta m_d = 0.493 \pm 0.012{(stat)}\pm 0.009{(syst)}$ ps$^{-1}$.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Physical Review Letter